This paper reassesses the food consumption and dietary impact of the regimes of food and food price control and eventually, food rationing, that were introduced in Britain during the First World War. At the end of the War the Sumner Committee was convened to investigate the effects of these...

This paper estimates and investigates the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in Britain between 1904 and 1937. To do this, it exploits two newly-digitised data sets. The paper is a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of...

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was roughly halfway through a 60-year demographic transition with declining infant mortality and birth rates. Cities exhibited great and strongly correlated diversity in these rates. We demonstrate cross–section correlations with, for instance,...

We re-assess the changes in British working class diets through WW1. The 1918 Sumner Committee’s work on this was limited by a lack of consistency across household surveys. Our rediscovered 1904 data allow a cleaner comparison. Though calorie intake was maintained, we find a closing of the...

We estimate the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in urban Britain between 1904 and 1937. We exploit two recently-digitized data sets. The paper presents a statistical generalization, to working families in the whole of urban Britain, of the poverty...

From assembly line to call centre, this volume charts the immense transformation of work and pay across the 20th century and provides the first labour focused history of Britain. Written by leading British historians and economists, each chapter stands as a self-contained reading for those who...

This article presents an analysis of British urban working-class housing conditions in 1904, using a rediscovered survey. We investigate overcrowding and find major regional differences. Scottish households in the survey were more overcrowded despite being less poor. Investigating the causes of...

This article introduces a newly discovered household budget data set for 1904. We use these data to estimate urban poverty among working families in the British Isles. Applying Bowley's poverty line, we estimate that at least 23 per cent of people in urban working households and 18 per cent of...