Upvote:2
Gidday. From the 1930s British social historians of a marxist bent were deeply interested in the concept of time series of price-wage or price-capital structures. This is basically a way of saying "How do we measure 'worth' socially over time." British historians like MM Postan were interested in this problem for multiple reasons:
The problem was that the historians discovered that wage/price data from 1300 was from monastery records. That there was no general market in a capitalist sense of labour power and commodities to reproduce actual living labour. That what was true in 1830 was not in 1300. Which means that a pound ain't a pound.
So let's get to the meat: knowing the data and theory are bad, we can price a pound of government expenditure in 1300 and 1930. This is limited by the fact that the pound works differently in both eras.
Measuring Worth https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1300&amount=1&year_result=1930 provides the following
£1 in 1300:
So there you go. Between 1300 and 1930 you could buy fewer beers, beers were more expensive, and the government controlled way more of the economy.
This is inline with Marx and Engels writings btw.
If you're offended the reason why is because there's a much larger base load of productive things (steel mills, ships) which exist. This "capital" has an interest in its reproduction. The reduction in actual beers drank though has been a matter of concern given that people get shot over it.
To compare military expenditure you'd want to compare %GDP but this is the worst historical figure to compare given that the UK government in 1944 could enclose ANYTHING to defeat Gitlerism. Whereas to defeat its close fraternal relations in 1300 the government had to beg borrow and steal to merely land in France to die attempting to become the King of France and abandon England.