While humans have certainly always fallen in love, it was often difficult and dangerous to pursue.
Malcolm Cochran —
Summary: Love is a modern luxury that was often difficult and dangerous to pursue in premodern Europe. Geographic, social, economic, and physical factors limited and shaped romantic relationships among different classes of people. Historical sources and evidence show how love was harder in premodern Europe than it is today.
Love is the most common reason Americans get married or move in together. With such overwhelming agreement, it’s easy to forget that love is a modern luxury. While humans have certainly always fallen in love, it was often difficult and dangerous to pursue.
At the most basic level, love was limited by geography. In early modern Europe, the royalty and upper aristocracy sometimes courted and married across great distances, but the romantic range for the vast majority of people was as far as they could walk or ride. In his book, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, the English Historian Laurence Stone notes that in 17th century England, almost eighty percent of local gentry married someone in their own county. Among the peasantry, ninety percent married within a ten-mile radius.
Ironically, the upper classes, who had the largest geographic reach, had the least control over whom they married. Stone writes that if wealthy parents did not select their child’s spouse outright, they would at least retain veto power over the relationship. The poorer the family, the less property the parents had “to withhold as a threat” if their children chose an unacceptable mate.
When choosing their child’s partner, wealthy parents, especially aristocratic ones, usually sidelined love and affection in favor of social and economic gain. In the marriage between Jemima Montagu and Philip Carteret, which Stone describes as “typical,” the two aristocratic families accepted the marriage and ironed out the financial details before even notifying the bride.
Not only did women have little agency before the marriage, but once married, they became their husband’s property. Peasant and, later, working class women could spend their entire lives in domestic drudgery, first for their parents, then for their employers, and finally for their husbands. Of those three stages, marriage was sometimes the worst. As late as 1869, John Stuart Mill wrote that:
In the most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the woman … causes them to feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being, with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity.
Of course, not everyone pursued status through marriage, and some people were lucky enough to marry someone they loved. But regardless of the social circumstance, the physical side of love was, for the most part, dirty (in a bad way) and dangerous.
First of all, there was no privacy. According to Stone,
Living conditions were such that among the bulk of the population before the second half of the nineteenth century, whole families lived, worked, ate and slept in one or two rooms. In Leeds in the early nineteenth century, the typical cottage was fifteen feet square.
The poor often had to share a bed with two or three other people, leading to some awkward situations. Court records from Elizabethan-era Essex “turn up evidence of a man having intercourse with a girl while her sister was in the same bed and of a case in which the girl’s mother was in the same bed.”
Hygiene was terrible across all social classes, and among the poor, it was atrocious. Soap was too expensive to use regularly, and decent sanitation was basically non-existent. Stone writes that in 19th century Rennes, “there was a population of seventy thousand, but only two houses with bathrooms, and only thirty public bathhouses.”
Of course, people in premodern Europe were accustomed to strange-smelling lovers. But that doesn’t mean they liked them. Stone writes that the English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was so opposed to bathing that his wife kicked him out of her bed. In the 1760s, the women at a Blenheim Palace Christmas party collectively protested that the aristocrat Topham Beauclerk was giving them all lice. And it wasn’t just women who complained—in the 1670s, the Earl of Rochester wrote this particularly revealing stanza:
Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind And all my joys restore By using paper still behind And sponges for before
But filth was the least of their problems. People suffered from all kinds of horrible sicknesses, and diseases of love were no exception. Using an 18th century English census, researchers at the University of Cambridge estimate that around eight percent of the population of Chester, a small English city, was treated for syphilis before the age of 35. In London, over twenty percent may have sought treatment. By all accounts, syphilis was common, and gonorrhea was rampant. The (admittedly libertine) Scottish biographer James Boswell (1740-1795) contracted gonorrhea at least nineteen times.
To treat syphilis and gonorrhea, which some believed were two versions of the same disease, doctors used mercury. Patients ingested it, spread it on their sores as an ointment, and were sometimes even blasted with mercurial steam in gigantic stoves.
A man in a “fumigation stove.” The writing on the stove reads, “for a pleasure, a thousand pains.”
While mercury did provide some relief from these diseases, it is highly toxic and builds up in the body over time, eventually causing permanent neurological damage.
In one way or another, modernity, which started with the Industrial Revolution, has solved all of these problems. Arsenical compounds and, eventually, penicillin provided safer and more reliable treatments for syphilis and gonorrhea. Even when HIV emerged in the 20th century, we dealt with it quickly by historical standards.
Hygiene is also rapidly improving. Worldwide, nearly eighty percent of people now have access to a basic latrine, and in the developed world, good sanitation services are practically universal. Thanks to skyrocketing incomes, disinheritance has become an increasingly empty threat, meaning we have more and more agency over our romantic relationships. And, with cheap air travel and widespread access to cell phones, there is little stopping us from having a fling on the other side of the world.
