[Sca-cooks] Was Medieval England more Merrie than thought?
Johnna Holloway
johnnae at mac.com
Tue Dec 7 08:05:00 PST 2010
Maybe being a serf wasn't so bad after all! Medieval Britons were
twice as rich as the poor in the Third World today
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336143/Medieval-Britons-twice-rich-poor-Third-World-today.html#ixzz17RUOWcMt
"In a paper entitled British Economic Growth 1270-1870 published by
the University of Warwick’s Centre on Competitive Advantage in the
Global Economy (CAGE) the researchers find that living standards in
medieval England were far above the “bare bones subsistence”
experience of people in many of today’s poor countries.
This new figure of $1,000 is not only significantly higher than
previous estimates for that period in England – it also indicates that
on average medieval England was better off than some of the world’s
poorest nations today
The research shows that the path to the Industrial Revolution began
far earlier than commonly has been understood. A widely held view of
economic history suggests that the Industrial Revolution of 1800
suddenly took off, in the wake of centuries without sustained economic
growth or appreciable improvements in living standards in England from
the days of the hunter-gatherer. By contrast, we find that the
Industrial Revolution did not come out of the blue. Rather, it was the
culmination of a long period of economic development stretching back
as far as the late medieval period"
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/medieval-england-had-1000-per-capita.html
Johnnae, playing librarian
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