Work and time: a reassessment in continental Europe in the 14th–19th centuries

Abstract Accounting for labor time was part of the quantification effort characterizing Western society since the fourteenth century, if not before. But if the characteristics of work time have been repeatedly studied in England in relation to the Industrial Revolution, the situation is much more contrasted on the continent for which no synthesis of existing research exists on this topic. The aim of this article is to present new results concerning the length of the work day and the number of workdays in a year, based on business accounts in particular. But considerations about the length of work time have no meaning if the content of this time is not taken into account. The quantification of the worker’s labor in the nineteenth century was not new in and of itself. The formalization of the relationship between work time and the quantity to be produced emerged and spread to a growing number of activities and businesses in the seventeenth century, no doubt based on earlier attempts. It introduced a relatively new form into the language of wage-earning during this period, the specificity of which was to link work time and work quantity in a relatively formal way.