Economic structure and agricultural productivity in Europe , 1300 - 1 800

Rsing agricultural productivity is central to economic development and has been studied by the historians of many countries. Much has been learned about their separate histories, but long-term, cross-national comparisons remain elusive. Crop yields have received considerable attention,' and progress has been made in understanding their evolution. However, labour productivity is arguably a more important variable in explaining the transition to an urban, industrial economy, and our knowledge of its history is weak indeed. Bairoch (1965, p. 1096) has provided some useful comparisons across countries for the nineteenth century, but the lack of censuses for earlier years has frustrated attempts to measure the growth in labour productivity before the industrial revolution. A well known paper by Wrigley (1985) is an influential attempt to measure labour productivity growth before the nineteenth ~ e n t u r y . ~ The method is an outgrowth of demographic reconstruction. Population historians have established reasonable estimates of the populations of many European countries during the early modern period as well as fairly sound estimates of their urban populations. The difference is, of course, the rural population. Wrigley assumed that this could be divided into an agricultural