The Industrial Revolution began more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, with Britons already transitioning from agriculture to manufacturing in the 1600s, according to new research.
Seventeenth-century England can be understood as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, laying the foundations for the transition from a society based on agriculture and handicrafts to a manufacturing-based economy in which networks of home-based artisans collaborated with and functioned similarly to merchants. I built it. To the factory.
According to research from the University of Cambridge, during this period there was a sharp decline in agricultural tenant farming, and a rapid increase in people manufacturing goods such as local craftsmen such as blacksmiths, cobblers and wheelwrights, as well as producing textiles for wholesale. A network of home-based weavers was rapidly growing.
Textbooks usually say the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, when factories and steam engines proliferated and technologies like the spinning jenny were created, but according to the most detailed history of the country’s occupations ever created, , built from over 160 million records, with a wide range of coverage. 3rd century – During the reign of the Stuarts, Britain was emerging as the world’s first industrial power.
The University of Cambridge’s Economic Past website uses census data, parish registers, probate records and more to track changes in Britain’s workforce from Elizabethan times to the eve of the First World War.
Economic historian Professor Lee Shaw-Taylor, who led the project, said: “100 years have been spent studying the Industrial Revolution based on a misunderstanding of what it entailed.
“Cataloging and mapping centuries of employment data shows that we need to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about Britain’s history.
“We found a shift towards employment in manufacturing goods that shows Britain was already industrializing more than a century before the Industrial Revolution.”
In fact, by the early 1800s, when William Blake was writing about the “Dark Devil’s Factory,” many parts of Britain were experiencing a decline in manufacturing and even deindustrialization in favor of coal mining. researchers discovered.
in 19 yearsth The size of the service sector nearly doubled in the 20th century, and this boom, often thought to have begun near the 1950s, spurred growth that lasted nearly 300 years. These included a large increase in canal and railway transport workers, as well as clerks, domestic staff, and professionals such as lawyers and teachers.
“The question of why the industrial age began in Britain is a much-debated question, with coal, technology and empire all being key factors,” Shaw-Taylor said.
“Our database shows that in the 17th century, a dramatic increase in enterprise and productivity transformed the economy.th At the turn of the century, Japan laid the foundations for the world’s first industrial economy. Britain was already a nation of manufacturers by 1700. ”
This website highlights changes in the workforce. The report found that while much of Europe was in decline in subsistence farming, the number of male agricultural workers in Britain fell by more than a third (from 64% to 42%) between 1600 and 1740. is observing. At the same time, the proportion of male workers decreased from 1600 to 1700. The power involved in the production of goods increased by 50%, reaching 42% of all men.
Shaw-Taylor calculated that this meant that by 1700 the proportion of Britain’s workforce working in manufacturing rather than agriculture was three times that of France. “The British economy at the time was different from that on the continent, with fewer tariffs and restrictions, and more freedom,” he noted.
Added before 19th Century data on women workers is a major next step for this project, but the researchers found that adult female labor force participation rates ranged from 60% to 80% in 1760 to 1851. They estimate that it fell to 43% by 2019, only to have returned by mid-2020. 18th Century level in the 1980s.
The website also allows users to track child labor rates since 1851. For example, vast numbers of young girls were put to work in Bradford’s rapidly growing textile mills, and in 1851 over 70% of girls aged 13 and 14 were working. Ta. , this figure was still over 60%.
In Bradford, too, more than 40% of girls aged 11-12 worked in 1851, but by 1911 this proportion had fallen to nearly 10%, by which time early childhood education had become compulsory.
