child labour in the industrial revolution essay

Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution

This essay about child labor during the Industrial Revolution discusses the complex dynamics of technological advancement and its social repercussions. It highlights how the era’s rapid industrial growth led to the widespread employment of children in factories and mines, often under dangerous and exploitative conditions. Despite the economic benefits these practices brought to industrialists, the ethical implications and the human cost of utilizing child labor became increasingly apparent. The essay outlines the grueling work environments, the physical and psychological impacts on the children, and the slow but eventual societal shift towards reform, spurred by social reformers and changing public opinion. It concludes by reflecting on the lessons learned from this period, emphasizing the importance of balancing innovation with social justice and the lasting influence of the Industrial Revolution’s darker aspects on contemporary labor laws and workers’ rights.

How it works

The Industrial Revolution, an epochal period characterized by monumental technological progress and profound societal metamorphosis, wrought myriad transformations, catapulting humanity into the realm of modernity. Yet, within this epoch lurked somber facets, among them the specter of child labor. The utilization of children to satisfy labor exigencies in factories, mines, and other industrial milieus unveils a disquieting aspect of industrial advancement, one that underscores the convoluted nature of progress.

During the twilight of the 18th and dawn of the 19th centuries, as industries burgeoned, the hunger for labor surged precipitously.

This demand found partial satiation through the enlistment of children, deemed ideal laborers for sundry reasons. They could be remunerated meagerly, were often more tractable than adults, and their diminutive stature facilitated traversal of the congested precincts of factories and mines. Consequently, it was not anomalous to encounter children as tender as five or six toiling arduously for protracted hours amidst perilous environs, with scant regard for their safety or well-being.

The toil exacted was arduous and perilous. Within textile mills, children operated gargantuan, intricate machinery, imperiling themselves to injuries or even fatalities should they become distracted or fatigued—a commonplace scenario given the exorbitantly protracted workdays. In coal mines, they toiled amidst stygian darkness, traversing cramped passages to convey coal. The corporeal toll was commensurate with the psychological repercussions, with myriad children deprived of the opportunity to partake in scholastic endeavors or relish a conventional childhood.

Notwithstanding the grim veracity of child labor, it required the passage of decades ere substantial reforms were effected. Nascent endeavors to regulate child labor encountered resistance from industrial magnates who reaped benefits from cheap labor and from some progenitors reliant on their children’s earnings for subsistence. It was not until the latter phases of the 19th century that public sentiment, galvanized by the endeavors of social reformers who laid bare the harsh vicissitudes encountered by working children, commenced to undergo transformation. Legislation was incrementally introduced to circumscribe the labor hours of children, institute minimum age requisites, and ultimately, to mandate educational pursuits.

The protracted struggle against child labor during the Industrial Revolution accentuates the intricate interplay between economic expansion and social equity. While the epoch was punctuated by unprecedented technological strides that laid the groundwork for contemporary industries, it also cast illumination on the imperative of ethical considerations amidst progress. The exploitation of juvenile laborers stands as a poignant testament to the human toll exacted by industrialization and the imperative of shielding vulnerable cohorts.

Upon retrospection of this era, it becomes imperative to acknowledge both the triumphs and lapses of the Industrial Revolution. The utilization of child labor underscores the murkier underpinnings of rapid industrial progress, serving as a poignant reminder of the imperative for equilibrium between innovation and societal well-being. Presently, the insights gleaned from this epoch continue to reverberate within labor statutes and workers’ rights, attesting to the enduring resonance of yesteryears upon contemporary and forthcoming policies.

In summation, the specter of child labor during the Industrial Revolution furnishes a paradox of advancement, emerging as a poignant exemplification of how industrial breakthroughs can engender social regressions. The ordeals endured by juvenile laborers during this epoch cast illumination on the bleaker facets of economic expansion and the exigency of ethical reflections in developmental trajectories. As humanity traverses the trajectory of advancement, recollection of the lessons of yore can serve as a bulwark, ensuring that future progress does not exact a toll upon human dignity and welfare.

Cite this page

Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution. (2024, Apr 14). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/

"Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution." PapersOwl.com , 14 Apr 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/ [Accessed: 29 Sep. 2024]

"Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution." PapersOwl.com, Apr 14, 2024. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/

"Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution," PapersOwl.com , 14-Apr-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/child-labor-during-the-industrial-revolution/ [Accessed: 29-Sep-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

child labour in the industrial revolution essay

Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

Children were widely used as labour in factories, mines, and agriculture during the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840). Very often working the same 12-hour shifts that adults did, children as young as five years old were paid a pittance to climb under dangerous weaving machines, move coal through narrow mine shafts, and work in agricultural gangs.

