Deposit & Copying of Dissertation Declaration

Deposit & Copying of Dissertation Declaration Board of Graduate Studies Please note that you will also need to bind a copy of this Declaration into your final, hardbound copy of thesis - this has to be the very first page of the hardbound thesis. 1 Surname (Family Name) Forenames(s) Title Keibek Sebastiaan Antonius Johannes Mr 2 Title of Dissertation as approved by the Degree Committee The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1850 In accordance with the University Regulations in Statutes and Ordinances for the PhD, MSc and MLitt Degrees, I agree to deposit one print copy of my dissertation entitled above and one print copy of the summary with the Secretary of the Board of Graduate Studies who shall deposit the dissertation and summary in the University Library under the following terms and conditions: 1. Dissertation Author Declaration I am the author of this dissertation and hereby give the University the right to make my dissertation available in print form as described in 2. below. My dissertation is my original work and a product of my own research endeavours and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration with others except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I hereby assert my moral right to be identified as the author of the dissertation. The deposit and dissemination of my dissertation by the University does not constitute a breach of any other agreement, publishing or otherwise, including any confidentiality or publication restriction provisions in sponsorship or collaboration agreements governing my research or work at the University or elsewhere. 2. Access to Dissertation I understand that one print copy of my dissertation will be deposited in the University Library for archival and preservation purposes, and that, unless upon my application restricted access to my dissertation for a specified period of time has been granted by the Board of Graduate Studies prior to this deposit, the dissertation will be made available by the University Library for consultation by readers in accordance with University Library Regulations and copies of my dissertation may be provided to readers in accordance with applicable legislation. 3 Signature Date 19/12/2016 Corresponding Regulation Before being admitted to a degree, a student shall deposit with the Secretary of the Board one copy of his or her hardbound dissertation and one copy of the summary (bearing student’s name and thesis title), both the dissertation and the summary in a form approved by the Board. The Secretary shall deposit the copy of the dissertation together with the copy of the summary in the University Library where, subject to restricted access to the dissertation for a specified period of time having been granted by the Board of Graduate Studies, they shall be made available for consultation by readers in accordance with University Library Regulations and copies of the dissertation provided to readers in accordance with applicable legislation. University of Cambridge, Board of Graduate Studies, 4 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RZ · Tel: 01223 338389 · email: [email protected] · http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/students/studentregistry/exams/submission/phd/submitting.html THE MALE OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLAND AND WALES , 1600-1850 Sebastiaan A.J. Keibek Queens’ College & Wolfson College Faculty of History University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2016 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation builds on a strong foundation: thirteen years of hard and inspired work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw- Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It employs much of the project’s data – such as the digitized censuses and parish register datasets – as well as occupational and geographic codification systems. Its contribution to the project is threefold. Firstly, it incorporates an additional data source, namely the occupational data contained in probate documents, to resolve the deficient coverage provided by the project’s current data sources in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Probate documents provide millions of occupational observations in these centuries, but are themselves a seriously flawed source of occupational information since they are severely socially and occupationally biased. An approach is presented and proven to yield reliable results, which employs parish register data to calibrate the probate data and, subsequently uses the – now no longer biased – probate data to interpolate and extrapolate the parish register data. Secondly, this dissertation presents a solution for allocating the numerous men with the indistinct occupational descriptor of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, based on non-linear, constrained regression analyses. This has important advantages over existing allocation methodologies, being more reliable, more precise and, most importantly, capable of allocating labourers not merely at the national scale but also at regional and local scales. Thirdly, it provides an answer to one the of Occupational Structure project’s most common criticisms: that early-modern men frequently engaged in gainful activities in addition to their principal occupation, and that these so-called by-employments therefore challenge occupational estimates based on principal occupations only. It is shown that the source on which the impression of ubiquitous male by-employments is based exaggerates their incidence with a factor of two. And it demonstrates that by-employments were overwhelmingly carried out by household members other than the male ‘household head’ and, as a result, do not truly distort principal-employment-only male occupational estimates after all. All this results in a new 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. The new estimates have two important implications for our understanding of the transition to modern economic growth, pioneered in Britain during this period. First, they provide conclusive evidence for an observation made by Shaw-Taylor et al based on earlier, preliminary occupational estimates, namely that the structural shift from agriculture to iii the secondary sector which has widely been associated with the above transition, was actually already complete by 1760, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the new estimates push this type of structural change back into the seventeenth and partially even the sixteenth century. Structural change during the Industrial Revolution is a central feature of the highly influential national accounts literature, based on occupational estimates derived from contemporary social tables which, as this dissertation shows, are a gravely flawed source. This, in turn, means that the national accounts literature greatly underestimates productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution and, thereby, the effects of technological and organisational innovation. Thus, the new occupational estimates provide strong arguments for the partial resurrection of the so-called ‘discontinuity interpretation’ of the Industrial Revolution. Second, they provide a detailed, quantitative basis for what could be called the ‘regional critique’ of the national accounts literature, namely that even if the discontinuity interpretation of the Industrial Revolution should not hold at the national scale, it does hold at smaller geographical scales. The new estimates paint a national picture of merely slow and limited shifts in male labour force during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; but they also show that, below this calm surface, this was a period of great turbulence, which witnessed rapid concentration of economic activities in specific counties, in small regions within counties, in towns compared to the surrounding countryside – with all of these rapidly specialising regions held together by an ever growing transport sector. The role of small, highly specialist regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation is well-known in present-day economies. Since the new estimates show that strong regional specialisation clearly preceded the Industrial Revolution, it raises the intriguing question to which degree a uniquely decentralised yet well-integrated early-eighteenth-century economy was instrumental or even crucial in Britain’s precocious transition to modern economic growth. iv PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation aims to answer a straightforward question: what was the composition of the early-modern and early-industrial male labour force in England and Wales? It does this by building on the ground breaking work of Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Tony Wrigley, and other members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain, 1379-1911’ project. When I joined this project as a graduate student, I walked into a treasure house of data and knowledge. All of the census and parish register data and a substantial part of the probate data which, together, constitute the evidence base on which this dissertation is built, had already been collected by members of the project. Occupational codification systems were in place, as well as geographic information systems linked to census units, parishes, and townships. This

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