Divergence seems to have come earlier to unskilled wages, both urban and rural, than to living standards. Though the data are poor, especially on the Chinese side, they indicate that by the mid-eighteenth century – when other indicators still suggest close comparability between Jiangnan and advanced regions of Europe – Delta wages had already fallen far behind, resembling those of Milan or even Warsaw more than those of London.19
At first these two points seem irreconcilable; but a gap in real wages can be quite consistent with comparable living standards. Wage labourers were probably under 10 per cent of rural adults even in the highly commercialized Lower Yangzi, where one might expect widespread landlessness. By contrast, nearly half of the working population in England and Holland in c. 1700 probably relied on wage earning.20 Because most tenants in the Delta had strong usufruct rights, they earned much more than unskilled labourers – roughly three times as much, according to the best estimates Pomeranz can put together (smallholders would have netted almost five times what a labourer earned).21
Thus, a comparison of unskilled real wages is a comparison of the bottom of the income scale in Jiangnan with something close to the middle in Northwest Europe, reconciling significant wage differences with comparable average living standards.
