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Great Divergence

Allen-Unger price database

A long-running international collaborative compilation of commodity-price series across European cities (and, more thinly, Middle Eastern, American, and East Asian cities) from the late Middle Ages to 1914, organized by Robert Allen and Richard Unger and hosted at the University of British Columbia. The database aggregates the work of dozens of contributors across many decades and is one of the principal empirical resources for long-run real-wage and welfare-ratio reconstruction in pre-industrial economic history. It is the underlying price-data layer for the Allen wage series and feeds into the broader Global Prices and Income History project at UC Davis.

The database covers staple commodities (wheat, rye, oats, barley, peas), animal products (beef, butter, cheese), industrial inputs (iron, copper, lead), fuels (firewood, charcoal, peat, coal), and various household goods, in original local currencies and units, with notes on conversions and methodology. Individual city series vary in length, density, and data quality.

Coverage

Section titled “Coverage”
  • Time: ~1300 to 1914, varying by city and commodity.
  • Variables: commodity prices in original local currency and units; conversions to silver-equivalent and to standardized metric units.
  • Geography: ~20+ European cities with substantial coverage (London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris, Strasbourg, Vienna, Florence, Madrid, Leipzig, Augsburg, Krakow, etc.); thinner coverage of Cairo, Istanbul, Beijing, Edo, and a few other non-European cities; sparse but real American-colonial series.
  • Density: European staple-grain series are densest; non-grain commodities and non-European cities have substantial gaps.

What to be skeptical of

Section titled “What to be skeptical of”
  • Original sources vary in quality. The database aggregates centuries of work by many scholars on many specific archives; not all sources are comparably reliable. The metadata documents this but it requires care.
  • Local-currency-to-silver conversions are sensitive to assumptions about coin debasement and silver-content variation across decades. The standardized series rely on conversion tables that are themselves historical reconstructions with error.
  • Asian and American coverage is much thinner than European. Comparative claims that lean on these cities have wider error bars than the European cross-city work.
  • The basket choice for “real” wages or welfare ratios is normative. Different consumption-basket assumptions yield different real-wage and welfare-ratio reconstructions even from the same price data.

Source

Section titled “Source”