Engels' pause
Engels' pause noun: 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.
Noun
Engels' pause (uncountable)
- 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.
- 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...[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
Origin of Engels' pause
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).
Questions about Engels' pause
- What does Engels' pause mean?
- Engels' pause means 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.
- What part of speech is Engels' pause?
- Engels' pause is a noun.
Words near Engels' pause in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Engels' pause (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “Engels' pause.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/engels%27_pause. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.