Japan of around 40 (Hanley, 1983) are also likely to be a significant over-esti-
mate. Again, the records Hanley used did not account for infant mortality
(those who die at age zero), which in 1800–50 in Japan was around 300 per
1,000 (comparable with developing countries in the 1950s), so life expectancy
estimated from this would have been about 34.7 years or five years shorter than
Hanley estimated or the British level of 40.4 in 1854–58 (Yasuba 1986). The
argument of Pomeranz and Hanley also ignores the common observation that
life expectancy can fall alongside industrialization and urbanization. Eric
Hobsbawm (1995:206) notes that the average life expectancy at birth in the
1840s was twice as high for agricultural labourers in Wiltshire or Rutland as
for those in Manchester or Liverpool.
These works by Clark, Pomeranz and Parthasarathi and others together rely
on indirect comparisons based on scattered output, consumption, or demo-
graphic data. Far more systematic and comprehensive is the enormous effort
by Allen et al. (2007) to estimate wages in eighteenth-century China and
compare them with existing estimates for Western Europe. Data taken from
Imperial Ministry records, merchant account books, and local gazetteers
includes wages of unskilled male workers on government building projects in
Beijing,unskilled port labour hired by European trading companies in Canton,
and wages of daily earnings of men working as calenderers pressing cloth in
the textile industry in Suzhou. These more comprehensive series are then
compared with a broader range of 264 scattered wage quotations from many
sources in different parts of China. They then define a consumption basket that
represents the bare minimum for survival. The basket provides 1940 calories
per day mainly from the cheapest available carbohydrate. In Shanghai, Canton,
Japan and Bengal this was rice, in Beijing it was sorghum, in Milan polenta,
and in North-west Europe oats. The basket also includes some beans, small
quantities of meat or fish and butter or oil. These baskets were derived from
detailed consumption surveys in Japan and China from the 1920s and 1930s.
The cost of the baskets was calculated using prices from a huge variety of
sources and adjustments were made for the length of the working year. Allen et
al.(2007) compare daily wages of unskilled workers in London, Amsterdam,
Leipzig,Milan, Beijing,and the lower Yangzi in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and find that wages in Amsterdam and London were significantly
higher than in the rest of Europe and China. Overall European wages rose
rapidly in the nineteenth century and after 1890 Japanese wages also began to
rise, while Chinese wages changed little over the entire period. During the
eighteenth century unskilled labourers in major cities of China and Japan had
roughly the same standard of living as their counterparts in central and south-
ern Europe but were significantly below those in Western Europe.
These measures of real wages are likely to underestimate increases in living
standards in Western Europe after 1600. Long-run changes in living standards
were explored by Allen et al.through real wage indices using an unchanging
consumption basket. This is not a realistic assumption. Tea and coffee were
av ailable in limited quantities before 1500. Tea consumption reached England
154 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth