The Occupational Structure of London c. 1670-1891

"London, as Schwartz, has pointed out, was the largest manufacturing town in the country. But, with the exception of Schwartz’s study, London has been rather neglected in the historiography of industrialisation, though there are studies of London’s occupational structure for the seventeenth centuries by Alexander, Beier, and by Clark for the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have created a snapshot of London’s male occupational structure for in 1817 by abstracting the occupations of fathers from the baptism records of every parish in London (using the definition of the Metropolis used in the 1851 census). Because this snapshot has the same geographical coverage as the census definition, the data set created is directly comparable with the male occupational data published for London from 1841 onwards. One part of the paper will analyse the development of London’s male occupational structure from 1817 through to1891. From 1841 to 1891 it will be possible to consider female employment as well. The published 1851 census also contains disaggregated occupational data by registration district. As far as we know this has never been analysed. We hope to be able to match this data with our parish level data to look at change between 1817 and 1851 in a spatially disaggregated form, though there are some methodological problems to be overcome. The third part of the paper will look backwards from 1817. Schwartz tentatively compared his analysis of the 1851 census with Beier’s findings for London 1641-1700 and with Alexander’s data for the City in 1692. He tentatively concluded that, apart from a major decline in the leather industry and a rise in service occupations (mostly before 1730) there was only limited change over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Schwartz was very hesitant about his findings because of a number of methodological problems. One key methodological problem, which we can overcome, is that because Beier and Alexander’s data derived from parts of London rather than the whole area covered by the 1851 census Schwartz was not able to compare exactly the same areas over time. This paper will compare Beier’s data for the period 1641 to 1700 with the same set of parishes in 1817. Using the PST coding occupational coding scheme developed recently by E.A. Wrigley may also bring out changes not apparent in Schwartz’s comparison. If appropriate we may also carry out a spatially disaggregated analysis of change over the same period."