The Industrial Revolution began in Stuart Britain in the 1600s, a century before the traditional date: University of Cambridge

The world has been misinformed. The Industrial Revolution, one of humanity’s most transformational events, did not begin in 1760 across Georgian Britain. Instead, Britain had already industrialised a century earlier under the Scottish House of Stuart, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

In fact, the traditional date of the Industrial Revolution was a time when England and Wales were already deindustrialising, as manufacturing drained from much of the nation, according to Cambridge researchers.

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The surprising new conclusions have been reached upon by Cambridge researchers after a  thorough study of a huge tranche of more than 160 million records spanning over three centuries — from 1600, when England was still under the rule of the last great Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I till well into the 19th century.

The corpus of information includes census data, parish registers, probate records and more, according to an article on the aggregator website Phys.org.

“Alongside vast quantities of digitized census data, researchers also visited 80 records offices to gather data from a further 2.5 million baptism records from the 19th century (when it became compulsory to list the father's occupation),” the article noted.

The result is the ‘Economies Past’ website, part of a research project at Cambridge that has been running for over 20 years — the Occupational Structure of Britain 1379–1911, which has gathered data from late medieval poll tax records to early modern coroner reports.

The work will be launched at the Economic History Society’s annual conference on April 6.

‘Groundswell of enterprise and productivity’

So why did industrialisation begin 100 years before the traditional date in Britain?

“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,” Leigh Shaw-Taylor, project leader and Professor of Economic History at Cambridge's Faulty of History, was quoted as saying in the Phys.org article.

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“We can’t say for certain why this change occurred in Britain rather than elsewhere,” Shaw-Taylor added. “However, the English economy of the time was more liberal, with fewer tariffs and restrictions, unlike on the continent.”

The researchers give instances of England’s peers on the Continent. The Dutch Republic (1588–1795), which witnessed a ‘Dutch Golden Age’ in the 1600s, had an economy that was dominated by trade guilds.

The number of guilds in the Dutch Republic almost doubled during the 17th century, from about 650 to more than 1,100.

“Shaw-Taylor argues that trade guilds also had more power in other nations. For example, textile production was prohibited in the countryside around the Dutch city of Leiden, and in Sweden no shops were permitted in rural areas within a ten-mile radius of a town until the 19th century,” the article noted.

In England though, half of all manufacturing employment was in the countryside in 1700.

There were village artisans. In addition, there were networks of weavers in rural areas who would work for merchants that supplied wool and sold the finished articles, said Shaw-Taylor.

This is reflected in the analysis of the data that he and his colleagues came across. According to it, the number of male agricultural workers in Britain fell by over a third (64 per cent to 42 per cent) from 1600-1740.

The number of men involved in goods production during the same time (1600-1700) rose, on the other hand, by 50 per cent to just under half of working men (28 per cent to 42 per cent).

The share of the male workforce involved in industry in the southwestern English county of Gloucestershire grew from a third (33 per cent) to almost half (48 per cent) over the 17th century. This was driven in large part due to expansions in textiles, footwear and metals.

Meanwhile, in Lancashire in northern England, the share of men in manufacturing work grew from 42 per cent in 1660 to 61 per cent in 1750. The county saw the number of textile workers increase from 15 to 30 per cent.

The share of the British labour force in an occupation involving manufacturing rather than agriculture was three times that of its arch foe France by 1700, according to Shaw-Taylor’s estimates.

By the mid-18th century (the traditional date of the start of the Industrial Revolution), most industries had migrated to the north of England, which had abundant coal stocks and where crops were more difficult to cultivate, according to the researchers.

The south and east of England, meanwhile, returned to farm labour.

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The county of Norfolk in East Anglia (eastern England) was the most industrialised county, with 63 per cent of adult men in industry by 1700.

“But this actually dropped to 39 per cent during the 18th century, while the share of the male workforce in agriculture jumped from less than a third (28 per cent) to over half (51 per cent),” the researchers noted.

According to the research, the service sector doubled in the region in the 19th century, rather than the 1950s as is popularly believed.

“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 per cent of all working men were in transport. In fact, the research suggests that Britain’s service sector has been growing almost continuously for three hundred years,” the article noted.

“A hundred years has been spent studying the Industrial Revolution based on a misconception of what it entailed,” Shaw-Taylor said.

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