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Preliminary papers, reports and dissertations produced so far

Preliminary papers, reports and dissertations produced so far

Reports and papers

In some cases full versions of the unpublished papers can be downloaded. In others preliminary reports with tables, figures, maps and short texts may be downloaded.

The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 and the International Comparative History of Occupational Structure: An overview of findings and where to find them

Report available online

Listed most recent first:

40. Why wasn't France first? The Industrial Revolution in England and France: New data and further thoughts

Alexis Litvine and Leigh Shaw Taylor

This paper is available online

39. Transport and urban growth in the first industrial revolution

Eduard Alvarez-Palau, Dan Bogart, Oliver Dunn, Max Satchell and Leigh Shaw Taylor

During the first industrial revolution the English economy underwent a spatial transformation to go along with its structural transformation in employment. It became highly urbanized and, apart from London, its urban centre shifted to the northwest. This paper examines the role of transport in causing this spatial transformation. Transport changed greatly with infrastructure improvements and technological and organizational innovations. We focus on those occurring before the era of railways and steam ships, when wagons, canals, and sail ships were dominant. We construct a measure of market access for 458 towns in 1680 and 1830 using a new multimodal transport model and then estimate the effects of lower trade costs through changes in market access. Our regression model controls for various town characteristics, including coal endowments. The results show that changes in market access had a large positive effect on changes in urban population. Through counterfactuals we estimate that England's urban population would have been 11% lower if trade costs remained constant from 1680 to 1830. The results contribute to a new understanding of the industrial revolution and spatial economic growth more generally.

This paper is available online.

38. Transport development and urban population change in the age of steam: A market access approach

Xuesheng You, Dan Bogart, Eduard Alvarez, Max Satchell and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This article takes a market access approach to study the effect of a major transport development, the introduction of steam-powered transport, on urban population change for 415 towns in England and Wales between 1830 and 1911. The totality of the roads, inland waterways, coastal routes and railway networks recorded in available sources for these two dates were digitised with unprecedented accuracy, in order to build a multimodal transport network accordingly. Our baseline model produces the unexpected result that, on average, improved market access had a negative effect on urban population growth. More specifically, the elasticity of population change with respect to market access change was of approximately -0.25. We argue that this unexpected effect was due to the strong heterogeneous effects of market access according to initial town size. Indeed, our estimates show that while market access had a significantly positive effect on population growth in large towns, it had a significantly negative effect on small towns. We argue that this heterogeneous effect was due to the fact that improved transport networks reinforced agglomeration effects in large urban centres while diminished the dispersion effect that had previously protected small towns.

This paper is available online.

37. Railways, population divergence, and structural change in 19th century England and Wales

Dan Bogart, Xuesheng You, Eduard Alvarez, Max Satchell and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Railways transformed inland transportation during the nineteenth century. In this paper, we study how railways led to population change and divergence in an already urbanized economy, England and Wales. We make use of detailed data on railway lines, stations, and population change in more than 9000 spatial units. We also create a least cost path based on major 1801 towns and the length of the 1851 rail network to address endogeneity. Our instrumental variable estimates show that having railway station in a locality by 1851 led to significantly higher population growth from 1851 to 1891 and shifted the male occupational structure away from agriculture. Moreover, we estimate that having stations increased population growth more if localities had greater population density in 1801. Also, there were population losses for localities 5 to 15 km from stations, indicating a displacement effect. Overall, we find that railways reinforced the urban hierarchy of the early nineteenth century and contributed to further spatial divergence of the English and Welsh population. The resulting implications for national income and labor productivity are found to be large.

This paper is available online

36. Economic development and economic growth: the poverty and imprecision of our terminology and concepts

Osamu Saito and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

In editing the book, Occupational structure, industrialization and economic growth in a comparative perspective (edited by O. Saito and L. Shaw-Taylor) it became clear that the existing terminology used by economists, economic historians and others concerning economic growth and economic development is in many ways inadequate and needs to be re-thought. There are many inconsistencies and much vagueness in the ways in which the existing terminology has been used in the past. Key terms such as 'industrialisation' or 'growth' are used with multiple overlapping meanings in the literature. Moreover, the country chapters for the book reveal that a number of fundamental processes need to be disaggregated and described separately, because in so many cases they do not happen at the same time or in the same places or in the same order in different countries and this has conceptual implications, which in turn entails another set of changes in terminology. This draft chapter discusses the problems with existing terminological uses and proposes both new terms and more precise and more clearly defined usages for old terms.

