A frequent question
is "how much would a specified amount of money at a certain period of
time be worth today?" The sources listed below
are useful in attempting to answer this question.
Comparisons of purchasing power are only reliable over short periods.
A typical computer in 2004 is a very different machine from its counterpart
of 5 years ago. Indices of inflation fail to take proper account of improvements
in quality.
Even in the essentials of life there are significant changes over the
years. A typical diet in most advanced countries will be rather different
today from what it would have been before the refrigerator became a common
household item.
Therefore over long time spans, changes in prices give only the very
roughest and most approximate idea of changes in the value of money.
An EH.Net service providing calculators for the purchasing power of the
US dollar and the British pound sterling, US and British inflation rates,
US commercial paper rates. It also gives information about exchange rates,
earnings and prices in Britain and the US, and the price of gold back to
1257.
A graph and table compiled by Hans Eisenkolb showing the decline in purchasing
power of the currencies of Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, USA, France,
Canada, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy.
A project by the The International Institute of Social History, based in
the Netherlands, to make data on prices and wages in different countries
and periods more widely available.
Exchange rates for German, French, English, Spanish and Portuguese currencies
are given. Some information on exchange rates in the British colonies in
North America is also included.
The US National Bureau of Economic Research maintains this database that
includes some datasets for the United Kingdom, France and German, although
the main focus is on the United States. Interest rates and prices are among
the topics covered.
Some examples of wages for particular occupations and a small selection
of prices taken from the book The English: A Social History, 1066-1945
by Christopher Hibbert, London: Grafton Books, 1987.
An article by Richard Colyer, National Library of Wales journal. 1974,
Summer. Volume XVIII/3. It contains quite a lot of information about the
expenses incurred by cattle drovers, e.g. tolls at gates on their routes,
and expenditure on accommodation and beer!
A collection of web pages on facts and figures relating to South Wales,
in particular the Rhondda Valleys, from the middle of the 19th century
to the First World War.
Extracts from The History of Cardiganshire by S R Meyrick, 1810,
specifically the reprint of the 1907 imprint published by Stephen Collard
in July 2000.
Instances of wife Selling occurred in Britain until late in the 19th century.
It was regarded, particularly by the poorer sections of society, as an
alternative to divorce. This account of various cases includes prices.
The most famous account of wife selling is in Thomas Hardy's novel the
Mayor of Casterbridge. It was based on real
cases.
A list of prices of some common items. They were normally more expensive
in the "Tommy shops" as company shops were called. The table is about a
third of the way down the page. Search for the Truck system and Tommy
Shops.
Wages and prices are two of the categories in the database.
Adam Smith. (1723-1790). Wealth of Nations
The most influential book on economics ever written. Book
I, Chapter X, Of Wages and Profit in the Different Employments of
Labour and Stock includes details of wages in typical occupations in
Smith's time, and also in Ancient Greece. Book I, Chapter XI Of the
Rent of Land has information about prices and is accompanied by a set
of tables
of data.
Chronicon
Preciosum or, an Account of English Gold and Silver Money; The Price
of Corn and other Commodities; and of Stipends, Salaries, Wages, Jointures,
Portions, Day-labour, &c. in England, for Six hundred Years last past:
&c.... London: Printed for T. Osborne, in Gray's-Inn. 1745.
This work, originally published anonymously, was written by William Fleetwood,
the Bishop of Ely. Chronicon Preciosum was one of the earliest works on
changes in prices and its data was used by many later writers on the same
subject. A facsimile copy is available online but it requires the DjVu
Browser Plug-in which can be downloaded from Lizardtech.
This paper by Professor John H. Munro, University of Toronto, ends with
a set of tables showing the purchasing power of a London craftsman's wages
in 1438 - 1439. The tables cover a wide range of commodities, not just
spices.
A site maintained by Helmer Christiansen. It includes rates of exchange
going back to the middle of the 18th century and various agricultural prices
back as far as the beginning of the 17th century.
This calculator, provided by the Bank of Canada, uses monthly consumer
price index (CPI) data from 1914 to the present to show changes in the
cost of a fixed "basket" of consumer purchases. These include food, shelter,
furniture, clothing, transportation, and recreation.
Tables of yield rates, inflation and age and price indices going back to
1924. The tables accompany the Canadian Institute of Actuaries annual
report on Canadian economic statistics.
