In this revisionist study of the construction industry in early modern London Judy Stephenson draws on evidence from previously unused account books to demonstrate that by equating sums paid to obtain services with what workers (regardless of skills or length of contract) earned, historians such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Leonard Schwartz, Steve Rappaport and Jeremy Boulton have overestimated wage rates in the building industry by between 20 and 30 per cent. Many of the figures these scholars used were sums paid to contractors rather than directly to labourers, and Stephenson argues that paying greater attention to the former, as managers of projects, will enable a more accurate understanding of the metropolitan economy to be obtained. Following this critique of existing historiography, in chapter 2 Stephenson details forms of extraordinary (new build) and ordinary (maintenance) work carried out in London, dividing these forms of labour into seven categories: public or institutional projects; infrastructure work; house building; construction of commercial premises; repair and maintenance of public and commercial buildings (including churches); repair and maintenance of private and residential properties; and interior and decorative architectural work.
Stephenson provides a prosopography of contractors who worked on metropolitan projects in chapter 3, demonstrating how these investors, interconnected by apprenticeship and marriage, were able to access significant levels of financial capital. Resources and networks were vital when it came to negotiating contracts, and in chapter 3 Stephenson explains how those for major building projects were put out to tender and varied depending on the type of work to be carried out. Day rates and contracts by great (with payment when all work had been completed) existed, but contracts by measure were most common, minimizing risk by enabling the progress and costs of work to be monitored. Profit margins are the focus of chapter 5, where Stephenson unpacks the costs to bosses of sourcing labourers and materials; running sites; employing accountants; and providing workers with necessary tools, as well as highlighting that contractors lost out when clients made deductions if their expectations were not met.
The next two chapters offer comparisons of wages across metropolitan construction sites. In chapter 6, Stephenson is the first historian to use the day books kept by the mason contractor William Kempster to investigate real wages paid to those working on St Paul's Cathedral in the 1700s, linking this data to that for Westminster Abbey and the Office of the King's Works. Wages varied depending on the skills needed to carry out specific tasks while the number of hours worked fluctuated according to time of year, contract duration and individual inclination, with some workers taking on overtime, particularly night shifts. In chapter 7, Stephenson turns to ordinary maintenance work carried out at London Bridge, comparing her data with that for work carried out at Westminster Bridge and the Middle Temple. Bridge House pay records reveal unskilled labourers’ wages to have been lower than estimated previously, and do not appear to have risen across the long eighteenth century. Most workers were paid by the tide or day, a system which enabled wage costs to be kept low, but few were employed for a full working day.
In the final two chapters Stephenson draws overall conclusions from her evidence, arguing that few workers were able to work the hours necessary to maintain high standards of living because perquisites were rare, contract lengths variable and advanced skill levels no guarantee of high wages. Considering the wider significance of her findings, Stephenson asserts that evidence from the London building trades demonstrates that waged labour was a prominent feature of the English economy well before the late eighteenth century and that complex managerial systems were in place, but that the sector had distinct features which make using such data to measure broader economic trends in Europe and Asia, as various historians have sought to do, problematic.
By paying greater attention than previous scholarship to the role of contractors, and by providing a persuasive critique of existing readings of various account books, Stephenson has produced an important study which historians of guilds, wages, credit relations and economic growth within and beyond London will need to engage with. Gender historians might build upon the work of Stephenson too, since it would be useful to know more about the role played by women such as Elizabeth Gregory and Sarah Spoore, individuals who get only brief mentions in this book. In the decades around 1700, women were engaging in business activities in novel ways, and understanding how the (male-dominated) building trades fitted into a metropolitan economy where (female-dominated) service sectors were starting to predominate will enable scholars, building on the findings of this fine monograph, to write more nuanced studies of economic developments in early modern London.
