Posts Tagged ‘industrial revolution’
Thursday, January 23rd, 2025
Amy Erickson
In the spring of 2020, when the government asked anyone who could conduct their paid employment ‘remotely’ to do so for fear of a novel coronavirus, working from home – or WFH as it came to be known – was a novel concept. It seemed strange because since the 20th century we think of paid work as taking place outside the home – in a factory, an office, a shop, a hospital, a school or university. But in historical terms, working outside a home (not necessarily one’s own, but someone’s home) is a relatively recent phenomenon.
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Tags: households, industrial revolution, occupations, women's employment, women's history, women's work
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Thursday, January 16th, 2025
Leigh Shaw-Taylor
The service sector, also known as the tertiary sector, comprises all workers not making a physical product. This includes shopkeepers, wholesalers, publicans, hotel workers, people working in financial services, health and social care workers, professional services, and transport workers.
The UK economy today, like that of all rich countries, is dominated by the service or tertiary sector. According to the 2021 census, fully 76 percent of the labour force is now in the tertiary sector. But when did the service sector become dominant, and when did it begin to grow? Many people think the growth of the service sector is a recent phenomenon, starting perhaps in the 1950s and picking up speed as Britain de-industrialised from the 1970s. However, new long-run data on male occupations collected by the Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project tell a different story.
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Tags: economic history, industrial revolution, occupational structure, occupations, service
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Thursday, January 2nd, 2025
Leigh Shaw-Taylor
The secondary sector, as discussed in a previous blog, consists of anyone who makes a physical product. It includes manufacturing, construction, and utilities. Manufacturing includes village artisans like carpenters or blacksmiths, and weavers working at home, as well as any industrial workers employed in factories.
What proportion of the male labour force would you think worked in the secondary sector at the beginning of the 18th century? 10 percent? 20 percent? 30 percent? The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project has established that as early as 1701 the figure was already remarkably high, at 43 percent.
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Tags: industrial revolution, occupational structure, occupations
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Thursday, November 7th, 2024
Kevin Schürer
“When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past... The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – that at any rate is the theory.”
Thus wrote the Eton-educated George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937.
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Tags: industrial revolution, migration, north-south divide, population size
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Thursday, October 31st, 2024
Romola Davenport
In 2007 the United Nations announced an historic milestone: the world had become decisively urban, with half the global population living in towns and cities. This represented a dramatic reversal of historic norms, when 80-90 percent of people worked and lived in the countryside. And this unprecedented shift from rural to urban areas shows no sign of abating – indeed, the UN predicts that all future population growth will be urban.
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Tags: agricultural revolution, coal, fossil fuels, industrial revolution, migration, plague, towns and cities, urbanisation
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Thursday, October 24th, 2024
Paul Warde
On 30th September 2024, Britain used coal to generate electricity for the very last time. The age of coal as a source of power – both economic and political – is over. The speaker of the House of Lords traditionally sits on a sack of wool, an ancient representation of England’s trading wealth. In the 1860s, when Britons embarked on a brief but heated debate over whether they were running out of fossil fuels, it was commented that he should really sit on a bag of coal.
Everyone knows that the Industrial Revolution was based on coal. Everyone now knows the environmental consequences we have reaped from making a world from fossil fuels. Yet why have fossil fuels been so important? To understand this, we need to go back to the world that came before – the world that the historian Tony Wrigley called ‘the organic economy’.
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Tags: coal, energy, fossil fuels, industrial revolution, organic economy
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Thursday, October 17th, 2024
Emily Chung
The Industrial Revolution drastically changed the way people lived, worked, and socialised in Britain’s large towns and cities. England rapidly urbanised in the first half of the 19th century as the country’s population moved from the agrarian countryside into growing centres of industrial activity, drawn in by the promise of work.
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Tags: class, industrial revolution, social history, urbanisation, wealth
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Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
Kevin Schürer
“Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country…” Thus starts Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village, published in 1824, a bestseller in its day. It continues to describe this idyllic village as a place “with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive… where we know every one, [and] are known to every one”.
The message is loud and clear. Prior to the coming of the railways and mass transportation, rural villages were slow-moving, tight-knit communities – places where people rarely came or went, and where the likelihood was that the majority of the population would live and die in the parish where they had been born and baptised. To all intents and purposes, they were stuck in the mud.
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Tags: industrial revolution, migration, rural life, urbanisation
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure