I have recently completed a working paper which has now been submitted (thank you a great many scholars who provided comments notably Judy Stephenson and Mark Koyama). That paper basically went back modestly on one datapoint in the work of Robert Allen which was published in 2001 in Explorations in Economic History. 

Probably one of the greatest ten papers in the field of economic history for the last twenty-five years, Allen’s article has had a tremendous influence. It introduced a new method of comparing real wages at a time when very few goods were traded internationally and most prices were determined at the local level. In using what we now call “welfare ratios” (which are akin to poverty lines), Allen managed to compare many countries before the industrial revolution.

My entire research agenda has been to improve on this stupendous work and to increase the constellation of observations as part of an “uncoordinated” (many scholars are working on this separately) effort to map living standards prior to the mid 19th century. The main part of my agenda is to add Canada and devote more attention to the important issue of relative prices in comparing old world (high labor to land ratios) and new world (high land to labor ratios) economies. In the process of comparing parts of the world, I had to re-examine some data for some established countries. One of my reconsiderations was for Strasbourg in France where I found that Allen might have misclassified wages of skilled workers which included in-kind payments as unskilled workers receiving full compensation in money wages.

When I enacted corrections to the money wage rate, I found that the Alsace region where Strasbourg is located had living standards more or less in line with those observed in Paris (rather than living standards at less than half the level of Paris). If you’re interested, the note is available here.

Note: For those who are interested, I really recommend reading this short article in Cliometrica by Sharp and Weisdorf who also discuss comparisons between France and England (and how it may relate to topics like the French Revolution).