Am I misunderstanding something? It sounds like both abstracts excerpts are making the same conclusion: that northwestern europe had higher wages than central/southern europe, which had similar wage levels to china and japan.

The only difference, it appears, is that incomes increased in Japan and decreased in China during the 17/1800s.

pwyll:

You're exactly right: I'm just highlighting the different coverage of the two papers, in hopes of getting some folks to actually read the d**n things....

The physiological subsistence ought to have been much the same everywhere though. If cities had double or higher wages, in the malthusian era that would have to mean that they were usually destroying their recruited populations via infectious disease. The exception would be areas like Manchuria, where they did find significantly higher wages, and explained it by the land having been held at lower density of population, due to Manchu dynasty policies restricting Han colonization in that area. An accession of land seems to be the trigger for a move to sustained higher productivity, such as could spread out into the entire population, not just the wealthy, but disease-vulnerable, urban ones, of that era.

Before about 1900 the Japanese seem to have been generally poorly nourished, though I think that the diet was balanced -- a degree of stunting, though without pervasive deficiency diseases. I read somewhere that as of 1965 or so the typical Japanese was a foot taller than his grandfather.

"major Southern and Central European..."; should one treat Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe as having been two different cultures?

Their conclusions are midway between Pomeranz and the old (Western) consensus: only London and Amsterdam were ahead.

"The silver wage in Milan or Leipzig was not appreciably higher than the wage in Beijing or Kyoto throughout the eighteenth century."

"The classical economists and many modern scholars have claimed that European living standards exceeded those in Asia long before the Industrial Revolution."

It's too bad I can't see the tables in the linked versions.

Note at the beginning they admit:

"One thing is clear about this debate, and that is the fragility of the evidence that has been brought to the issue."

should one treat Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe as having been two different cultures?

if you ignore the confounds.