ABSTRACT
The transformation of agriculture and industry during the eighteenth century was reflected in the changing characteristics of the labour force. Recent economic historians have drawn attention to rapid productivity growth in agriculture which entailed structural shifts of labour away from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. These sectors were not, they have pointed out, the new high-productivity factory industries, but slowgrowing traditional industries. Such findings, however, have all been based on evidence for the adult male labour force. The impact of women’s labour and wages, and the role of children’s labour, have not been considered in the construction of indices of economic change, because long runs of quantitative data on occupations, labour-force participation and wages are not generally available. Women and children were rarely recorded in the eighteenth century in official statistics, legal records or wage books in terms other than widow or spinster. This is not, however, grounds for excluding descriptive and analytical consideration of their impact on current understandings of this classical phase of industrialization.
