Child labour and industrialisation: Evidence from factory records and the 1851 British census

You, Xuesheng and Tertzakian, Alex 2025. Child labour and industrialisation: Evidence from factory records and the 1851 British census. The Economic History Review Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Children were an integral part of the workforce during the British Industrial Revolution. The changing patterns of child labour as well as the causes behind its rise and fall have generated much scholarly debate. This study brings in new direct evidence on child labour from children’s age certificates and school attendance records from cotton factories. We link individual children identified from these factory records with the 1851 census, and provide, for the first time, concrete evidence on the scale of the census underreporting of child labour in factories. We find that the British census underreported the true scale of children’s factory employment by a third. Based on this finding, we further reconstruct children’s labour force participation rates and occupational structure in the mid-nineteenth century. Overall, we argue that technological change and the early Factory Acts did not diminish children’s factory employment immediately nor effectively. Children continued to be a valuable labour source in factory production until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0013-0117
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 March 2025
Date of Acceptance:	5 March 2025
Last Modified:	10 Mar 2025 12:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176670

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