Historical Prices and Wages (HPW)

Data on prices and wages are among the most important sources of information in social- and economic-historical research, especially for the pre-statistical period.

The International Institute of Social History (IISH) has taken the initiative to set up a network of scholars working with this kind of data and establish a moderated list of datafiles of historical prices and wages.

Scholars working in this field are invited to register their work, and to make their databases available through the internet - either on their own webpages (which may be made accessible via the IISH-list) or on the webpages of the IISH.

The long term goal is to enhance the exchange and (re-)use of these data in order to write truly international-comparative histories of the development of markets and their institutional settings. The focus will be on data bases related to Europe and on non-European (in particular Asian) countries in the period before 1914.

All data bases will not only include the data themselves, but also descriptions of the way in which they are constructed, the sources which are used, and relevant publications in which the data are analysed.

We supply three kinds of sources:

• List of datafiles available online (at Dataverse)
• An index to other websites containing statistical data
• An overview of the value of the guilder from 1270 onwards
  with links to sites with the value of the US dollar (1774-  ) and
  the British pound (1660-  ).