Performs calculations for any period between 1800 and the present. The
pre-1975 data are the Consumer Price Index statistics from Historical Statistics
of the United States (USGPO, 1975). All data since then are from the annual
Statistical Abstracts of the United States.
This site, maintained by by Robert Sahr at Oregon State University, not
only provides data on the dollar's value over three centuries but also
has data on many other related topics, e.g. prices of commodities such
as gold, gasoline and movie tickets, government expenditure, the pay of
presidents and members of congress, and much else besides.
Tables of data on US inflation and the consumer price index back to 1913,
and on the Average
Annual Inflation by Decade There are also articles about inflation,
deflation and the CPI.
A group of pages on various trans-Atlantic shipping lines. In many cases
there are pictures of advertisements giving the fares. Click on the advertisements
for larger images.
An EH.Net calculator giving exchanges rates between the US dollar and a
wide range of other currencies, going back as far as 1913 for many of the
European countries, and all the way back to 1791 in the case of the British
pound.
A paper by George J. Hall, of Yale University, on Swiss exchange rates
during World War I for five of the primary belligerents: Britain, France,
Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
Scotland had its own currency, the pound Scots, prior to the Act of Union
in 1707. The converter allows you to convert an amount in Scots pounds
to Sterling (from the year 1600 onwards).
This web page includes a table of Jewish weights, Persian, Greek and Roman
coins giving their rough values in terms of wages when they were used and
also in terms of US dollars.
Prices of some common goods, and details of soldiers' wages. The prices
are taken mainly from Diocletian's Edict of Prices, 301 AD, which attempted,
not very successfully, to curb inflation by stipulating maximum prices.
For more information about monetary units in the Roman Empire see Roman
money or, alternatively, Roman
Money, Weights and Measures.
Treasure and Prices in Spain 1505-1650
Treasure and
Prices in Spain 1505-1650 This web page, maintained by Thayer Watkins
of San José State University Economics Department, includes a table
of showing the cumulative import of treasure, from Mexico and Peru after
the conquest of the empires of the Aztecs and Incas, and the corresponding
price level at 5 year intervals. The source of the data is:
Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in
Spain, 1501-1650, Harvard University Press 1934.
A list of (mainly) printed sources in one of London's major business libraries.
Pick, Franz and Sédillot, René
All the monies of the world : a chronicle of currency values. 2nd ed.
New York, Pick Pub. Corp., 1971.
Raw data, such as prices of gold and silver, to compare values of all imaginable
countries for all imaginable eras.
Fisher, Irving
The purchasing power of money : its determination and relation to credit
interest and crises / by Irving Fisher ; assisted by Harry G. Brown. rev.ed.
New York, N.Y. : A.M. Kelley, 1985. - xxiv,515p. : Reprint. Originally
published: New York : Macmillan, 1931.
This book, the first edition of which was published in 1911, is a detailed
treatment of the problems of determining purchasing power and its historical
changes.
A guide to inflation and the value of everyday objects.
McCusker, John J.
How much is that in real money? : a historical price index for use
as a deflator of money values in the economy of the United States. 2nd
ed. Worcester : American Antiquarian Society, 2001. ISBN 1-929545-01-0.
This edition not only has information for the United States going back
to 1665 but also has comparable tables for Great Britain going back to
1600.
Cooper, James C. and Borden, Karl
Public representation of historical prices.
Essays in economic and business history 14 1996, p. 465-485
Cooper and Borden compiled three indexes for the years 1774-1994 (U.S.
only):
Consumer Price Index
Index of Money Wage Rates (Unskilled labor)
Labor Cost of Living Index.
They compiled the data from Paul David and Peter Solar, "A Bicentenary
Contribution to the History of the Cost of Living in America," Research
in Economic History 2 (1977). The 1975-94 data came from the Federal Reserve
Bulletin and Handbook of Labor Statistics.
These cover the period 1580-1870. One of the earliest forms of journalism
was the printing of information about commodity prices, foreign exchange
rates and money rates. Dutch
price currents were produced regularly in Amsterdam from the seventeenth
century onwards.
Retail prices index. London: The Stationary Office. (Business monitor MM23).
Recent issues of this monthly publication have a table showing the internal
purchasing power of the pound from 1980 onwards and a longer-term indicator
of the prices of consumer goods and services from 1914 onwards. Unfortunately
there is a gap for the years 1939-1945 which is surprising as data for
those years has long been available in other publications, including British
Labour Statistics
Great Britain. Department of Employment
British labour statistics : historical abstract, 1886-1968. London
: H.M.S.O., 1971. ISBN 0-11-360802-0
This includes data on the cost of living for the period 1886-1968.
