Rosemary Collinsreports on data releases and genealogy news
Study sheds new light on our ancestors’ occupations
Britain was well on its way to becoming an industrialised economy in the 17th century – over 100 years before the Industrial Revolution began – according to the most detailed occupational history of a nation ever created.
The University of Cambridge’s site Economies Past (economiespast.org), launched on 5 April, uses more than 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 website breaks down labour by sector, gender and age, revealing the extent of women’s and children’s participation in the workforce.
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 ‘The Occupational Structure of Britain 1379–1911’, a University of Cambridge research project that’s been running for over 20 years and has gathered data from a variety of sources.
The main source of data for the period 1600–1800 is two million wills and probate inventories: lists of the movable goods of the deceased.
Alongside vast quantities of digitised census data, researchers also visited 80 record offices to gather data from an additional 2.5 million baptism records from the 19th century (in 1813 it became compulsory to record the occupation of the child’s father).
The researchers found that between 1600 and 1740, the proportion of men in Britain working in agriculture fell from 64 per cent to 42 per cent, while the proportion who worked in goods production increased from 28 per cent to 42 per cent.
Parts of Britain, particularly the south and east, actually ‘deindustrialised’ during the course of th
