[Sca-cooks] Was Medieval England more Merrie than thought?

[James Prescott]

And if they say "late medieval period" they are starting more than two hundred
years too late.  See various descriptions of the earlier industrial revolution,
especially Jean Gimpel's _The Medieval Machine_.

Here's the first Google hit: 
http://dannyreviews.com/h/The_Medieval_Machine.html

Or the first volume of Fernand Braudel's _Civilization and Capitalism_, titled
_The Structures of Everyday Life_.

Again, the first Google hit: http://www.poppyware.com/dunham/facts/braudel.html


Thorvald



At 11:05 AM -0500 12/7/10, Johnna Holloway wrote:
>  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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