Prices and Wages in Salzburg and Vienna, c. 1450-1850

The proposed project takes a comparative and critical perspective on prices and wages in Salzburg and Vienna between 1450 and 1850: The study of prices and wages (as the cost of labor)those key data of economic developmentis a fundamental task of economic and social history. In the currently discussed great divergence, for instance, real wages since 1600 in 16 European cities are used as support for the assumed economic and social advancement of the Northwest over the rest. Yet it evidences that the current state of real-wage analysis suffers from a relative scarcity of Central European data and lacks adequate consideration about their quality. During the 1930s the International Scientific Committee on Price History worked through serial sources in many European states and cities and evaluated long-running series with the goal of developing a European perspective on the standard of living spanning time and space. Whereas more recent investigations of some nations do exist, in the case of Austria the data collected during the 1930s still constitute the state of the art; and since the emigration of Alfred F. Pribram extensions of these investigations have not been released with the same intensity. The aims of our research project are: firstly, apart from improving the quality of existing data samples (Vienna, Klosterneuburg), to collect new data (Salzburg) and secondly, to design on this basisconsidering the existing critique on approaches in previous researchconsumer baskets and to arrive at estimates for real wages. Toward this end, the account books of almshouses for the care of the poor and elderly in Vienna, Klosterneuburg and Salzburg, will be consulted, from which a long series of prices and wages can be gathered extending over three centuries. The focus will be on two East Alpine regions or cities: Vienna, as a growing court capital and highly integrated in the market, supplied not least by trade along the Danube; and Salzburg, as a medium-sized European town and the seat of a small prince- bishopric dependent on its surrounding regions. The goal is: on one hand, to make possible the compilation of wage and price listsfrom a European perspectivefor regions of Europe that have hitherto hardly been taken into account; on the other hand, from such records to choose an optimal number of pertinent goods to assemble a consumer basket that reveals changes over time. With reference to newer research and the debate on basic wages, effective earnings, wage in kind (esp. board and allowances), options foror extent ofself-sufficiency, our ambition is to view prices in high resolution, along with their volatility, from a social and economic perspective, in order to obtain a more accurate assessment of the standard of living. This project will be a cooperation between the University of Salzburg (Reinhold Reith, chair of economic, social and environmental history) and the University of Vienna (chair of economic and social history).

In the joint research project of the Universities of Salzburg and Vienna extensive data on pre-industrial prices and wages in the cities of Salzburg and Vienna (ca. 1450 to 1850) were collected and analyzed. On this basis the long-term development of the material standard of living can be estimated, which has so far only been implemented for individual cities - especially for major European cities. Recent studies on pre-industrial living standards have pointed to problematic and simplifying assumptions in this respect and to the fundamental lack of reliable data. Although older price and wage data exists for Vienna, no comprehensive and, above all, systematic survey of prices and wages is available for other cities in the Eastern Alpine region. Therefore, the project collected completely new data for the city of Salzburg and reviewed, improved and extended the already available data for Vienna. The first project goal was to provide high-resolution price and wage data for this under-researched area, which also includes rarely considered expenditures on rent and firewood. The second goal was to develop a more nuanced view of the long-term evolution of pre-modern urban living standards by designing regionally and temporally adjusted (and varying) consumer baskets, by capturing a variety of wages (including women's wages), and by combining quantitative with qualitative methods. When analyzing our data, we ask about convergences and divergences in real wage trends in the two cities, as well as about market integration and the trajectory of inflation crises.