This paper is available online

35. French occupational structure, industrialisation and economic growth in France, 1695 to the present

Alexis Litvine

This chapter compiles a large number of data from eighteenth-century capitation (tax) records, military records, agricultural and industrial surveys, and modern censuses to establish series of French occupational structure covering more than two centuries. It gives a much imporved answer to the long-standing debate on British and French economic performances during the long nineteenth century. The revision of the relative sizes of the industrial and agricultural labour forces in the pre-industrial era confirms Crafts' intuition and shows that French productivity increased much more slowly and gradually than revisionist historians (O'Brien and Keyder, Cameron) had thought. The chapter also assesses the macro-economic effects of labour transfer between sectors caused by patterns of by-employment (individual having a secondary occupation in another sector). It confirms that the aggregated effects of by-employment were almost negligible as national transfers of labour from agriculture to industry and from industry to agriculture almost compensated each other until the 1880s. The chapter also provides a full discussion of the data on French occupational structure since 1695 included in Saito, O. and L. Shaw-Taylor, Comparative history of occupational structure (expected CUP, 2021).

This paper is available online

34. A novel use of correspondence and cluster analysis to study high-dimensional occupational data from the 1851 census of England and Wales?

Murat Güvenç, Tobias Lunde and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Powerpoint available online. Paper available soon. Download: Presentation Appendices

33. A preliminary estimate of the female occupational structure of England and Wales 1700-1911

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Keith Sudgen and Xuesheng You

As a result of work undertaken at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the last 16 years, we now have robust national estimates of male occupational structure for England and Wales c.1710-1911. From 1851, the decennial censuses provide occupational data for women as well as men. However, prior to 1851 we do not have reliable national data on female occupations and there are a number of defects in the census reporting of female occupations thereafter. This paper documents both a methodology for estimating female occupational structure from male estimates over the period c.1710-c.1817 and a set of corrections to the data reported in the published census reports 1851-1911. Following an analysis of the sensitivity of the estimates to the assumptions made, some preliminary implications of the new estimates are addressed. These indicate a massive decline in the female labour force participation rate, driven primarily by the mechanisation of spinning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but also by trends in agriculture. They also support the suggestion that secondary sector labour productivity growth, driven by technological change, was substantially greater during the Industrial Revolution that the national accounts literature has suggested over the last four decades.

This paper is available online

32. Adam Smith revisited: coal and the location of the woollen manufacture in England before mechanization, c. 1500-1820

Keith Sugden, Sebastian Keibek and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This study uses male occupational data abstracted from the Court of Common Pleas to determine the location of the English woollen manufacturing industry circa 1500, and from county probate records to track temporal change 1601-1801. It shows that the onset of deindustrialization in textile counties in southern England occurred toward the end of the seventeenth century when the industry began to shift to the West Riding of Yorkshire. Occupations of fathers recorded in Anglican baptism registers 1813-20 indicate that the industry relocated to a relatively small number of places. This study establishes a clear association between these places and the proximity of water and the coalfields. This relationship concurs with the views of Adam Smith to show that coal was important to the woollen manufacture decades before the mechanization of spinning and weaving and the use of steam power.

This paper is available online

31. The male occupational structure of London 1700-1881: A complex picture of London's development

Jacob F. Field and Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This paper presents estimates of male occupational structure for London from the early eighteenth to the later nineteenth century. The early eighteenth century data derive from the marriage registers of the Fleet Prison. In this period about half of all London marriages were celebrated in the jurisdiction of the Fleet. A comparison with occupational data for parishes whose baptism registers record occupations with men marrying in the Fleet from the same parishes suggests that, with the exception of mariners, the Fleet registers suffer from only modest biases as a source for London's male occupational structure. The comparison also provides the basis for a modest re-calibration of the Fleet data. The Fleet data are then compared with c.1817 data drawn from all of London's baptism registers and with the 1851, 1881 and 1911 censuses. The paper thus presents the first ever estimates of London's occupational structure before 1841. This allows us to identify the range and scale of economic activities for the first time. London remained the largest manufacturing centre in Britain throughout, but the whole period was characterised by a very substantial relative shift away from manufacturing to the service sector.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

30. By-employments and occupational structure in pre-industrial England

Sebastian Keibek

As a result of its wealth bias, probate inventory evidence significantly exaggerates the prevalence and size of by-employments. New estimates, corrected for wealth bias, are presented in this paper, for six English counties/regions. Regional differences are shown to be best explained by the relative maturity of the local manufacturing environment. It is demonstrated that by-employments were, largely, of the household rather than the individual kind, negating the necessity for a by-employment-correction on the occupational structures derived from principal-employment-only data sources (such as parish registers). It is shown that by-employed households generated a significant share of their income in the by-employments, but that little evidence for the industrious revolution thesis can be found in the by-employment source data.

