Labour Market Evolution: The Economic History of Market Integration, Wage Flexibility and the Employment Relation.
These thirteen papers, based on a conference on the "Evolution of Labour Market Structures" held at McGill University in February 1991, were intended "to focus on the quantifiable characteristics of labour market structures and to analyse their behaviour over time," and to provide for exchange between labor economists and economic historians dealing with the development and performance of labor markets in the past. Quantitative approaches are predominant-there are 64 tables and 50 figures-and the studies presented are all by economic historians, almost all of whom are primarily affiliated with economics departments. As the editors point out, the topics covered, including labor market integration, skill and geographic differentials, job turnover and duration, wage flexibility, and the determination of wages and hours, are more relevant to the concerns of labor economists than to those of most present-day labor historians, but these are topics that should obviously be of interest to everyone studying past and present economies. The papers on labor markets cover several different countries over some extended time periods and deal primarily with measures of nominal and real wages, hours of work, and length of job duration. Several draw on newly utilized primary sources, while others rely on new examinations of already available sources. There are a number of common issues, such as the past and present importance of seasonality in the labor market and the adaptations made by laborers and employers to deal with the problems posed by the peculiarities of agricultural work requirements, Western Europe's and North America's generally flexible adaptations over time to wage and employment adjustments, and the trade-offs faced by workers between more security and higher temporary incomes. Not much is said about unions and other forms of labor organization, about the possibilities of extensive labor exploitation, Marxist or other, or about the impact of slavery, indentured labor, or other direct methods of labor coercion. The first essay, by George Grantham, is an historical survey of the basic changes in European free labor markets after about 800, with particular attention to seasonality, home employment, and the rise of the factory. It is a very useful overview of the circumstances out of which more recent labor markets have evolved. The one contribution by a labor economist is David Green's perspective on the economic history of labor. This is basically a discussion of the essays in this volume, describing the contributions economic historians can bring to labor economics and vice-versa. In his examination of Dutch labor markets between 1500 and 1815 and comparison of Dutch and English wages in that period,Jan de Vries points to the early ability of Dutch laborers to obtain high wages for full-time work. The need for seasonal labor was, however, met by low-cost foreign migrant labor. Seasonality, due to the pattern of the grain harvest, is the focus of Gilles Postel-Vinay's tudy of nineteenthcentury France. He finds that when agriculture was important, the labor markets linking industry and agriculture were reasonably integrated, but they broke down with the expansion of larger-scale industry in the late nineteenth century. The pattern that emerged, Postel-Vinay argues, combined increased mobility within sectors with a reduction in mobility between sectors. George R. Boyer and Timothy J. Hatton, using new data and new measures, analyze the interconnections among labor markets in England between 1850 and 1913, and conclude "that the integration of labour markets at the national level was far from complete in 1914." Robert C. Allen calculates real wages in Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia between 1879 and 1913 and concludes that there remained wide differences in wages among these nations, despite extensive international migration. He finds that over this period British