Leigh Shaw-Taylor

It is widely assumed that before the Industrial Revolution most people worked in agriculture, and that the economy was underdeveloped or backward. But was this really so? The first of these assumptions will be taken up in next week’s blog, while today’s blog will focus primarily on the second.  

This blog derives from the Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911 project. This project was started by the late Tony Wrigley and Leigh Shaw-Taylor in 2003. Today it is directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Amy Erickson.   

Historical data on occupations provide us with the most comprehensive evidence on patterns of economic activity in the past. Over the last 20 years, the Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911 project has collected a vast amount of male occupational data from parish registers, wills and probate inventories, censuses, and other sources. 

Arthur Claude Cooke, The Brickmaker’s Shed. Image: Luton Culture.

Case study 1: Newcastle All Saints

Table 1 (below) derives from the baptism registers of the parish of Newcastle All Saints over a four–year period in the early 18th century. It provides counts of the number of fathers reporting different occupations. We do not have data on female occupations at this date because they were much less frequently reported than male occupations were. A total of 139 distinct occupations are reported. This indicates a very wide range of economic activities in Newcastle at this date, suggesting a highly sophisticated local economy.  

Table 1. Occupations of fathers in the baptism registers of the parish of Newcastle All Saints 1713-1716 .

Newcastle’s most important economic function at this date was loading the coal produced on the nearby coal fields into sea–going boats. The coal was then shipped down the coast to London and other east coast ports (and at lower volumes to south coast ports). The most common occupation (933 baptisms) was waterman. This probably refers to men engaged in rowing the coal out to sea in small boats called wherries, and then loading the coal into larger sea-going vessels moored just off the coast (The Tyne was not navigable for sea going boats at this date). Wherry man (67 baptisms) is a more precise term for the same activity. 

J.M.W. Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Night (1835).

Mariners (184 baptisms) were the third largest group, and these would have been sailors, primarily employed on the sea-going colliers. Shipwrights (136 baptisms) were carpenters who specialized in building ships. Many listed with other occupations such as butcher (91 baptisms), smith (59 baptisms), cordwainer (shoemaker, 51 baptisms), and cooper (barrel maker, 32 baptisms) would have been provisioning ships as well as meeting the demands of local residents.   

Merchants (32 baptisms) would have been involved in buying and selling shipped commodities including coal but also grain, butter, and cheese being imported from East Anglia and elsewhere, and manufactured goods from London and other industrial centres. They would have been involved in both maritime trade and in trading with the inland hinterland of Newcastle. Shops all over the north of England would have bought much of their stock from Newcastle merchants who would have shipped goods from London and elsewhere. 

Case study 2: Darlington

Table 2 (below) derives from the baptism registers of Darlington in County Durham for the years 1713-16. In this case there were 82 distinct occupations. The most common occupation was weaver (117 baptisms), but there were also woolcombers (24 baptisms), men who processed the wool prior to spinning and weaving, and bleachers (7 baptisms), men who bleached either wool or manufactured cloth. It is not recorded here, but the presence of male weavers would suggest large numbers of women were employed in spinning in Darlington, and spinners likely outnumbered weavers.  

Table 2. Occupations of fathers in the baptism registers of Darlington, Durham 1710-17.

In total some 23 percent of adult males were employed in the manufacture of textiles. The cloth produced would have been sent all over the country, and some of it probably went overseas. The other occupations shown here are suggestive of a relatively large market town, though not quite on the scale of Newcastle. People in surrounding villages, and from smaller towns, would have come into towns like Darlington, especially on market days, to purchase all kinds of goods either made in Darlington or imported from elsewhere. Again, Darlington was clearly part of a complex and sophisticated economy. 

Case study 3: Shillington

Table 3 (below) shows the occupations of fathers derived from the baptism registers of Shillington, a village in Bedfordshire. This rural parish presents a very different picture from Newcastle and Darlington, as only 13 different occupations are recorded over the five years 1701-1705.  The most important occupation was labourer (39 baptisms). Almost all of these would have been agricultural labourers working for local farmers. The second most important occupation was farmer (12 baptisms) followed by yeoman (also meaning farmer, 10 baptisms).   