A revised version of this paper is available online

29. From probate inventories to households: correcting the probate record for wealth bias

Sebastian Keibek

Capital-intensive, wealthy estates are severely overrepresented in historical collections of wills, inventories, and other probate documents. This paper discusses a new methodology to neutralise the wealth bias in this important historical data source, enabling historians to use probate records as a source of information on all households rather than merely on the biased, probated subsection. As an example application, the methodology is employed to reassess an historical issue which is of special relevance for the occupational structure project, and one which has probate evidence at its core: by-employments.

A revised version of this paper is available online

28. Allocating labourers to occupational sectors in historical datasets using regression techniques

Sebastian Keibek

One of the most common male occupational denominators in historical data sources such as baptism registers and wills is that of 'labourer'. Such labourers make up almost a third of England and Wales' male occupational structure in the early-nineteenth century. But it is not a priori clear what work such men engaged in, and to which occupational sector they belong. This paper discusses a new method to allocate labourers to sectors using regression techniques, in which the number of labourers per geographic unit of analysis is 'predicted' using surface areas, land quality, local climate, local 'employers', and local 'competitors for work' as predictor variables.

A revised version of this paper is available online

27. Using probate data for estimating historical male occupational structures

Sebastian Keibek

Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley's published estimates of the male occupational structure of England and Wales are based on parish register data. But before Rose's Act of 1812, parish registers offer occupational information only in a sample of parishes, and are virtually silent about male employments before 1690. This paper examines how the gaps in the parish register data can be filled using a data source which offer more universal coverage and goes back much further in time: probate records. It argues that an, at first sight, critical deficiency of probate data, namely their severe bias towards capital-intensive or well-paying occupations, can be overcome by using parish register data to calibrate the probate record.

A revised version of this paper is available online

26. Occupational structure and population change

Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley

This paper will appear, in virtually unaltered form as a chapter in in Floud, R., Humphries, J., Johnson, P., (eds) The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, 4th edition, forthcoming 2014, CUP. The authors are grateful to CUP for allowing us to put this chapter online in advance of the print publication of the book in 2014. It contains the interim results of a long-running project on the occupational structure of England and Wales between 1700 and 1871.

The research upon which this chapter was based was funded by the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Isaac Newton Trust. Many people undertook research on the project over the last ten years. Critical contributions to the work reported here were made by Ros Davies, Jacob Field, Gill Newton, Peter Kitson and Max Satchell.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

25. Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs

Amy Louise Erickson

The ubiquitous forms of address for women 'Mrs'and 'Miss' are both abbreviations of 'mistress'. Although mistress is a term with a multiplicity of meanings, in early modern England the mistress most commonly designated the female equivalent of master - that is, a person with capital who directed servants or apprentices. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there was only Mrs (or Mris, Ms, or other forms of abbreviation), applied to any adult woman who merited the social distinction, without any marital connotation. Miss was reserved for young girls until then. Even when adult single women started to use Miss, Mrs still designated a social or business standing, and not the status of being married, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. This article demonstrates the changes in nomenclature over time, explains why Mrs was never used to accord older single women the same status as a married woman, and argues that the distinctions are important to economic and social historians.

This paper is available online.

24. Marital status and economic activity: interpreting spinsters, wives, and widows in pre-census population listings

Amy Louise Erickson

This paper addresses the confusions between marital and occupational status in female descriptors, arguing that in order to calculate female labour force participation rates, we have to be able to read sources like population listings and early censuses in a much more careful way than has been done to date. I show that 'spinster' was used as an occupational descriptor alongside its connotation of an unmarried woman until at least 1801; that 'Mrs' implied business ownership, not marriage; that the general lack of occupational descriptors for married women did not necessarily mean they were unemployed, rather that enumerators omitted wives' occupations by convention; and that 'widow' was used only irregularly in an as yet unidentified pattern. Occupations missing from population listings are identified by different means. The conclusions about how to read population listings also have implications for the interpretation of later census returns.

