dleness'. However, these and similar sentiments have recently been categorized by de Vries as ironic examples of `historians who regard themselves as champions of the common man' appropriating the claims put forward by elites seeking to perpetuate the poverty of the common man.(51) While it is true that Thompson was sometimes neglectful of the economic context within which labour operated, he was acutely aware of its social and cultural context, and his work demonstrates how essential it is to temper modern economic analysis and consumer theory with a good dose of contemporary mentality.(52)Continued from page 11Peter Mathias has provided a crisp focus on the effects of short-term fluctuations in employment, money wages and prices on the industriousness of the work-force.(53) Such fluctuations were, of course, both commonplace and severe in later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century England and, as Adam Smith noted, `the demand for labour increases in years of sudden and extraordinary plenty, and diminishes in those of sudden and extraordinary scarcity'.(54) `Windfall gains', in the shape of exceptionally high but essentially short-lived earnings or substantially reduced outgoings due to bumper harvests and low food prices, were unlikely to induce workers to abandon totally their customary expectations and levels of consumption, and therefore resulted in an increase in voluntary leisure. Short-term leisure preference of this sort featured prominently in contemporary analyses, with their repeated references to the idleness induced by `cheap years' or a `sudden rise of wages'.This need not mean, however, that over the longer term more permanent increases in real wages necessarily led to a fall in the amount of labour offered. It is possible for individual workers to indulge in a fair measure of leisure preference and still work more when the demand for labour is high than they had been able to when employment was less easily obtaina...
