This conference aims to move beyond the use of men’s real wages and instead use household income to reconstruct historical living standards and brings together scholars from different disciplines working on household income diversification during the past 250 years. In our contemporary world, the estimation of the “informal” part of the economy, is a particular challenge, as looking at formal national accounts and aggregate per capita income may not capture actual standards of living and economic development. The conference explores how our historical and present-day images of economic growth and inequality within and between societies changes when looking at total household income as opposed to formal, full-time male wages.
Programme
DAY 1, 6 JULY 2023, 11:00-18:00 CET
11:00-11:30 Tea/Coffee and welcome address
11:30-12:45 Keynote Lecture by Joyce Burnette, Mismeasuring Women’s Work
13:00-14:00 Lunch
SESSION I HOUSEHOLD ECONOMIES IN THE GLOBAL NORTH
CHAIR Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
14:00-14:45 Alberto Concina, Roots and fruits of inequality. Land and wealth distribution in the XVIII century Piedmontese Alps
14:45-15:30 Malin Nilsson, Kathryn Gary, and Mats Olsson, Paid spinning in rural landless and semi-landless households in Sweden 1767-1797
15:30-16:00 Tea/coffee break
16:00-16:45 Francisco Marco-Gracia and Margarita López-Antón, Households, family budgets and living standards in Aragón (Spain) in the first quarter of the 20th century
16:45-17:30 Auke Rijpma, Income Distribution in the Netherlands from 1850 to 1920: A Comparison of Income Taxes, Wages, and Household Budgets
17:30-18:00 General discussion
DAY 2, 7 JULY 2023, 10:00-18:00 CET
SESSION II ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND INEQUALITY
CHAIR Aditi Dixit
10:00-10:30 Tea/Coffee
10:30-11:15 Wenjun Yu and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, From home production to modern textile mills: labor allocation, gender and living strategies of Chinese peasant households, c. 1910s-1930s
11:15-12:00 Vincent Delabastita and Robin Philips, The (im)possibility of growth for African colonies: series of GDP & real wages for Belgian Congo during 1885-1960
12:00-12:45 Giulia Mancini, Poverty and intra-household inequality in a changing rural world, Italy 1920s- 1930s
12:45-13:45 Lunch
SESSION III GENDER, LABOR, AND INDUSTRY IN THE GLOBAL NORTH AND SOUTH
CHAIR Malin Nilsson
13:45-14:30 Benjamin Schneider, Technological unemployment in the British Industrial Revolution: The rise and fall of hand spinning
14:30-15:15 Sarah Carmichael and Corinne Boter, Sub-regional specialization, majority gender shares, and the gender wage gap in the Lancashire cotton textile industry, 1886-1906
15:15-16:00 Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk & Aditi Dixit, “Human Beings Are Too Cheap in India”. Wages and Work Organization as Business Strategies in Bombay’s Late Colonial Textile Industry
16:00-16:30 Tea/Coffee Break
16:30-17:30 Joyce Burnette, assisted by Bianca Visser, Final Discussion/Closing Session
19:00 onwards Dinner
© image courtesy: Zeeland Auctioneers