This paper is available online.

23. The occupational structure of England and Wales c.1817-1881

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Peter Kitson, Ros Davies, Gill Newton and Max Satchell

This paper examines the male occupational structure of England and Wales between c.1817 and 1881. The creation of a new quasi-census of male occupational data for c.1817 from parish register data makes it possible, for the first time, to examine reliably the changing male occupational structure over the whole of this period and to do so both in the aggregate and at fine spatial resolution and in sectoral detail. One key result is to show that the secondary sectors' share of adult male employment grew very little over this period. The basic feature of structural change was a relative shift from agricultural to service sector employment. The secondary sector was much larger at the beginning of the nineteenth century than has been thought hitherto. One implication is that the productivity growth of the secondary sector grew much more rapidly between c.1817 and 1841 than has been suggested hitherto. One likely consequence is that new technology made a much bigger impact on the secondary sector at the aggregate level, than the national accounts literature suggests at present. Moreover, striking tertiary sector growth was a feature of all regions of England and Wales, suggesting that the Industrial Revolution affected all parts of the country and cannot be viewed merely as a regional phenomenon, as has sometimes been argued.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

22. The occupational structure of England c.1710-c.1871

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Peter Kitson, Ros Davies, Gill Newton and Max Satchell

This paper presents new evidence on the male occupational structure of England c.1710 deriving from c.1000 baptism registers and provides a preliminary analysis of the implications of the data. The key finding is that the secondary sector was perhaps twice as large, in terms of male employment, at the beginning of the eighteenth century as historians have been suggested in recent years. One implication of this is that most of the growth in the relative importance of secondary sector employment, normally associated with the post 1750 period, in fact preceded the eighteenth century. A further implication is that the increase in the productivity of the secondary sector was much larger than has been argued in the national accounts literature. The paper also explores regional differences and documents the scale of de-industrialisation in southern England over the eighteenth century. It also provides a more speculative discussion of likely trends in female employment.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

21. The creation of a 'census' of adult male employment for England and Wales for 1817

Peter Kitson, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Ros Davies, Gill Newton, and Max Satchell

This paper presents new estimates of the adult male occupational structure of England and Wales in 1817, over twenty years before the availability of the first reliable returns based upon the census of 1841. The system of baptismal registration introduced by parliament for the Church of England in 1813 required the occupation of the father to be recorded. By collecting this data from every parish register in England and Wales from this year until 1820, it is possible to generate estimates of occupational structure. Comparison of these estimates with other sources suggests that they are very reliable. Through the use of (1) a population weighting system using the returns from early nineteenth centuries censuses; (2) the PST system of occupational coding; and (3) a method for attributing the considerable numbers of men described as 'labourer' between the different sectors of employment, the total number of men engaged in each sector of the economy for 1817 can then be estimated.

A revised version of this paper is available online

20. The PST system of classifying occupations

E.A. Wrigley

The aim of the paper is to outline the problems facing all occupational classifications systems, to discuss the considerations which lay behind the design of PST, to describe its prime characteristics, and to compare it with alternative systems, especially HISCO. The range of topics treated is suggested by the internal headings of the paper. They are as follows: Problems in the interpretation of occupational information, Census data and sources relating to individuals, The PST system and the study of the industrial revolution, Some features of the PST system, The processing of occupational data, More complex systems of classification, PST and other occupational systems, HISCO.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

19. The occupational structure of England and Wales c.1750 to 1911

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This paper is a slightly revised version of a paper given to the INCHOS workshop held in Cambridge July 29th-31st 2009. It is an early draft of a chapter, for a book: Saito, O and Shaw-Taylor, L., (eds.) Occupational structure and industrialization in a comparative perspective. The paper shows that most of rise in the relative importance of secondary sector employment, associated with British industrialisation, took place before the onset of continuous technological change and modern economic growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the nineteenth century structural change in employment consisted primarily of a shift from agriculture to services.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

