Engels' pause

English

Etymology

Coined by economic historian Robert C. Allen in 2009 and named after German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who described the workers' situation in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Noun

Engels' pause (uncountable)

  1. The early phase of the Industrial Revolution, from 1790 to 1840, when British working-class wages stagnated while the per-capita gross domestic product expanded rapidly.
    • [2017 [2013], Arthur Goldhammer, transl., Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, translation of Le Capital au XXIe siècle by Thomas Piketty, →ISBN, pages 224–225:
      In Britain, for which we have the most complete data, the available historical studies, in particular those of Robert Allen (who gave the name “Engels’ pause” to the long stagnation of wages), suggest that capital's share increased by something like 10 percent of national income, from 35–40 percent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to around 45–50 percent in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto and set to work on Capital.]

Further reading

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