Industrial Revolution began century earlier than previously thought according to academics
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have been studying records
Last updated 5th Apr 2024
Britain was already industrialising more than a century before the Industrial Revolution, according to a study of historical employment records.
Cambridge University research indicates there was a steep decline in agricultural peasantry in 17th century Britain, and a surge in people who manufactured goods.
This included blacksmiths, shoemakers and wheelwrights, and networks of home-based weavers producing cloth for wholesale.
It came several generations before the mills and steam engines of the late 18th century, when textbooks mark the start of the Industrial Revolution.
More than 160 million records spanning more than three centuries were analysed to compile Cambridge University's Economies Past website, using census data, parish registers, probate records and more.
It tracks changes to the British labour force from the Elizabethan era to the eve of the First World War.
Leigh Shaw-Taylor, project leader and Professor of Economic History at Cambridge's Faculty of History, said: "By cataloguing and mapping centuries of employment data, we can see that the story we tell ourselves about the history of Britain needs to be rewritten.
"We have discovered a shift towards employment in the making of goods that suggests Britain was already industrialising over a century before the Industrial Revolution."
By the early 1800s, when William Blake was writing of "dark satanic mills", numbers involved in manufacturing had long been flatlining, according to the study.
Many parts of Britain were even "deindustrialising", say researchers - as manufacturing drained from much of the nation to concentrate around coalfields.
Instead, the 19th century saw an almost doubling of the service sector - a boom often thought to have begun closer to the 1950s.
These included sales clerks, domestic staff, professionals such as lawyers and teachers, as well as a huge increase in transport workers on the canals and railways.
By 1911, some 13% of all working men were in transport.
The research suggests that Britain's service sector has been growing almost continuously for 300 years.
"The question of why the industrial age dawned in Britain is a much-debated one, with coal, technology and empire all major factors," said Prof Shaw-Taylor.
"Our database shows that a groundswell of enterprise and productivity transformed the economy in the 17th century, laying the foundations for the world's first industrial economy.
"Britain was already a nation of makers by the year 1700."
He continued: "A hundred years has been spent studying the Industrial Revolution based on a misconception of what it entailed."