15 research outputs found
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Allocating labourers to occupational (sub-)sectors using regression techniques
British historical sources on occupational information such as censuses, parish registers, and probate records describe many men with the unhelpfully vague term of ‘labourer’. This paper introduces a new method to allocate these labourers to occupational (sub-)sectors, a prerequisite for creating comprehensive and accurate historical occupational structures. The new method leads to a significant correction on the allocation shares used in the national accounts literature. Its results at national level are largely in agreement with another new approach, developed by Osamu Saito and Leigh ShawTaylor. But it has an important advantage over that approach: it is capable of allocating labourers at all geographic levels, and can thus generate local and regional occupational estimates, rather than only national ones
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Using probate data to determine historical male occupational structures
Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Sir E.A. Wrigley recently published new estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales. Their pre-census figures are based on parish register data, but before Rose's Act of 1812, parish registers offer occupational information only in a sample of parishes, and are virtually silent about employments before 1690. This paper examines how the gaps in the parish register data can be filled using a data source which offer more universal coverage and goes back much further in time: probate records. It demonstrates how an, at first sight, critical deficiency of probate data, namely their severe bias towards capital-intensive and/or relatively well-paying occupations, can be overcome by using parish register data for calibration
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The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1850
This dissertation builds on existing work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It addresses three central problems of the 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 indistinct denominator of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for the (presumed) ubiquity of dual employments in the early-modern world. 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.
These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the highly influential 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.
Secondly, it provides 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.ESRC 1+3 studentshi
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By-Employments in Early Modern England and Their Significance for Estimating Historical Male Occupational Structures
Based on the evidence from probate inventories, by-employments have generally been presumed ubiquitous amongst early modern Englishmen. This would appear to present a significant problem for estimates of the contemporary male occupational structure, since the sources on which these estimates are based describe men almost always by their principal employment only. This paper argues that this problem is vanishingly small, for three reasons. Firstly, the probate inventory evidence is shown to exaggerate the incidence of by-employments by a factor of two, as a consequence of its inherent wealth bias. Secondly, it is demonstrated that even after wealth-bias correction, the probate record greatly overstates by-employment incidence as most of the traces of subsidiary activities in the inventories actually point to the employments of other members of the household, not to by-employments of the inventoried male household head. Thirdly, even if one ignored this and assumed that they did, in fact, point to his by-employments, they are shown to have been relatively small in economic importance compared to the principal employment, and to necessitate only a very minor adjustment of the principal-employment-only male occupational structure
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Correcting the probate inventory record for wealth bias
Wealthy, capital-intensive estates are severely overrepresented in historical collections of probate inventories. This paper discusses a new methodology to neutralise the wealth bias in this important historical data source, enabling one to use probate inventories as a source of information on all households, rather than merely on the biased, probated subsection. The methodology is based on establishing the probability of being inventoried – in a certain time period and geographical area – as a function of the value of the decedent’s estate. The probability function is established by means of an iterative fitting process, using occupational information from contemporary parish registers to establish the target values. The inverse of the resulting probability function is subsequently used to reweight the probate inventory dataset. Thereby the historical process which created the inventoried household subsection in the first place is reversed, thus providing an unbiased view of the full population of households. A number of example applications demonstrate the value of the approach
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Adam Smith revisited: The relationship between the English woollen manufacture and the availability of coal before the use of steam power.
The timing of textile de-industrialization in eastern, southern, and western England and the concomitant shift of the woollen manufacture to the West Riding of Yorkshire is examined in temporal detail. The study shows that relocation was influenced by a number of factors, largely governed by advantages of geography and notably by the availabilities of running water and cheap coal. The manufacture began to shift to places where coal was readily available as early as the sixteenth century and by the end of the eighteenth century it was already ideally placed to adopt steam power.ESRC. Leverhulme Trust. Isaac Newton Trust. British Academy
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Infant and child mortality by socio-economic status in early nineteenth-century England â€
Historical relationships between socioeconomic status and mortality remain poorly understood. This is particularly the case in England, due to a lack of status indicators in available sources especially before c.1850. Here we used the paternal occupational descriptors routinely recorded in Anglican baptism registers from 1813–37 to compare infant and early childhood mortality by social status. Our sample consisted of eight of the Cambridge Group family reconstitution parishes, and allowed us to investigate the contributions of environment as well as household characteristics. Our main variable of interest was an individual-level continuous measure of wealth based on ranking paternal occupations by the propensity for their movable wealth to be inventoried upon death. We found that wealth conferred no clear survival advantage in infancy, once differences in average mortality levels between parishes were adjusted for. However, wealth was associated with higher survival rates in early childhood, especially in the second year of life, and this pattern persisted after adjustment for parish-level effects. The striking exception to this pattern were labourers, who were among the poorest of fathers but whose children enjoyed relatively low mortality. Thus socioeconomic differentials in mortality were present in early nineteenth-century England, however they were small, age-specific and non-linear