Labour in a Changing Economy, 1700–1850

The Industrial Revolution is often associated with a ‘transformation of work’. So far as the British economy is concerned, many of the suggested changes were already well developed by the mid-eighteenth century. Several others had hardly proceeded very far even by the mid-nineteenth century. By 1700 the British economy was already distinctive in the extent to which the proportion of the employed population primarily dependent on agriculture had declined. By the time of the first census in 1801, the first official measurement, little more than one-third of the occupied population remained in agriculture. By 1851 it was little more than one-fifth. Before 1801 workers frequently combined agriculture with manufacturing or mining: ‘weaver-husbandman’ or ‘tinner-husbandman’, for example, are commonly found given as joint occupations in parish registers, [Rule (6)]. Arguably, by 1700 agriculture was providing only around half of total employment. The Industrial Revolution in this important respect did not mark a rapid and radical shift in the structure of employment; rather it accentuated one which had already come to distinguish Britain from her European rivals.