And in Delhi, they were under 2. It's not totally clear why wages were so high in Britain. Like, one argument is that the Black Death lowered population so much that it tightened labor markets, but that doesn't explain why wages remained low in, like, plague-ravaged Italy. Mainly, high wages combined with cheap fuel costs meant that it was economically efficient for manufacturers to look to machines as a way of lowering their production costs. To quote the historian Robert Allen, wages were high and energy was cheap. These prices led directly to the Industrial Revolution by giving firms strong incentives to invent technologies that substituted capital and coal for labor. Aw, Stan, I'm a little worried that people are still going to accuse me of Eurocentrism.