Child day‐labourers in agriculture: evidence from farm accounts, 1740–1850¹

Abstract

While child labour has always been an important part of the industrial revolution story, there is little quantitative evidence about the number of child workers in the 1740–1850 period. This article estimates trends in the percentage of the agricultural day‐labouring workforce that were children. By using the wage level to identify child workers, it is possible to estimate child labour for a large sample of English farms. It is found that girls were rarely employed as day‐labourers, while boys were employed about as frequently as women. The percentage of boys in the day‐labour workforce increased until the 1820s and then declined.

Review of periodical literature published in 2012

“…Burnette's article on child day‐labourers published in this journal also explores similar themes, albeit from a different perspective. Her focus is on quantifying the number of children employed in agriculture, and in extrapolating trends over time from this data.…”

“…The proportion of boys in the farming workforce increased steadily until the 1820s when it began to fall. The reasons for this remain unclear, but Burnette offers a number of possible explanations in what is a stimulating article. Wallis in his second contribution for this year ( Journal of British Studies ) explores a related theme, apprenticeship in the City of London.…”

Education and household decision-making in Spanish mining communities, 1877–1924

“…In this process, the household's socioeconomic status played a major role, as, for instance, it determined the household's reliance on child labour, and, therefore, the parents' views on schooling (Basu and Van 1998;Basu 1999;and Bar and Basu 2009). 2 For instance, authors studying historical case studies find that for working-class families, schooling might be a luxury good, as they cannot afford the cost of losing their offspring's income (Cunningham 2000;Borras Llop, 2005;Burnette 2012;Humphries 2013;Larsson and Westberg 2020). 3 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, households whose members worked in the mines were among the working-class families with the lowest standards of living and thus relied heavily on child labour (John 1984, pp.…”