This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers’ living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy's early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all‐embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we do not detect any downturn in our early modern rural wages. This observation informs the little divergence debate. By comparing rural rather than urban wages and stable rather than casual ones, we find that annual English earnings rose from being only 10 per cent higher than those in Italy in 1650 to being a staggering 150 per cent higher in 1800. If wages reflected labour productivity, then unskilled English workers—unlike their Italian counterparts—grew increasingly productive in the run‐up to the industrial revolution.

中文翻译：

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意大利与工资和价格差异很小：农村地区稳定就业的证据†

本文介绍了托斯卡纳大公国稳定的农村男性工人的早期现代工资指数。这些工资凸显了在考虑历史工人的生活水平时区分地点和合同类型的重要性，并且它们引起了关于意大利早期的现代低迷是纯粹的城市现象还是无所不包的现象的长期争论。我们的数据为前一种观点提供了支持，因为我们没有发现我们早期的现代农村工资出现任何下滑。这一观察结果为很少的分歧辩论提供了信息。通过比较农村而不是城市的工资以及稳定的而不是临时的工资，我们发现英国的年收入从1650年的意大利仅增加了10％，到1800年的惊人地增长了150％。如果工资反映了劳动生产率，