Back to an age of falling prices?
The Economist vol. 252, 13 July 1974, p 62-63.
Data on prices changes over the period from just after the death of Cromwell
until the mid 1970s are included.
Fleetwood, William
Chronicon Preciosum London: Printed for T. Osborne, in Gray's-Inn.
1745. [Facsimile reprint 1969 by Augustus Kelley].
This work was used by many later writers on the changes in the value of
money. A facsimile copy can be read online if you have the DjVu Browser
Plug-in. See the note in the section on online sources
above.
Mitchell, Brian Redman
British historical statistics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,
1988. - 886p ; 23cm. Includes index. - 0-521-33008-4
Provides exchange rates for the British Pound Sterling, the French Franc,
various German currencies and the US dollar going back several centuries.
Newman, Oksana and Foster, Allan (editors)
The value of a pound : prices and incomes in Britain, 1900-93 Andover
: Gale Research International, 1995. 306p ISBN 1-873477-31-7
Officer, Lawrence H.
Dollar-Sterling mint parity and exchange rates, 1791-1834
Journal of Economic History vol. 43 no. 3, 1983, p.579-616.
Perkins, Edwin J.
Foreign interest rates in American financial markets: a revised series
of Dollar-Sterling exchange rates, 1835-1900.
Journal of Economic History vol. 38, no.2, 1978, p. 392-417.
Mitchell, Brian Redman
European historical statistics, 1750-1975. - 2nd rev. ed. London :
Macmillan, 1980. - 868p. 0-333-29215-4
Contains information on indicies of wholesale prices and cost of living.
United States. Bureau of the Census
Historical statistics of the United States, colonial times to 1970.
Washington : US Government Printing Office, 1975. - 2 v. - LC75-038832
Beveridge, William Henry
Prices and wages in England : from the twelfth to the nineteenth century.
- vol. 1: Price tables: mercantile era. London : Cass, 1965. - 756p. 1st
ed.originally published,Longmans,1939.
Bootle, R.P.
The death of inflation: surviving and thriving in the zero era London:
Nicholas Brealey, 1996. 244p ISBN 1-857881-45-1
This has some data on UK prices spanning the period 1264-1995.
Morgan, E. Victor
The study of prices and the value of money. London : George Philip
for the Historical Association, 1950. - 27p. - (Helps for students of history
series/Historical Association ; 53). -
This little pamphlet has details of prices of a few commodities going back,
in the case of wheat, to 1260.
Brown, H. Phelps and Hopkins, Sheila V.
A perspective of wages and prices. London: Methuen, 1981.
The book contains data on British wages and prices going back (for southern
England) to the 13th century.
Brown, H. Phelps and Hopkins, Sheila V.
Seven centuries of the prices of consumables, compared with builders'
wage-rates. Economica vol. 23, no. 92, November 1956, p. 296-314.
This paper compares the wages of builders in England with prices over the
period 1260-1954. It is reproduced in the above-mentioned book by the same
authors.
Braudel, Fernand P. and Spooner, Frank
Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750, in The Cambridge Economic History
of Europe Vol.4: The economy of expanding Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries / edited by E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson. Cambridge : Cambridge
University Press, 1967, pages 378-486.
The last 29 pages of this chapter contain many graphs showing variations
in the prices of several commodities over a long periods.
Tooke, Thomas and Newmarch, William
A history of prices, and of the state of the circulation, from 1793
to 1837 : preceded by a brief sketch of the state of corn trade in the
last two centuries / London, Printed for Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and
Longmans, 1838-57. (6 volumes).
Stanley Jevons described this as a "unique work, of which we can hardly
over-estimate the importance", quoted by Gregory (below).
Gregory, T.E.
An introduction to Tooke and Newmarch's A history of prices and of
the state of the circulation from 1792 to 1856. London : London School
of Economics and Political Science, 1962. - (Series of reprints of scarce
works on political economy ; no. 16) Reprint of edition first published
1928 by P.S. King, London.
Burnett, John
A history of the cost of living. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1969. ISBN
0-14-021020-2
The book deals with Britain from the middle ages, onwards.
Posthumus, N.W.
Inquiry into the history of prices in Holland. Leiden : Brill, 1946.