18. Prospects and preliminary work on female occupational structure in England from 1500 to the national census

Jacob Field and Amy Erickson

We present here a review of the twelve classes of sources examined to date (July 2009), giving examples of what they might tell us. The sources include early quasi-census material, national tax returns, savings bank depositor records, trade directories, religious 'censuses', court records, ecclesiastical and parochial records, listings of the poor, apprenticeship records, school accounts, hospital accounts, and estate and household accounts. Where particular examples of these sources do not use occupational descriptors for women, we explore how it is possible to use different means of identifying women's work by comparing a body of the same source over time and place.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

17. Service, gender and wages in England, 1700-1850

Jacob Field

This paper examines changes in wages and occupations in the service sector in England in the period from 1700 to 1850. Particular attention will be paid to the gender differences in the sector. Using a national sample of household and estate accounts and hiring agreements drawn from across England, as part of the Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 Project, this paper will show how wages and roles in service may have changed from the early eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth.

This paper has now been published in the Economic History Review as 'Domestic service, gender, and wages in rural England, c.1700-1860'.

16. Clockmakers, milliners and mistresses: women trading in the City of London companies 1700-1750

Amy Erickson

A sample of the London gilds' corporate records reveals that women were a small but significant proportion of their members. Some of these worked in the trade of the company, but many were in millinery (i.e. dressmaking) and other luxury clothing trades. Millinery apprenticeships commanded high premiums and opening a shop required substantial capital, so this was the preserve of the daughters of gentlemen, clergy, and wealthy businessmen. As a result of such substantial investment, milliners maintained their business during marriage, taking apprentices through their husbands' companies as they were entitled to do. There were more women and more elite women in this trade, located in the wealthiest streets of the City, than has been imagined.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report, with Appendix | Table 1 | Table 2

15. The nature and scale of the cottage economy

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This paper is a chapter from an as yet unfinished book on the impact of parliamentary enclosure on rural artisans and labourers. It examines probate inventory evidence from early eighteenth century Northamptonshire. Whilst its primary focus is on other matters it has a twofold relevance to occupational structure. Firstly that it deals with the question of how reliable occupational descriptors are. Secondly it considers the importance and nature by-employments and argues that existing studies have probably exaggerated the importance of by-employments, certainly in southern England.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

14. The recording of occupations in the Anglican baptism registers of England and Wales, 1690-1799

Peter Kitson

This essay reports the results of searches for periods where the occupation of the father at baptism was systematically recorded in approximately 11,000 English and Welsh parish registers between 1690 and 1799. In southern England and Wales, occupational recording was most common in the aftermath of the Marriage Duty Acts of the 1690s, but then becomes comparatively rare after 1710. Conversely, occupational recording was comparatively rare in northern England and north Wales before 1710. A series of ecclesiastical initiatives after this period ensured that occupational recording was very common in these regions for the rest of the eighteenth century.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

13. Identifying women's occupations in early modern London

Amy Erickson

This paper is a preliminary survey of three sources for women's occupations in eighteenth-century London: apprenticeships in the city livery companies; the registers of Christ's Hospital showing apprenticeships; and the records of testimony in the Old Bailey. There is currently only one article in print on the female occupational geography of London in this period (P. Earle, 1989), based on testimony in church court records. In the sources examined here, women worked largely in public, trading and production occupations. This profile is substantially different from the preponderance of domestic service and making/mending textiles which appears in the church court records.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

12. Diverse experiences: The geography of adult female employment in England and the 1851 census

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

The published nineteenth century censuses contain a vast body of data on female occupations. This material has largely been neglected due to widespread doubts about its accuracy. This paper argues that these doubts are overdone and should not stop historians making full use these invaluable data. This is followed by a preliminary exploration and mapping of the patterns of adult female employment in 1851.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report. A revised and extended version of this paper has been published in Goose, N., (ed.) Women's work in Industrial England: Regional and local perspectives (2007).

11. The male occupational structure of Bedfordshire c.1698-1881

Peter Kitson

Around 40 per cent of Bedfordshire's parish registers containing good runs of occupational data at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Male occupational data have already been collected from baptism registers for all of Bedfordshire for the period 1813-20 and from all registers which contain occupational data between 1695 and 1800. A preliminary analysis will be available in the near future.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

10. The male occupational structure of Lancashire c.1750-1881

E.A.Wrigley

We are in the process of collecting adult male occupational data for every parish and chapelry in Lancashire for the period 1813-20 together with from the second half of the eighteenth century where it is available (in about 40 per cent of cases). These data will be used together with data from the censuses of 1831 through to 1881 to reconstruct the evolution of the county's male occupation structure. Data collection should be completed during July. A paper will follow soon afterwards.

