Immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales (1851–1911)

Abstract

This article examines the history of immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The newly available electronic version of the Census (I-CeM) allows all business proprietors in each Census year to be identified, and provides birthplace information that allows entrepreneurs from different countries to be compared to each other and to business proprietors born in the United Kingdom. Immigrant populations had higher rates of business proprietorship than the English and Welsh-born population. This article argues that this was caused by labour market structure and demography rather than cultural differences between English- and foreign-born business proprietors.

The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911

“…This allows the demographic and other information on individuals included in the Census to be used. For example, the relationship between migration and entrepreneurship can be examined on a larger scale than previously possible (Godley, 2001;Smith et al, 2018). other long-standing narratives about England and Wales entrepreneurship can also now be considered in the light of these data.…”

The British business census of entrepreneurs and firm-size, 1851–1881: New data for economic and business historians

“…Just like the impact of the Minnesota Historical Census projects (Ruggles and Menard 1995), the availability of census digital microdata has made possible new insights in British demographic, economic and social history. Over the past five years, the I-CeM data containing census records of the full population of England, Wales, and Scotland have been used to develop new interpretations of childhood mortality (Jaadla and Reid 2017;Atkinson et al 2017), family structure (Sch€ urer et al 2018), fertility Reid et al 2019), business proprietors (Bennett, Smith, and Montebruno 2018;Bennett et al 2019;Van Lieshout et al 2019), business partnerships (Bennett 2016), agriculture (Montebruno et al 2019a), women's occupations (You 2019), portfolios in farming (Radicic, Bennett, and Newton 2017), migration (Sch€ urer and Day 2019;Smith, Bennett, and van Lieshout 2019), and urban structure (Smith, Bennett, and Radicic 2018), and have been visualized and further made available in the online atlas Populations Past ). These analyses have considerably improved on scholarship based on the only source that was previously available with national coverage: the published tabulations created by the census administrators (the General Register Office: GRO) at the time of the censuses.…”