This project builds on 2 historiographical currents. The first arises from the study of economic growth during the last 2 centuries. The prevailing view today is that the Industrial Revolution was a decisive break but not as sudden and dramatic as claimed earlier. It occurred in a region which had experienced growth already for more than a century. In the rest of Europe, from 1500 to 1750 income per capita declined or stagnated. This was the Great Divergence in Wages and Prices (R. Allen), which is at the heart of one of the main debates in long term comparative economic history. It involves estimating income per capita from the real wages of urban labour across Europe, using a purchasing power parity methodology. At present, the literature is concentrating on the &quot;map&quot; of these data worldwide, and Portugal, a missing country, is an important addition and &quot;counterweight&quot; to recent findings on the Eastern Mediterranean (Pamuk, 2005). A second strand of this historiography asks: was there a Great Divergence also between Europe and India and China? According to Pomerantz (2000), intercontinental per capita income divergence only happened upon industrialization. Before the 18th century, real wages in Europe could not have risen much. This casts doubts on the idea of a Great Divergence there. This view has been criticised by Maddison (2001), who contrasts a stagnant Asia, from the 16th century on, with a slowly growing Europe right up to the onset of industrialization. Portugal, with its long tradition of presence in Asia, is a valuable addition to this second debate . A third strand in this historiography has to do with income distribution. The Great Divergence implied also an increase in the inequality of this distribution among nations, but also a similar movement within nations. The main reasons were the rise of population, a concentrated system of landownership, the Law of Engel and technical progress. The bias comes from missing the more urban, service and manufacturing-oriented economic activities, which were expanding rapidly and pushing up the level of income per capita. The use of real wages as a proxy for national product per capita thus must be reconciled with the distributional issue. A consistent economic interpretation of the long run data in terms of the &quot;big questions&quot; - convergence, divergence, stagnation, development - is needed. <p>Our 2nd historiographical current comes from Portuguese price history (Godinho, 1970). Altogether, it covers the country, but is patchy over time and is weaker when it comes to wages or rents. Not much effort has been made to gather this data into a homogenous data base, or to produce weighted indices. This is in harmony with the lack of preoccupation in producing a coherent and encompassing interpretation of national macroeconomic history over 4 centuries. The possibility of changes in the global productivity of the economy, of market or technology-induced structural shifts, of fluctuations in living standards, on the whole, has also not been considered. The only macroeconomic model to have sprung from the efforts of Portuguese price historians is that which Godinho himself (1955) devised to explain the ebb and flow of efforts at industrialization over the centuries and their failure. Although this model would have difficulty today in meeting the exacting standards of the Cliometric school, it has provoked considerable and useful debate, and revealed that such approaches, based on solid evidence, may stir anew interest in the long term evolution of the Portuguese economy, which is the object of this project.</p>