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Department of Geography

 

 

Papers, reports and conference presentations

Please note that all the items below represent work in progress produced during the lifetime of the project. As such there are some discrepancies between estimates of occupational structure made at different times and on some points of interpretation. Paper 3 gives the most up-to-date estimates of occupational structure for c.1817 while the account of eighteenth century occupational structure in paper 3 partially supercedes that given in paper 5 in some respects.

1. The PST system of classifying occupations

E.A. Wrigley

The aim of the paper is to outline the problems facing all occupational classifications systems, to discuss the considerations which lay behind the design of PST, to describe its prime characteristics, and to compare it with alternative systems, especially HISCO. The range of topics treated is suggested by the internal headings of the paper. They are as follows: Problems in the interpretation of occupational information, Census data and sources relating to individuals, The PST system and the study of the industrial revolution, Some features of the PST system, The processing of occupational data, More complex systems of classification, PST and other occupational systems, HISCO.

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2. The creation of a ‘census’ of adult male employment for England and Wales for 1817

Peter Kitson, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Ros Davies, Gill Newton, and Max Satchell.

This paper presents new estimates of the adult male occupational structure of England and Wales in 1817, over twenty years before the availability of the first reliable returns based upon the census of 1841. The system of baptismal registration introduced by parliament for the Church of England in 1813 required the occupation of the father to be recorded. By collecting this data from every parish register in England and Wales from this year until 1820, it is possible to generate estimates of occupational structure. Comparison of these estimates with other sources suggests that they are very reliable. Through the use of (1) a population weighting system using the returns from early nineteenth centuries censuses; (2) the PST system of occupational coding; and (3) a method for attributing the considerable numbers of men described as ‘labourer’ between the different sectors of employment, the total number of men engaged in each sector of the economy for 1817 can then be estimated.

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3. The occupational structure of England c.1710-c.1871

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Peter Kitson, Ros Davies, Gill Newton and Max Satchell

This paper presents new evidence on the male occupational structure of England c.1710 deriving from c.1000 baptism registers and provides a preliminary analysis of the implications of the data. The key finding is that the secondary sector was perhaps twice as large, in terms of male employment, at the beginning of the eighteenth century as historians have been suggested in recent years. One implication of this is that most of the growth in the relative importance of secondary sector employment, normally associated with the post 1750 period, in fact preceded the eighteenth century. A further implication is that the increase in the productivity of the secondary sector was much larger than has been argued in the national accounts literature. The paper also explores regional differences and documents the scale of de-industrialisation in southern England over the eighteenth century. It also provides a more speculative discussion of likely trends in female employment.

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4. The occupational structure of England and Wales c.1817-1881

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, Peter Kitson, Ros Davies, Gill Newton and Max Satchell

This paper examines the male occupational structure of England and Wales between c.1817 and 1881. The creation of a new quasi-census of male occupational data for c.1817 from parish register data makes it possible, for the first time, to examine reliably the changing male occupational structure over the whole of this period and to do so both in the aggregate and at fine spatial resolution and in sectoral detail. One key result is to show that the secondary sectors’ share of adult male employment grew very little over this period. The basic feature of structural change was a relative shift from agricultural to service sector employment. The secondary sector was much larger at the beginning of the nineteenth century than has been thought hitherto. One implication is that the productivity growth of the secondary sector grew much more rapidly between c.1817 and 1841 than has been suggested hitherto. One likely consequence is that new technology made a much bigger impact on the secondary sector at the aggregate level, than the national accounts literature suggests at present. Moreover, striking tertiary sector growth was a feature of all regions of England and Wales, suggesting that the Industrial Revolution affected all parts of the country and cannot be viewed merely as a regional phenomenon, as has sometimes been argued.

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5. The occupational structure of England and Wales c.1750 to 1911

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

This paper is a slightly revised version of a paper given to the INCHOS workshop held in Cambridge July 29th-31st 2009. It is an early draft of a chapter, for a book: Saito, O and Shaw-Taylor, L., (eds.) Occupational structure and industrialization in a comparative perspective. The paper shows that most of rise in the relative importance of secondary sector employment, associated with British industrialisation, took place before the onset of continuous technological change and modern economic growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the nineteenth century structural change in employment consisted primarily of a shift from agriculture to services.

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6. The recording of occupations in the Anglican baptism registers of England and Wales, 1690-1799

Peter Kitson

This essay reports the results of searches for periods where the occupation of the father at baptism was systematically recorded in approximately 11,000 English and Welsh parish registers between 1690 and 1799. In southern England and Wales, occupational recording was most common in the aftermath of the Marriage Duty Acts of the 1690s, but then becomes comparatively rare after 1710. Conversely, occupational recording was comparatively rare in northern England and north Wales before 1710. A series of ecclesiastical initiatives after this period ensured that occupational recording was very common in these regions for the rest of the eighteenth century.

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7. Tracking change over time

E.A. Wrigley

Notes and Powerpoint of a conference paper on the changing population geography of England 1801-1891

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Powerpoint

8. 'The sectoral allocation of labourers c.1710-1911: towards an optimal methodology.’

Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Peter Kitson

Around 1817 around 30 percent of all adult males whose occupations were recorded in parish registers were enumerated simply as ‘labourers’ with no further indication of which sector of the economy they might have worked within. In the censuses of 1851 through to 1911 agricultural labourers were distinguished from other labourers but most non-agricultural labourers were left sectorally unclassified. This paper assesses a number of procedures for allocating ‘labourers’ to the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. This is an essential task for any analysis of sectoral changes in employment over the nineteenth century.

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