New research from the University of Cambridge shows that Britain began its industrial transformation as early as the 17th century, well before the established timeline of the Industrial Revolution, highlighting Britain's earlier transition from agriculture to manufacturing and services.
According to the most detailed history of the nation's occupation to date, Britain had already begun its move towards an industrialized economy during the reign of the Stuarts in the 17th century, more than 100 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution in textbooks.
The University of Cambridge's Economies Past website tracks changes in Britain's labor force from Elizabethan times to the eve of World War I using census data, parish registers, probate records and more, with more than 160 million records spanning more than three centuries.
The findings suggest that the 17th-century English agricultural population declined dramatically and the manufacturing population surged: from local artisans such as blacksmiths, shoemakers, and turners, to a proliferation of networks of family weavers who produced cloth for wholesale.
Historians say the data suggests that Britain had risen to become the world's first industrial power several generations before the advent of mills and steam engines in the late 18th century – and the mills and steam engines in the late 18th century have long been considered the birthplace of global industrial and economic growth.
"By cataloguing and mapping employment data over centuries, we can see that the story of British history that we tell ourselves needs to be rewritten," said Leigh Shaw-Taylor, a professor of economic history at the University of Cambridge and a project leader. "We find a shift towards employment in the manufacture of goods, which suggests that Britain had already industrialized more than a century before the Industrial Revolution. "
In fact, as early as the early 19th century, when William Blake wrote about "The Mill of Darkness of Satan," the number of people engaged in manufacturing was already flat. Many parts of the UK are even "deindustrialising" – as manufacturing flows away from much of the country and is concentrated around coalfields, the researchers say.
An example of a list of wills in England in the late 17th century. This is a list of the wills of John Booth, a food and liquor supplier in Macclesfield, Cheshire, dated 1697. The research team extracted parish names, occupations and years of work from more than 2 million such records in the UK, which form part of the dataset. This information can be seen at the top of the file. Image source: Reprinted with permission from the Cheshire Department of Archives and Local Studies
On the contrary, the service sector almost doubled in the 19th century – a boom that is often thought to have started in the 50s of the 20th century. These services include professionals such as salesmen, domestic workers, lawyers, and teachers, as well as a large increase in canal and rail transport workers.
By 1911, about 13 percent of male laborers were engaged in transport. In fact, research shows that the UK's services sector has been growing almost consistently for three hundred years.
economiespast.org The website compiles and summaries employment statistics at the local level in England and Wales, allowing users to zoom in and track changes in the labour force over the centuries.
The site is also segmented by industry and, after 1851, by gender and age, revealing the extent of child labor. Historians hope the site will be a valuable classroom resource for students to explore the labor history of their area.
This work will be launched at the annual meeting of the Economic History Society on April 6.
Professor Shaw-Taylor said: "There is a lot of debate about why the industrial age came into being in the UK, with coal, technology and empire all being major factors. Our database shows that the wave of enterprise and productivity in the 17th century transformed Britain's economy, laying the foundations for the world's first industrial economy. By 1700, Britain had become a manufacturing powerhouse. For a hundred years, the study of the Industrial Revolution has been based on a misunderstanding of its connotations. "
As much of Europe continued to wander in subsistence agriculture, the number of male agricultural workers in England fell by more than a third between 1600-1740 (64% to 42%).
At the same time, from 1600-1700, the proportion of the male labor force engaged in the production of goods rose by 50%, just under half (from 28% to 42%).
According to Shaw-Taylor's estimates, by 1700, the proportion of the British labor force was engaged in manufacturing rather than agriculture as in France.
"We can't be sure why this change is happening in the UK and not elsewhere," he said. However, the British economy at that time was much freer, with fewer tariffs and restrictions, unlike continental Europe. "
In many European countries, the transportation of goods is subject to the payment of landlords' tolls, so the market is often very local. In England, there are few records of such taxation after the Middle Ages.
Shaw-Taylor argues that guilds also had more power in other countries. For example, textile production was prohibited in the countryside around the Dutch city of Leiden, while in Sweden, shops were not allowed in rural areas within a 10-mile radius of towns until the 19th century.
The research team extracted the name of the parish, occupation of employment, and year from more than 2 million wills and probate records in the UK, and this information forms part of the dataset, as shown in the figure. This particular example comes from the list of wills of John Booth, a food and liquor supplier in Macclesfield, Cheshire, with a will dated 1697.
However, in England in 1700, half of all manufacturing employment was rural. "In addition to rural artisans, there are networks of weavers in rural areas who work for merchants who supply wool and sell finished products," Shaw-Taylor said. "
The textile industry or the metal craftsmen who make nails and sickles are like "factories without machines, spread over hundreds of households" - the products they produce are increasingly sold to the international market. In Gloucestershire, for example, the proportion of male labour in the textile, shoemaking and metal industries grew from a third (33%) to nearly half (48%) in the 17th century due to the expansion of the textiles, footwear and metal industries. And in Lancashire, the proportion of men in manufacturing grew from 42 per cent in 1660 to 61 per cent in 1750, driven by a doubling of textile workers (from 15 per cent to 30 per cent). These all happened before the Industrial Revolution. As industry moved to the north of England, where coal was abundant and crops were difficult to grow, some networks evolved into workshops and eventually Blake's mills.
Research shows that by the mid-18th century (the beginning of the Industrial Revolution), much of southern and eastern England had actually lost its historic industry and even returned to the era of agricultural labour.
Norfolk, for example, was probably the most industrialized county in the 17th century, with 63 per cent of adult men employed in industry by 1700. But in the 18th century, that percentage actually fell to 39 percent, while the proportion of men in the labor force engaged in agriculture jumped from less than one-third (28 percent) to more than half (51 percent).
Thus, contrary to the prevailing historical narrative, the proportion of the population in England and Wales engaged in manufacturing-type jobs has changed little during the period considered to be the heyday of the Industrial Age, on the contrary, the nature and location of work have changed.
As textile manufacturing moves out of the home and the Southeast, the number of women in the labor market has decreased significantly. Increasing data on women workers from before the 19th century is the next major step in the project, but researchers have devised methods to estimate the gender ratio of the early workforce.
"We believe that the labor force participation rate of adult women in 1760 was between 60 and 80 percent, falling back to 43 percent by 1851," Shaw-Taylor said. It was not until the 80s of the 20th century that it returned to the level of the mid-18th century.
By 1851, only 17 percent of adult women were employed in Essington at the Durham Coalfield. However, in Luton's hat-making district, one of the only remaining industrial centres in the south, the proportion is as high as 78 per cent.
The site also allows users to track the percentage of child labor after 1851. In Bradford's thriving textile mills, a large number of young girls were put to work, and in 1851, more than 70% of girls aged 13-14 were in the workforce. Sixty years later, that number is still over 60%.
In 1851, more than 40 percent of Bradford's 11-12 year old girls were also working, but by 1911 that number had fallen to nearly 10 percent, by which time legislation had established a system of compulsory education for young children.
The Economics of the Past website is the result of a more than 20-year research project at the University of Cambridge, "The Structure of Occupations in England 1379-1911," which collects data from late medieval poll tax records to early modern coroner reports.
The primary data for the period 1600-1800 are derived from more than 2 million wills and lists of wills: lists of the movable belongings of the deceased. The team behind this work aims to continuously expand the data set.
In addition to the vast amount of digitized census data, the researchers visited 80 archives to collect data from an additional 2.5 million 19th-century baptismal records (at the time father's occupation had to be listed).
编译自/scitechdaily