Last one, I promise. Just some clarifications on the role of the home market in England's industrialization: It is common to approach this issue by focusing on wages, living standards, and food prices. I myself used a graph by E.A.Wrigley's which showed that, from 1600 onwards, real wages, in England, moved steadily upward, to fall after 1750, to rise, substantially and steadily, after 1800. I also viewed the home market in terms of the role a sizable class of middling peasants (the so-called yeomen) played as a both an internal market and source of accumulation. But Lorna Weatherhill's *Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (1988) warns us about the fragility and conflicting nature of this type of evidence. Moreover, even when this evidence is reliable, it says little about *expenditure and consumer behavior*. Accordingly, she says that it is the analysis of consumer behavior, or evidence about ownership patterns of household goods, which should be studied and relied upon. By analyzing the results from samples of inventories of household goods, and using cross-tabulations of occupations, she arrives at the conclusion that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the largest market for "new and imported goods" was in the "middle ranks" of society, which included the lesser gentry, professions, merchants, shopkeepers, farmers, yeomen, husbandmen, and craftsmen. Half the households of late 17th-century England belonged in these occupations, which is the focus of this book, rather than wage-earners. She says that even if wage labourers, cottagers and small-holders had extra cash, or even if there were low food prices (between 1717-24 and 1730 and 1740) which resulted in greater purchasing power for manufactured commodities, "we do not even know whether income formerly spent on grain was actually spent on other food, on drink, or on manufactured goods". According to her, in the very early phase of industrialization, there was already "an extensive potential market for a wide range of goods among the middle ranks" (197). Of these middle ranks, tradesmen and the professional people constituted the greatest market for the "new goods"; yeomen were not as innovative in their consumer behavior. These tradesmen and professional people were mostly in the towns (according to Wigley, the proportion of the English population living in towns over 10,000 by 1800 was 24%, as compared with 9.5% in the rest of Europe). For his part, de Vries (1993) has recently argued that the key to this whole debate about the role of consumer demand lies in the changing role of female labour from subsistence production to manufacturing for wages. Even if, as was noted in the graph by Wrigley, real wages declined from 1750 to 1800, the increased participation of women in the market, as wage earners, altered the supply of, and demand for manufactured goods. Contrast this with China were all women after the middle years had bound feet.
