ABSTRACT
Seasonal fluctuations in agricultural employment have important economic and social consequences. If work is seasonal, some workers must be unemployed in the slack season, or workers must be brought in for the busy season. The seasonality of work affected institutions; it has been argued that poor law allowances of the early nineteenth century were designed to deal with seasonal agricultural employment. The exchange of labour between agriculture and industry meant that agricultural seasonality could also influence the path of industrialisation. Sokoloff and Dollar argue that, since English agriculture was more seasonal than US agriculture and cottage industry could be more easily combined with seasonal agricultural work, the English had more cottage industry, while the US had more factory production. Extra labour may have come from local farm workers who were unemployed in the winter, from migrant workers, or from local non-agricultural workers who switched temporarily to farming work.