Table 3. Occupations of fathers in the baptism registers of Shillington, Bedfordshire, 1701-1705.

Also working in agriculture were three shepherds and one dairy man. The dairyman was probably employed to milk cows and work in the dairy, usually a female occupation. Fully 86 percent of Shillington fathers worked in agriculture. However, this was not characterised by small-scale self-employed ‘peasant’ agriculture, as the 22 farmers and yeomen employed 39 labourers, implying that, on average, each farm employed two wage labourers. This is a sharp contrast to agriculture elsewhere in Europe at this date which was dominated by small scale farmers, working their own farms and not employing much wage labour.   

Jean-Francois Millet, Sketch of moving farmer.

The other occupations present would have largely been servicing the agricultural population. Hemp-dressers would have been preparing hemp, probably grown locally, prior to making rope or cloth. A wheelwright would have been making and repairing carts and wagons for the local farmers.   

While Shillington was overwhelmingly agricultural and had a much simpler division of labour than Newcastle or Darlington at this date, it would be a mistake to see this as backward or underdeveloped.

First, agriculture was not in the hands of peasants, and places like Shillington were exporting surplus grain to places like Newcastle and Darlington while buying in goods produced elsewhere, e.g, cloth from places like Darlington. Second, the contrast between Shilllington on the one hand and Newcastle and Darlington on the other indicates a functional division of labour between different places which traded with one another. Third, despite having 86 percent of adult males in agriculture, Shillington still supported a range of other specialised occupations.  

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary 

Although we have examined the occupations of only three settlements, it is apparent that England and Wales in the early 18th century had a very sophisticated economy with an advanced division of labour, long before the Industrial Revolution began. 

The occupational structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project has collected occupational data from thousands of parish registers and hundreds of thousands of probate documents and made use of millions of census records over the period from 1381-1911. To examine change over time and to compare the same places over time, it is necessary to simplify from the complexity of the underlying occupational data. To do this, we have coded all our data to one of three sectors (while retaining the full detail of the individual occupations), using a scheme developed by the late E.A. Wrigley and the late Ros Davies called PST (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary).  

Ferdinand Hodler, The shoemaker (1878).

First, there is the primary sector. This refers to everyone working in agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining, i.e. everyone engaged in the production of raw materials.  Second is the secondary sector. This refers to everyone transforming raw materials into a physical product. This is regardless of whether this is work in a factory, in a workshop, or a village craftsman working at home. It covers manufacturing, construction, and utilities. Finally, there is the tertiary sector, which covers all service sector occupations: shopkeepers, merchants, innkeepers, servants, lawyers, and transport works such as carters and train drivers. None of these in the final category make a physical product.   

Future blogs will discuss how the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors evolved between 1381 and 1911. For now, consider the graph below, which shows modern data from 2004. The horizontal axis shows the percentage share of the labour force in agriculture. The vertical axis shows GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a measure of average incomes in US dollars.

Countries like Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Burma all have very low average incomes. They also have very high proportions of the labour force in agriculture. In contrast rich highly developed economies like the US, the UK, France and Japan enjoy very high incomes but have a very small percentage of the labour force in agriculture.  

The graph shows a very clear pattern. Where a high proportion of the labour force is in agriculture, incomes are always low.  This is because the productivity of agriculture is so low that most people need to work in agriculture just to keep the population fed. The UK produces over half the food consumed in Britain, but does this with a mere one percent of the labour force. Given this pattern in modern cross-sectional data, we might expect the historical pattern to show the share of the labour force in agriculture diminishing over time as development proceeds while the share in the primary and secondary sectors grow: this will be explored in future blogs. 

Further reading

• Shaw-Taylor, L., and Wrigley, E. A., ‘Occupational Structure and Population Change’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries, and P. Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 53–88. Link to chapter  
• Keibek, S., The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1850, Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis (2017). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.8960 
• Shaw-Taylor, L., and Saito, O., ‘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.’ Available here. 

Tags: coal, economic history, industrial revolution, occupational structure, occupations

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