Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, ca. 1780–1918

Huzzey, Richard; Miller, Henry

doi:10.1017/jbr.2021.185

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Several papers have focused on petitioning and the press in the context of the British Empire. Huzzey and Miller drew on a database of more than a million petitions sent to the House of Commons from the British Isles and from colonies between 1780 and 1918. They focused especially on the treatment of colonial issues in Parliament and uncovered the arbitrariness in dealing with colonial petitions and the unequal access to petitioning on the part of the colonial subjects.…”

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confidence: 99%

Review of periodical literature for 2022: (iv) 1700–1850

Hutková

2024

The Economic History Review

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The topic of wages, living standards, and the working week attracted considerable attention. Horrell, Humphries, and Weisdorf introduced a novel framework for evaluating real household incomes of English rural working families in the years 1260−1850. They identify the key weakness of studies in economic wellbeing as the fact that family income has been equated with the husband's earnings alone, yet a model with a male breadwinner does not fit well with historical realities of the pre-modern world. The authors took a life cycle approach to resources available to families across the cycle. On the basis of demographic evidence for 1541−1850 that traces changing fertility and dependency and using data on women's and children's earnings, the authors study trends in wellbeing for different types of families and over the long run. Their model goes beyond the male-breadwinner type of family as they also capture families that do not have an adult male earner as the breadwinner. The authors found that intact average-size working class families were able to attain respectability from the eighteenth century onwards without reliance on poor relief and/or child labour. They also found that before the eighteenth century, in the case of families in which men were not capable to earn, women and children's earnings were an even more essential source of income than in the post-eighteenth-century period. On the basis of the demographic data in their model, the authors then equate the expansion of child labour and poor law expenditure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the great share of large families and fatherless or non-earning father families in the period. However, they find that the living standard of these type of families -large, fatherless, or with a father who is not a capable earner -started to increase at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the same time, very small families with very few children and a father/husband who was not capable of earning found it challenging to attain respectability in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crafts and Mills estimate a structural model of economic-demographic interactions for 1570-1850 to study the effect of population growth on wages. On the basis of the simulations of their model, the authors conclude that growth of real wages during the Industrial Revolution was constrained by high population growth. They thus argue that workers benefitted from the Industrial Revolution immediately since without the technological change their living standards would have decreased further. They disagree with interpretations that ascribe the limited wage growth to Marxist exploitation and/or technological

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confidence: 99%