ABSTRACT
It has long been a conventional view that Great Britain had a higher level of income per capita than France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gregory King put the difference in 1688 as 10 to 30 percent (Deane and Cole, 1967, p. 38 n. 1). Angus Maddison is the latest of economic historical statisticians to compare the two (among others) and reached the conclusion that the levels of living were about equal in 1700, but that the United Kingdom had pulled ahead by 1820, increased its lead to 1870, and slipped thereafter to be widely outclassed by 1979. His (Maddison, 1982, p. 8) data for gross domestic product per head at US 1970 prices show