It was very often the case that children's jobs were well-defined and specific to them, in other words, child labour was not merely an extra help for the adult workforce. The education of many children was replaced by a working day, a choice often made by parents to supplement a meagre family income. It was not until the 1820s that governments began to pass laws that restricted working hours and business owners were compelled to provide safer working conditions for everyone, men, women , and children. Even then a lack of inspectors meant many abuses still went on, a situation noted and publicised by charities, philanthropists, and authors with a social conscience like Charles Dickens (1812-1870).

A Lack of Education

As sending a child to school involved paying a fee – even the cheapest asked for a penny a day – most parents did not bother. Villages often had a small school, where each pupil's parents paid the teacher, but attendance was sometimes erratic and more often than not the education rudimentary in hopelessly overcrowded classes. There were some free schools run by charities, and churches often offered Sunday school. Not until 1844 were there more free schools available, such as the Ragged schools established by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885). These schools concentrated on the basics, what became known as the 3 Rs of Reading, Writing , and Arithmetic. Compulsory education for 5 to 12-year-olds, and the institutions necessary to provide it, would not come along until the 1870s. Consequently, "at least half of nominally school-age children worked full-time during the industrial revolution " (Horn, 57).

Some factory owners were more generous than others to the children in their employ. An example is the Quarry Bank Mill in Styal in the county of Cheshire. Here the owner provided schooling after the long working day was over for 100 of its child workers in a dedicated building, the Apprentice House.

An indicator of better education, despite all the difficulties, is literacy rates, rather imperfectly measured by historians by recording the ability of a person to sign one's name on official documents such as marriage certificates. There was a great improvement in literacy, but by 1800, still only half of the adult population could sign their name to such documents.

For those children who could find work in the Industrial Revolution, and there were employers queueing up to offer it, there were no trade unions to protect them. For the vast majority of children, working life started at an early age – on average at 8 years old – but as nobody really cared about age, this could vary wildly. Working involved at best tedium and at worst an endless round of threats, fines, corporal punishment, and instant dismissal at any protest to such treatment. In one survey taken in 1833, it was found that the tactics used with child labourers were 95% negative. Instant dismissal accounted for 58%. In only 4% of cases was a reward given for good work, and a mere 1% of the strategies used involved a promotion or pay rise.

Traditional Child Work

In the traditional cottage industry of handweaving, children had always washed and carded raw wool so that their mother could spin it on a spinning wheel, which then was woven into fabric by the father using a handloom. Craftworkers often took on an apprentice or two. Apprentices were given their board and lodgings and taught a particular trade by their master. In return, the child not only worked for free but was expected to pay a large fee upfront before starting a contract that could last a year or several years or even up to seven years, depending on the trade. Then there were children who worked in their parents' or relations' small businesses, such as small-scale manufacturers like basket-weavers, blacksmiths, and potters.

Children worked in agriculture, still a significant area during the Industrial Revolution and one which involved 35% of Britain 's total workforce in 1800. Children, as they always had done, continued to tend herds of animals and flocks of fowl, and they essentially performed any task required that they were physically capable of. Many children joined agricultural gangs which moved around to where there was temporary or seasonal employment.

Children in Mines

Men, women, and children worked in Britain's mines, particularly in the coal mines, which boomed as they produced the fuel to feed the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution. All three groups had been involved in mining before the arrival of machines, but the industry's expansion meant that many more were now involved than previously. Children as young as five years old were found useful by mine owners since they were small enough to climb into narrow ventilation shafts where they could ensure that trapdoors were regularly opened and shut. Testimony like James Pearce's in 1842 was common:

I am 12 years of age. I went down to the pits about 7 years and a half to open doors. I had a candle and a fire beside me to show me light…I was 12 hours a-day, and got 6d a day. I attended and got the money. When I was paid I took it home to my mother. I was a year and a half at this work. I once fell asleep and was well threshed by a driver. (Shelley, 42)

Most children, as they got older, were then employed to either shift the coal from the working level to the surface or to sort it out from other debris before it was shipped away. Those who pulled the coal in carts using a harness were known as 'hurriers', and those who pushed were 'thrusters'. This was back-breaking work detrimental to the child's physical development. Many parents were not opposed to their children working, despite the health hazards, since they brought in much-needed earnings for the family. In addition, over half of the children working in mines kept their employment when they reached adulthood, so it was a good route to secure a job for life. From 1800 to 1850, children composed between 20-50% of the mining workforce.

