Child labour and industrialization
Evidence from factory records and the 1851 British census
Datos Bibliográficos
| ID | 3534565 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Xiaoying You (0000-0002-5690-4119, Economics Section, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, autor de correspondencia), Alexander Tertzakian (0009-0001-2705-651X, University of Glasgow) |
| Año | 2025 |
| Volumen | 79 |
| Número | 1 |
| Páginas | 163-188 |
| Fecha de publicación | 2025-03-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sí |
| Open Access | Sí |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Revista | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores de la revista | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Editorial | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/ehr.70015 |
| OpenAlex | W4408744466 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referencias citadas | 43 |
Children were an integral part of the workforce during the British Industrial Revolution. The changing patterns of child labour as well as the causes behind its rise and fall have generated much scholarly debate. This study brings in new direct evidence on child labour from children's age certificates and school attendance records from cotton factories. We link individual children identified from these factory records with the 1851 census, and provide, for the first time, concrete evidence on the scale of the census under-reporting of child labour in factories. We find that the British census under-reported the true scale of children's factory employment by a third. On the basis of this finding, we further reconstruct children's labour force participation rates and occupational structure in the mid-nineteenth century. Overall, we argue that technological change and the early Factory Acts did not diminish children's factory employment immediately nor effectively. Children continued to be a valuable labour source in factory production until at least the mid-nineteenth century
Census · Child labour · Demographic economics · Economic history · Economics · Factory (object-oriented programming) · Geography · Industrialisation · Labour economics · Political science · Population · Sociology · Work (physics) · Australian History and Society · Computer Science · Demography · Engineering · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law
Victorian Childhoods
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
British economic growth during the industrial revolution
Apprenticeship In England, 1600-1914
Capital
The Making of the English Working Class
A History of Childhood. Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times
Gender bias in nineteenth-century England
Child labor and the division of labor in the early English cotton mills
A brief statistical sketch of the child labour market in mid-nineteenth-century London
Working with Husband? “Occupation’s Wife” and Married Women’s Employment in the Censuses in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911
The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family
The Exploitation of Little Children
Household and market production of families in a late nineteenth century American city
Children’s work and wages in Britain, 1280–1860
The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758-1830
A History of Factory Legislation
Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860-1918
Sociological history and the working‐class family
Child Labor and the Factory Acts
Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth Century Censuses
Occupational Censuses and the Agricultural Workforce in Victorian England and Wales
Debate
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
Forging Ahead and Falling Behind
The Family Economy of the Working Classes in the Cotton Industry, 1784-1833
Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865
How skilled were English agricultural labourers in the early nineteenth century?1
The Early Factory Masters. The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Textile Industry
The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680-1851
Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution
Parish apprenticeship and the old poor law in London
Child day-labourers in agriculture
Beyond the male breadwinner
| Velocidad de citación | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | No |