Economic historian Robert Allen observed that during the Industrial Revolution, the British working class experienced a period of stagnant real wages. This has led many historians to investigate changes in the diet of the working class during that time. While there has been a focus on the entire...

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, global trade increased dramatically: between 1816 and 1914 trade grew between 3 and 4 percent per annum, compared with about 1 percent annual trade growth in preceding centuries. Southeast Asian commodity production for the global economy boomed:...