Downloadable paper/report not yet available

9. English county populations in the later eighteenth century

E.A Wrigley

Because of the provisions of Hardwicke's Act, from 1754 onwards the registration of marriages was virtually complete, though there was a large and varying shortfall between the number of births and deaths occurring and the totals of Anglican baptisms and burials. It is possible to make use of the marriage data, which are available for all English counties and hundreds, to generate new and more accurate estimates of county populations at ten-year intervals from 1761 to 1801. They show vast differences in growth rates. The highest was Lancashire which grew by more than 130 per cent; the lowest Wiltshire which grew by only 2 per cent.

Click here for a downloadable copy of the paper. A revised version of this paper has been published as 'English county populations in the later eighteenth century', Economic History Review, 60 (2007), pp. 35-69.

8. Family farms and capitalist farms in mid-nineteenth century England

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Data on farm size and employment levels published in the 1851 census have been dismissed as unreliable. This paper shows that the data are in fact reliable and can be used to document the geography of farm size and employment patterns at county level. These data are used to investigate the relative importance of agrarian capitalism and family farming and their geography. Agrarian capitalism was more important than family farming everywhere. Large-scale agrarian capitalism was dominant in the south and east. A substantial family farm sector survived only in the far south-west and north of England by 1851.

A revised version of this paper has been published in the Agricultural History Review

7. The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of family farming in England

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Historians have documented rising farm sizes throughout the period 1450-1850. Existing studies have revealed much about the mechanisms underlying the development of agrarian capitalism. However, we currently lack any consensus as to when the critical developments occurred. This is largely due to the absence of sufficiently large and geographically wide-ranging datasets but is also attributable to conceptual weaknesses in much of the literature. This paper develops a new approach to the problem and argues that agrarian capitalism was dominant in southern and eastern England by 1700 but that in northern England the critical developments came later.

Click here for a downloadable copy of the paper. A revised version of this paper has now been published in the Economic History Review.

6. The emergence of a mineral-based energy economy: the male occupational structure of Northumberland, 1762-1871

Peter Kitson

The industrial revolution in Northumberland witnessed a steady growth in the secondary sector, while the tertiary sector, already sizeable by 1800, also grew. Meanwhile, the primary sector waned through the relative decline of agriculture, which was not offset by the growth of coal mining. However, aggregate statistics mask the rapidity of change around Newcastle and Tynemouth. Rapid demographic growth, coupled with the swift development of the iron making, engineering and iron shipbuilding sectors drove county-level growth in the secondary sector. In contrast rural de-industrialization in the rest of the county was only partially compensated by the gradual shift of coal mining away from Tyneside.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

5. The male occupational structure of Northamptonshire 1777-1881: A case of partial de-industrialization?

Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Amanda Jones

Northamptonshire had two notable concentrations of proto-industry in the late eighteenth century. The Worsted cloth industry collapsed almost completely when the West Riding industry began to mechanise and flooded the agricultural labour market with ex-weavers for many years. The shoe-making industry grew steadily but not rapidly enough to compensate for the collapse of weaving. As a result secondary sector employment fell over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and only regained its 1777 level after 1861 as steam-powered factory production spread to the shoe-making industry. However, the tertiary sector grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

4. Male occupational structure in Hertfordshire c 1758-1881: An example of relative occupational stability

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Hertfordshire was a heavily agricultural county in which agriculture accounted for 60 per cent of male employment in the mid-eighteenth century. This figure began to decline slowly only in the early nineteenth century. The secondary sector lacked any particular concentrations of specialist manufacturing and was both diverse and stable accounting for around 35 per cent of adult male employment from the mid eighteenth through to the early nineteenth century when it began to grow slowly. However tertiary sector employment grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century. Transport and the professions were the most dynamic sectors.