So, however you spent Valentine’s Day, be grateful we live in a time when we can search for love, cure our clap, and sleep, alone or together, in our own beds.
Comparing time prices in the 1980 Sears catalog to Walmart in 2020 indicates a 729 percent increase in abundance.
Gale Pooley, Marian L. Tupy —
Summary: In 1980, it took 54.17 hours of work to buy a coffee maker, toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, and food processor. In 2020, it took only 6.54 hours of work to buy the same set of appliances.
Has innovation improved kitchen appliances? To answer this question, we went back to the 1980 Sears Fall Winter Catalog and looked at the prices of various kitchen appliances, including a coffeemaker, toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, and food processor. The total cost of all these items was $219.94. In 1980 unskilled workers earned $4.06 per hour, so it took 54.17 hours of work to equip one’s kitchen with these modern appliances.
We then searched Walmart’s website to find similar items in 2020. The total nominal price of these six items had dropped by 57.32 percent to $93.87. However, nominal unskilled wages had increased by 253.7 percent to $14.36 an hour. As such, it only took 6.54 hours of work to buy these six appliances in 2020. The time price, in other words, had fallen by 87.9 percent. Kitchen appliance abundance increased by an average of 729 percent, from 254 percent for blenders to 2,023 percent for food processors. Here is a detail of our findings and analysis:
For the time required to buy a set of these appliances to equip one house in 1980, you could equip 8.29 houses in 2020. Abundance in the kitchen has been increasing at a compound annual rate of around 5.43 percent a year. At this rate, abundance doubles every 13 years.
As you prepare your dinner this evening, take a moment and thank the many kitchen appliance innovators who have given every household an extra 47.63 hours of leisure to enjoy.
We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must.
Tim Worstall —
Summary: This article challenges the common perception that human progress has made us work harder and deprived us of leisure. It shows how both market and domestic labor have declined over time, thanks to technological innovations and economic changes. It traces the history of labor alleviation from the Viking era to the present day, and celebrates the benefits of having more time and freedom to pursue our interests.
People often complain that we are all working too hard and that human progress is pointless if we have to labor and strain to achieve our current lifestyles. They say we would be better off curtailing our desires and returning to some Edenic life with more time for ourselves. The problem is that Edenic life never existed. In fact, over the past millennium, humanity has been working less and less. And a thousand years is probably long enough to make the claim that working less is a trend, not a blip.
To understand working hours, it is important to recognize two points. First, households (some societies define households as containing only parents and children, while others extend the definition to cousins and nephews and so on) are the central economic units that should be discussed. Second, labor comes in two flavors: domestic work and market work. Domestic work includes food preparation, childcare, cleaning, or any other labor within the household. Market work generates money or goods to trade for any goods and services that the household does not produce. The “labor burden” on the household is the combined number of hours spent doing those two types of work.
Market and domestic labor can substitute one another. Children can go to kindergarten, and food can be bought as take-out. Likewise, clothes can be purchased from a factory, or they can be stitched at home. People tend to use the option that gets them the desired good or service with the least amount of work. As I will show below, the net effect of changes in those two forms of labor determines the total household labor supply. Or, to put it less formally, it determines how long people have to work to gain what they want. Once those two kinds of labor are added up, a declining trend in the total number of hours worked becomes apparent. Consider this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:
Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours).
And that was just for the period between 1965 and 2003. A closer look at the 20th century suggests that market working hours fell for men and rose for women. The rise in female market working hours was precipitated by technological innovation and a concomitant decline in the number of domestic working hours. Domestic working hours fell greatly for women and, less dramatically, for men. The net effect of the four processes was that leisure hours rose, and total working hours fell, for both men and women.
In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the next century would usher in an age of prosperity. He also forecasted that people would work less and spend more time at leisure. Keynes turned out to be right. But many modern readers, who come across Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour workweek, wonder why they are still putting in 40 at the office. The answer is that the work we killed was the domestic labor done largely by women.
One author estimates that it took 60 hours a week of physical labor to keep a 1930 household working. Today, it takes perhaps 15 hours. Those numbers are not exact, but when you consider the washing machine, the gas oven, the vacuum cleaner, prepared food, and steam irons, the amount of household work eliminated is immense. One of Hans Rosling’s TED talks recounts how the washing machine brought him books. According to the Swedish physician, once the washing machine liberated his mother from laundry, she had more time to read to him. The South Korean economist Ha Joon Chang claims that the washing machine – by which he really means all domestic labor-saving technologies – changed the world more than the internet.
But labor alleviation did not begin in the 20th century. In her new book (The Fabric Of Civilisation came out in November 2020), the American writer Virginia Postrel estimates that it took 365 full days of work to spin enough thread to make a Viking sail. Days and days of work to create enough thread to weave a bandana and weeks to make a pair of jeans. The Vikings used the drop spindle to make thread – a basic technology that humans used for millennia. The spinning wheel, which partly mechanized the process, arrived in Europe sometime in the 11th or the 12th century A.D.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, first with the Spinning Jenny, which was followed by Crompton’s Mule and endless other derivatives. These machines progressively automated what was a horrendously time-consuming and nearly exclusively female domestic task for centuries. The economic historian Brad Delong has remarked that when women of any class are depicted in older literature, there is always reference to their spinning. By the time of Jane Austen’s novels in the late 18th and early 19th century A.D., spinning is never mentioned – it was all done in the factories by then.
