ABSTRACT
It is misleading to emphasize too much the effects that industrialization had had upon ways of life even by 1851. At that date, agriculture still employed 1·79 million persons and about 25 per cent of adult male workers, though the percentage had been dropping and would continue to do so. Domestic service constituted the second largest source of employment, with about one million workers, and the building trades employed about 0·7 5 million. The cotton industry ranked fourth, employing just over half a million; but there were still fewer coalminers (216,000) than boot and shoemakers (274,000). It is figures such as these which impose restraint on
the use of the term industrial ‘revolution’; for, of these major occupations, only coal and cotton were based on the new industrial technology and only cotton was organized on the factory system. The agricultural worker, the domestic servant, the building workers and the boot and shoemakers were affected, like everyone else, by the industrial transformation; but the new technology had hardly impinged at all on their daily work.