Downloadable paper/report available shortly

3. A hidden contribution to industrialization? The male occupational structure of London c. 1817-1871

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

London was the largest manufacturing town in Britain in the nineteenth century but it was the share of adult male employment in the tertiary sector that was the really distinctive feature of London's economy. New data on male occupations show that from the early nineteenth century the tertiary sector was growing rapidly and the secondary sector was declining as a proportion of adult male employment. However, London's increasing share of the national population between 1750 and 1871 meant that despite this, London contributed to the growth of both the secondary and tertiary sectors at the national level.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

2. An industrializing region? The West Riding of Yorkshire c. 1755 - 1871

Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Amanda Jones

It is normally supposed that the industrial districts experienced a radical increase in secondary sector employment during the classic industrial revolution period. However, the secondary sector's share of adult male employment in the West Riding was above 65 per cent as early as 1755 and declined slowly until 1871. While agriculture declined in importance the tertiary sector tripled in size, from a low base between 1755 and 1871. The West Riding's contribution to the national growth of secondary sector employment was made, not through a radical change in its occupational structure, but through relatively rapid population growth driven by migration.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report

1. The Occupational Structure of England c.1750-1871: A Preliminary Report

L. Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley

It is widely supposed that the industrializing regions of north-west England (Lancashire and the West Riding) experienced a rapid increase in the relative importance of secondary sector employment between 1760 and 1830. However a large-scale analysis of occupational data for the period 1750-1871 shows that in fact the rise in the relative importance of secondary sector employment in the north-west took place during the early modern period and actually declined slightly over the classic 'industrial revolution' period. After 1815, some other parts of the country experienced the rapid increase in secondary sector employment usually assumed to have characterised the industrial districts between 1760 and 1830. In contrast, the growth of service sector employment (especially transport) was dramatic and continuous in all regions of England from the late eighteenth century onwards. Nationally there was more growth in the secondary sector between 1500 and 1750 than there was between 1750 and 1850. These findings necessitate some rethinking of the first industrial revolution, its causes and its consequences. Not least, these findings finally resolve the long-standing controversy as to whether the first industrial revolution was a relatively short dramatic event or a more protracted process. The evidence in favour of the latter view is now overwhelming.

Click here for a fuller downloadable report. This paper provides the full context for the project but see papers 22 and 23 on this page for more recent findings.

Dissertations

11. Patterns of Female Employment in the Pays de Caux and the Perche, 1792-1901

Auriane Terki-Mignot, 2018
MPhil Dissertation

This MPhil dissertation presents a reconstruction of female and male labour force participation rates and sectoral distributions for two former French cantons in the Seine-Maritime and the Eure-et-Loir, covering the period 1792-1901. Through an analysis of patterns of women's work and their historical determinants, the dissertation suggests that traditional accounts of French industrialisation – including significant aspects of the debate on the 'French path' that have remained disputed ever since François Crouzet opened up a period of revisionism in the 1960s – may need to be re-evaluated in the light of new evidence on women's work. From a methodological perspective, the dissertation presents a detailed analysis of the potential and pitfalls of French population listings and censuses as sources for the study of women's work, suggesting a number of ways forward for interpretation and adjustments.

Click here for a downloadable copy of this dissertation

10.The male occupational structure of Kent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

James Wells, 2017

This dissertation seeks to shed light on the occupational structure of Kent, using almost 5,000 unique adult male occupational observations between c.1610 and the early nineteenth century. One strand of the argument concerns the methodology used to study occupational structure in this region and examines an under-utilised source, court recognizances. Recognizances can provide a cross-check to the biases in the testamentary records and expand upon the limited geographical scope of the parish register material pre-1817. The whole of Kent was covered around 1610, but only West Kent thereafter in my dataset (an area of interest given its proximity to London, which sheds light on the city's growth). The other strand of the dissertation describes the results, showing that the major sectoral shift from primary to secondary and tertiary activity began in the sixteenth century, and that the share constituted by the secondary sector stayed constant over the two centuries, but changed in character, at the sub-sectoral level, with implications for the spatial division of labour. I highlight the growth of dockyards, concentrated in northwest Kent by c.1715. Finally, the recognizance data make clear the importance of the tertiary sector in the county, which, consistently larger than the national average, reflected the county's precocious and sustained urbanisation over the two centuries.

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9. Changing Patterns of Female Employment in Westmorland, 1787-1851

Auriane Terki-Mignot, 2017
BA Dissertation

A full reconstruction of female and male patterns of employment in Westmorland between 1787 and 1851 using pre-census listings and census materials shows evidence of massively declining employment opportunities for women over the period. Falling female labour force participation rates are shown to be strongly related to the mechanisation of spinning, and influenced by women's marital status. The data further provides a solid basis for national estimates of female sectoral distributions prior to 1850, and thereby suggest that any labour 'shift' to the secondary sector, long thought to be a central characteristic of the Industrial Revolution on the basis of exclusively male estimates, was in fact complete by the 1780s, if not earlier, and took place over a protracted period of time.