Vol.1 Wholesale prices at the Exchange of Amsterdam 1585-1914; Rates of
exchange at Amsterdam 1609-1914.
Hamilton, Earl J.
Money, prices, and wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351-1500
/ by Earl J. Hamilton. Philadelphia : Porcupine Press, 1975. - xxviii,310p.
- (Perspectives in European history ; 6) Reprint of the ed. published,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936, which was issued as no.51 of
Harvard economic studies
Hamilton, Earl J.
War and prices in Spain 1651-1800. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University
Press, 1947.
An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations / by
Adam Smith ; edited by Edwin Cannan ; with a new preface by George J. Stigler.
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1976. 2 vol. Reprint of the 1904
ed. published by Methuen & Co., London. ISBN 0-226-76374-9
Chapter XI has an extensive discussion of variations in prices of various
commodities, especially corn, over long time spans. At the end of the chapter
there are statistics of corn prices from 1202 - 1750, a span of nearly
five and a half centuries! The complete text is available online.
Keynes, John Maynard
A treatise on money. London : Macmillan, 1930.
Vol. 1 chapter 4 The purchasing power of money p. 53-64 and chapter 5 the
plurality of secondary price-levels have a lot on index numbers.
Zaslavsky, Claudia
Africa counts : number and pattern in African culture Westport, Conn.
: Lawrence Hill, 1979.
The book has several pages about the use of cowrie shells as currency,
including some information, on page 226, about typical values in terms
of Sterling. In the 1860s these were:
40 cowries = one string = 3/4d.
5 strings = one bunch = 3-6d.
10 bunches = one head = 13/4 shillings.
10 heads = one bag = 14-18s.
Later, because of inflation, these values changed drastically.
"Two obols were the day's pay of a labourer, while the architect
of the Erechtheum temple on the Acropolis earned about three times as much,
a drachma a day. As a rough but useful guide as to the value of such coins,
the average day's pay for a manual worker in Great Britain in 1982 was
over £27, while a first-rate consultant architect (not necessarily
of the quality of those that built the Parthenon) would expect to earn
at least £200 a day, worth in today's inflated currency some 25,000
drachmae."
Keynes, in volume 2, pages 156-158 of his Treatise on money (cited
above) discussed the historical importance of Drake's booty. Although illustrating
the power of compound interest this example may also be of interest to
those concerned with changes in the value of money.
"the booty brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind may fairly
be considered the fountain and origin of British Foreign Investment. ...
In view of this, the following calculation may amuse the curious. At the
present time (in round figures) our foreign investments probably yield
us about 6½ per cent net after allowing for losses, of which we
reinvest abroad about half - say 3¼ per cent. If this is, on average,
a fair sample of what has been going on since 1580, the £ 42,000
invested by Elizabeth out of Drake's booty in 1580 would have accumulated
by 1930 to approximately the actual aggregate of our present foreign investments,
namely £ 4,200,000,000 - or say 100,000 times greater than the original
investment. ..."
"Returning to the last quarter of the sixteenth century in England,
the reader must remember that it was not the absolute value of the bullion
brought into the country - perhaps not more than £ 2,000,000 or £
3,000,000 from first to last - which mattered, but the increment of the
country's wealth in buildings and improvements being probably several times
the above figures. Nor must we overlook the other side of the picture,
namely the hardship to the agricultural population, which became a serious
problem in the later years of Elizabeth, due to prices outstripping wages;
for it was out of this reduced standard of life, as well as out of increased
economic activity (tempered by periodic years of crisis and unemployment),
that the accumulation of capital was partly derived."
Acknowledgements
The people whose names are listed below suggested sources
or made useful comments on the problem of comparing sums of money over
long time periods. I apologise if I have omitted anyone.
Jonathan Bean, Mason Clark, Glyn
Davies, Ron Haller-Williams, Anthony Hoelscher, William F. Hummel,
David Lloyd Jones, John Lehman, Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, Darren Lubotsky,
Paul Marks, Wade Neitzel, Geno Pinero, John A. Lane, Jane Howells, Cal
Schindel, and Bill Goffe.
In Family Tree
Magazine, vol 20 no 3, January 2004 there was an article by Jane Cavell
on Internet Resources on money, wages and the cost of living. Some of those
resources were used in updating this page.
The directory name arian in this URL is the Welsh
word for money. It also means silver, which was for many
centuries the most common metal for making coins.
Roy Davies - last updated 7
September 2004.
