Britain was well on its way to an industrialised economy in the 17th century – over 100 years before the official start of the Industrial Revolution – according to the most detailed occupational history of a nation ever created.
The University of Cambridge’s Economies Past website uses over 160 million census, parish and probate records to track changes to the British labour force from the Elizabethan era to the eve of the First World War.
The site, a collaboration between the University’s Faculty of History and Department of Geography, breaks down labour by sector, gender and age, revealing the extent of women’s participation in the workforce and child labour.
The research shows that 17th century Britain saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry, and a surge in people who manufactured goods, usually in a small-scale way at home, such as blacksmiths, shoemakers, wheelwrights and weavers.
Leigh Shaw-Taylor, project leader and Professor of Economic History at Cambridge’s Faculty of History, said: “By cataloguing and mapping centuries of employment data, we can see that the story we tell ourselves about the history of Britain needs to be rewritten. We have discovered a shift towards employment in the making of goods that suggests Britain was already industrialising over a century before the Industrial Revolution.”
Economies Past is the result of a research project at Cambridge that’s been running for over 20 years, the Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911, which has gathered data from late medieval poll tax records to early modern coroner reports.
The main source of data from 1600-1800 comes from over two million wills and probate inventories: list of the moveable goods of the deceased.
Alongside vast quantities of digitised census data, researchers also visited 80 records offices to gather data from a further 2.5 million baptism records from the 19th century (when it became compulsory to list the father’s occupation).
The researchers found that between 1600 and 1740, the proportion of men in Britain working in agriculture fell from 64% to 42%, while the proportion working in goods production rose from 28% to 42%. Britain was more industrialised than other countries at the time, with the share of the British labour force in an occupation involving manufacturing rather than agriculture being three times greater than that of France by 1700.
Parts of Britain, particularly the south and east, actually ‘deindustrialised’ in the 18th century, as manufacturing moved from small home workshops to large factories in the north of England, and workers in other parts of the country abandoned industries and returned to farm labour.
For example, Norfolk was Britain’s most industrialised county in the 17th century, with 63% of adult men in industry by 1700. But this dropped to 39% during the 18th century, while the share of the male workforce in agriculture increased from 28% to 51%.
The research also found that Britain’s service sector began growing earlier than the 20th century as previously thought. The 19th century saw the number of people in jobs such as domestic servants, shop clerks, solicitors and teachers almost doubling.