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8. The male occupational structure of northwest England, circa 1600 to 1851

Tim Rudniki, 2015
MPhil Dissertation

This dissertation uses a newly built dataset of 88,099 unique adult male occupational observations from the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire in northwest England from between 1624 and 1834 to estimate the male occupational structure of those counties at various points in time between the early seventeenth century and 1851. In the course of doing so, it shows that the occupational information contained in Quarter Sessions recognizances, the primary source material for this dissertation, is representative enough of the male population at large to make such estimates. It argues that a significant portion of the male population of the northwest, and particularly of Lancashire, was employed in manufacturing activities by the early seventeenth century. This suggests that the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were periods of significant growth in the secondary sector in the northwest.

7. The male occupational structure of the London parish of Stepney, St. Dunstan, from 1610 to 1881

Ibrahim Yate, 2014

Studies of the industrial revolution traditionally focus on cities such as Manchester and Liverpool rather than the much more diverse London economy. Addressing the period's historiographical knowledge gap, this study uses the occupations of fathers noted in parish baptism records to map out the changing relative sizes of the London parish of Stepney, St. Dunstan's primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors over three centuries. Data is taken from the birth records in the years 1610, 1651, 1711, 1813, 1814, 1815, 1816, 1817, and 1881. In a wider context, the analysis demonstrates the neglected role of London's industrialization process within the wider national economic changes of the time.

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6. By-employment and occupational structure in early-modern England

Sebastian Keibek
MPhil Dissertation

This dissertation follows on from a BA dissertation (see dissertation 5), presenting an extended and more sophisticated analysis of early-modern by-employments. It is based on a sample of almost 2,000 probate inventories, covering six counties and two centuries. It introduces an innovative method to remove wealth bias from the probate inventory record, and uses it to create accurate estimates of by-employment incidence – concluding that the 'raw' probate inventory evidence, on which historians have based their calculations in the past, exaggerate the phenomenon by a factor two. It furthermore concludes that by-employments were typically of the household rather than the individual kind, with several members of the same household engaged in different gainful activities, rather than individuals engaging in more than one activity. It examines and explains geographic differences and temporal developments in by-employment incidence and economic importance. And, finally, it examines the corrections which by-employments necessitate on occupational structure estimates derived from principal employments, and finds them to be relatively small.

The most important results of the dissertation have been summarised in two papers in the Cambridge Working Papers in Economic and Social History series (see papers 30 and 29 on this page).

5. By-employment and occupational structure in north-west England, 1700-1760

Sebastian Keibek
BA Dissertation

It has generally been presumed that most men in early modern rural England significantly augmented the income from their principal occupation by engaging in one or more subsidiary economic activities. The historical evidence for the prevalence of such by-employments is almost exclusively based on probate inventories. This dissertation argues that such frequency counts are unreliable. Using early eighteenth-century Cheshire and Lancashire as a test case, it is demonstrated that the by-employed were significantly more likely to be probated than those with only one source of income. Using occupational data from parish registers and estimates of contemporary livestock numbers, the degree to which the by-employed are over-represented in the probate record is assessed. It is concluded that inventories vastly exaggerate by-employment incidence.

The most important results of the dissertation have been summarised in a (co-authored) paper in the Agricultural History Review.

4. The Occupational and Organizational Structures of the Northamptonshire
Worsted and Shoemaking Trades, circa 1750-1821

Keith Sugden
MSt Dissertation

De-industrialization and industrialization processes have been studied through an occupational analysis of the worsted and shoemaking trades in Northamptonshire, circa 1750-1821. Using a number of primary sources, the timing of the collapse of the local worsted trade has been pinpointed. Decline began well before the introduction of mechanization. Worsted parishes depopulated. Marriage records were found to be of particular value as a proxy of economic change and a useful tool to study those parishes for which occupational data was not available.

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3. The economic development of Sussex c.1700-1881

Lucy Walker

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2. The male occupational geography of Middlesex in the nineteenth century

Niraj Modha

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1. The Economic Development of a County Town during the Industrial Revolution: Aylesbury, 1700 - c.1850

Matthew Ward

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