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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure

Department of Geography and Faculty of History

 

The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1850

The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1850

Sebastian Keibek

This dissertation – submitted in November 2016 and officially approved in February 2017 – addresses three central problems of the 'Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911' project namely (a) the lack of geographical and temporal coverage by the project's existing data sources before the nineteenth century, (b) the allocation of the numerous men with the indistinctive denominator of 'labourer' to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for dual employments. The solutions to these problems result in a set of estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850, in twenty-year time intervals, at the level of sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary) and sub-sectors (farmers, miners, textile workers, transport workers, etcetera), at national, regional, and local geographical scales. In figure 1, these estimates have been placed in a long-term perspective, at the sectoral, national level.

Figure 1. A long-run perspective of male labour shares by sector (England and Wales)

Long-run male labour shares by sector, England and Wales

These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the national accounts literature. Firstly, they place the structural shift from agriculture to industry firmly in the seventeenth and, to a lesser degree, even the sixteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, means that productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution must have been much higher than previously thought, and thereby also the effects of technological and organisational innovation.

Figure 2. Regional shares of the total male labour force in the secondary sector over time (% of total for England and Wales)

Regional shares of total male labour force in secondary sector over time, England and Wales

Secondly, they provide strong evidence that although economic developments during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century may seem to have been limited and gradual at the national scale, this surface calm hides diverging regional developments which were anything but limited and gradual, held together by a persistently growing transport sector. The result was a regionally specialised yet integrated economy, firmly in place at the eve of the Industrial Revolution which – in light of the known role of small, specialised regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation in present-day economies – may well have contributed to Britain's precocious transition to modern economic growth. Figures 2 and 3 provide an impression of the extent and timing of regional specialisation, above and below the county level.

Figure 3. An example of concentration of function at sub-county scales (Cheshire, male labour force)

Example of concentration function at sub-county scales, Cheshire male labour force

Link to the dissertation