Introduction
One of the longest lasting economic-historical debates concerns the development of standard of living in the preindustrial and early industrial periods. Whether or not the standard of living increased during the Industrial Revolution has been fiercely debated since the time of Marx, Engels, and the classical economists (e.g.
Taylor 1975). In the early 1980s new evidence and estimations further fuelled this debate regarding the English case (Crafts 1982; Lindert and Williamson 1983). More recently there has also been a growing interest in the differences in standard of living between the East and the West, and what may have caused these differences (e.g. Goody 1996; Frank 1998; Lal 1998; Landes 1998; Pomeranz 2000; see also O'Brien 2001). This debate is also intimately connected to the broader question of why the West, rather than the East, was first to experience modern economic growth. In this debate a multitude of factors have been stressed, among them are differences in natural resources, technological development, institutional setting, access to colonial markets, cultural and religious factors, and so on.While some authors have approached the issue by constructing various macroeconomic indicators on production, wages, or productivity, others have focused on indicators of ‘quality of life', such as housing conditions, working conditions, and the like. There have also been attempts to measure living standards by the health status of the population. One of the most straightforward ways of doing this is to study the development of life expectancy and mortality, where increased longevity could be seen as the ultimate indicator of a higher standard of living. In the last decades we have also seen a rapidly growing attention to various anthropometric measures (heights, body mass index, etc.) as indicators of standard of living (e.g Engerman 1976; Steckel 1979, 1995; Komlos 1985; Steckel and Floud 1997; Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990; Fogel 1993).
In this chapter we propose a rather different measure of standard of living, which has been developed within the Eurasia Project on Population and Family History (EAP)1 as a complement to the more traditional measures. It focuses on the way individuals and families in pre-industrial society responded to short-term economic stress, by which is meant short-term changes in income, employment opportunities, or food availability. We have made a long-term study of the mortality and fertility response to short-term economic stress, as measured by grain price fluctuations, for a rural area of western Scandia, Sweden, during the period 1766—1895, taking into account the structural changes this economy underwent. Our analysis focuses on the landless—the social group whose members lived closest to the margin. They were the group most vulnerable to economic stress and the least able to counteract its negative effects, the group that had the fewest options for ameliorating their lot in hard times (see Bengtsson and Dribe 2000). We include in this category all families whose land holdings were below subsistence level, that is, the semi-landless smallholders and crofters as well as completely landless labourers, soldiers, and artisans.2 By studying how the landless responded to economic stress over time, we are able to give a new dimension to their standard of living. Higher mortality in response to short-term economic stress must be regarded as a clear indicator of a low standard of living, and a development towards a weaker mortality response should be interpreted as a positive development of living standards. Similarly, we argue that a fertility response to economic stress—whether intentional or not—could be interpreted as indicating a high degree of vulnerability to economic fluctuations, and thus of a rather low level of standard of living. Before turning to these issues, however, we shall review previous research on the standard of living development in Sweden. That will allow us to make more explicit comparisons of the results obtained by various methods and approaches.
2.