An Industrialising Region: the West Riding of Yorkshire c. 1740-1891

"The West Riding of Yorkshire was one of the key industrialising areas of Britain during the industrial revolution. By the late eighteenth century it had eclipsed all other areas in the production of wool cloth and by 1841 it had the highest proportion of male employment in manufacturing of any British county. The West Riding’s industrial base also encompassed major coal producing areas and the metal trades of the Sheffield area. But surprisingly we lack a synoptic account of the region’s economic development during the industrial revolution. The wool and worsted industries have been well served by Heaton’s book, first published in 1920 covering early developments and stopping ‘at the factory gates’ in the late eighteenth century and by Hudson’s work on the period from 1750-1850. Nevertheless this paper will add considerably to our understanding of the geography and development of the industry between 1740 and 1891. Relatively little has been written about the coal field in this period and Hey’s work on the Sheffield metal trades ends in the mid eighteenth century. Unlike Lancashire, which has recently been the subject of two monographs, the overall economic development of the West Riding as an industrial region has never been the subject of a major study. This paper will provide a quantitative framework for the West Riding’s economic development from c.1740 through to 1891 based on a major new dataset documenting the evolution of the county’s male occupational structure. The data is derived from around half of all West Riding parish registers between 1740 and 1820 and the censuses of 1831-1891 for the whole area. It will provide the first major overview of the evolution of the county’s economic structure during the industrial revolution period. A major limitation of the core datasets is that they cover adult males only. However, as is well known, women and children were particularly important in textile manufacture. But comprehensive occupational data for women and children is hard to come by. Nevertheless the paper will attempt to estimate the importance of female and child labour by integrating estimates of the importance of female and child labour relative to male labour, drawn from other studies, with our own data on male employment. We will also make extensive use of the under-utilised census material from 1841 to 1891 which may be a better guide to female employment than has sometimes been thought. A brief comparison of the West Riding’s worsted sector with the Northamptonshire worsted industry which collapsed abruptly around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will also be made and this may shed light on the reasons for de-industrialisation in other long-established textile areas."