We all have more leisure now than our forebears did. We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must. But this wonderful outcome of human progress is obscured by the fact that, in large part, it is the household labor that has been automated away. Sure, the Roomba might not be a great leap forward, but it is just the latest iteration of a process that began a thousand years ago. And there is no sign of it ending.
During the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. economy grew by more than 2 percent per capita annually, but then it declined to 1 percent. We have a dysfunctional economy and a general technological slowdown. Dead Wrong.
The better things get, the more we will be on the lookout for things to worry about.
Marian L. Tupy —
Slavery was once ubiquitous throughout the world. Today, it is illegal everywhere. Is that a sign of moral progress or a temporary accomplishment that’s bound not to last? Put differently, are human beings capable of evolving toward higher states of ethical behaviour, or must slavery, along with other forgotten cruelties, inevitably reappear? Some backsliding is surely to occur, but history suggests that a full return to the savage days of yore is highly unlikely.
Slavery can be traced back to Sumer, a Middle Eastern civilisation that flourished between 4,500 BC and 1,900 BC. The early laws of the Babylonians, who overran Sumer in 18th century BC, appear to have taken ownership of one person by another for granted. Thus, the Code of Hammurabi states, “If a slave say to his master, ‘You are not my master,’ if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.” Over the succeeding 4,000 years, chattel slavery would be practised, at one point or another, by every civilisation.
Prior to the Age of Steam, humanity depended on energy produced primarily by people and animals. An extra pair of field hands was always welcome and conquered people, if they escaped execution, were frequently put to work as slaves. There were no internment camps to hold captive populations and prisons were mere short-term holding cells, where the accused awaited trial, punishment and execution. In any case, low agricultural productivity and the concomitant food shortages meant that feeding a captured, but idle population was impractical.
Slavery existed in ancient Egypt, India, Greece, China, Rome and pre-Columbian America. The Arab slave trade took off during the Muslim conquests of the Middle Ages. The word “slave” probably derives from Late Latin word sclavus, which in turn denotes the Slavic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe who were enslaved by the Ottoman Turks.
The number of countries where slavery is legal has plummeted in the last two centuries
Slavery in the Caribbean and the south-eastern United States, which was practised between the 16th and 19th centuries AD, saw millions of Africans brought to the New World for that very purpose. Yet slavery amongst African tribes, especially in West Africa, was also common and persisted until very recently. In fact, Mauritania became the last country to outlaw slavery in 1981 and, due to its persistence, criminalise the practice of enslavement in 2007.
As chattel slavery disappeared, our definition of slavery has expanded to include such practices as forced labour, sexual slavery and debt bondage. This is a common psychological behaviour called “prevalence-induced concept change.” As Harvard University psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert found, people who were asked to identify “blue dots” tended to call purple dots “blue” as blue dots become rarer. Similarly, people who were asked to identify threatening faces tended to describe faces as threatening as threatening faces become rarer.
“From low-level perception of colour to higher-level judgments of ethics,” the two psychologists wrote, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.” Human psychology, then, partly explains the persistent allure of pessimism. As bad things become rarer, the human brain makes the definition of “bad” more encompassing.
This interplay between human nature and ethical behaviour strikes at the core of what we mean by progress. Some people, like the British philosopher John Gray, deny the possibility of moral progress. As he wrote, “I define progress … as any kind of advance that’s cumulative, so that what’s achieved at one period is the basis for later achievement that then, over time, becomes more and more irreversible. In science and technology, progress isn’t a myth. However, the myth is that the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics, or, more simply, civilisation.”
But Gray’s pessimism is difficult to reconcile with the disappearance of once common practices, such as human sacrifice and cannibalism. Human sacrifice has been looked down upon since the Roman times. Today, no rational being believes sacrificing virgins can bring about better harvests. Better fertilisation and pest control are much safer bets for aspiring farmers.
Hannibal Lecter notwithstanding, cannibalism has been extremely rare for centuries. Even during the communist famines in China and the Soviet Union, very few people resorted to eating their fellow human beings, preferring starvation instead. It is unlikely that even a potential collapse of global food supply would reverse the trend away from eating human flesh.
A civilisational collapse could, of course, resurrect some abhorrent practices. But some of the knowledge and internalised ethical precepts that humanity has so painstakingly accumulated over millennia will surely remain, thus moderating peoples’ behaviour even in the direst of times. In the meantime, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that progress is “self-cloaking.” The better things get, the more we will be on the lookout for things to worry about.