The consequence of working at such an early age was that most children employed in mines never had more than three years of schooling. Children very often suffered health problems from the physical hard work and long, 12-hour shifts. Breathing in coal dust year after year caused many to develop lung diseases later in life. As the historian S. Yorke emphatically notes, "The coal mining industry must represent one of the worst exploitations of men, women and children ever to have taken place in Britain" (98).

Children in Factories

Factories with new steam-powered machines like power looms were the great development of the Industrial Revolution, but they came at a cost. These places, especially the textile mills, were dark and noisy, and they were deliberately kept damp so that the cotton threads were more supple and less likely to break. The new mechanization of manufacturing meant that few skills were needed anymore for the basic workforce. Children were required to go under the machines to clear up cotton waste for reuse or to repair broken threads or remove blockages from the machinery. This was often dangerous work as the machines could be unpredictable. A massive weaving machine might come to a crashing halt with heavy parts falling down and movable pieces like spindles flying around like bullets.

In the factories, children worked, just like the adults around them, long 12-hour shifts six days a week. 12 hours nicely split the day in two for employers. As the machines were operated 24 hours a day, one child would return to a warm bed after work as the occupant rolled out to start their own shift, a practice known as 'hot bedding'. Children were the cheapest labour to be found, and employers were not slow to use them. A child worker was about 80% cheaper than a man and 50% cheaper than a woman. Children had the advantage of having nimble fingers and smaller bodies that could get into places and under machinery that adults could not. They could also be bullied and threatened by supervisors much more easily than an adult, and they could not fight back.

Children were also apprenticed to factory owners in a system similar to indenture. Parents were given money by their parish to allow their children to work in factories. The practice was common, and it was not until 1816 that a limit was put on how far away the children were required to work – 64 km (40 mi).

Children made up around one-third of the workforce in Britain's factories. In 1832, as the Industrial Revolution reached its final decade, these children were still subject to appalling working conditions in factories, as here described by the MP Michael Sadler, who pressed for reform:

Even, at this moment, while I am thus speaking on behalf of these oppressed children, what numbers of them are still at their toil, confined to heated rooms, bathed in perspiration, stunned with the roar of revolving wheels, poisoned with the noxious effluvia of grease and gas, til at last, weary and exhausted, they turn out almost naked, plunge into the inclement air, and creep shivering to beds from which a relay of their young work-fellows have just risen; and such is the fate of many of them at the best while in numbers of instances, they are diseased, stunted, crippled, depraved, destroyed. (Shelley, 18)

The Poor & Orphans

Children without homes and a paid position elsewhere were, if boys, often trained to become a Shoe Black, that is someone who shined shoes in the street. These paupers were given this opportunity by charitable organisations so that they would not have to go to the infamous workhouse. The workhouse was brought into existence in 1834 and was deliberately intended to be such an awful place that it did little more than keep its inhabitants alive in the belief that any more charity than that would simply encourage the poor not to bother looking for paid work. The workhouse involved what its name suggests – work, but it was tedious work indeed, typically unpleasant and repetitive tasks like crushing bones to make glue or cleaning the workhouse itself. No wonder, then, given the squalid life in the workhouse, that many children worked in factories and mines.

Government Labour Reforms

Eventually, governments did what the fledgling trade unions had struggled to achieve, and from the 1830s, the situation for workers in factories and mines, including for children, began to slowly improve. Previously, governments had always been reluctant to restrict trade in principle, preferring a laissez-faire approach to economics. It did not help that many members of Parliament were themselves large-scale employers. Nevertheless, several acts of Parliament were passed to try, although not always successfully, to limit employers' exploitation of their workforce and lay down minimum standards.

The first industry to receive restrictions on worker exploitation was the cotton industry, but soon the new laws applied to workers of any kind. The 1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act stipulated that child apprentices should not work more than 12 hours a day, they must be given a basic education, and they must attend church services no fewer than two times each month. More acts followed, and this time they applied to all working children. The 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act limited work to children 9 years or over, and they could not work for more than 12 hours per day if under 16 years of age. Possible working hours for children were established as between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. The 1833 Factory Act stipulated that children in any industry could not be legally employed under 9 years of age and could not be asked to work for more than 8 hours each day if aged 9 to 13, or no more than 12 hours each day if aged between 14 and 18. The same act prohibited all children from working at night and made it obligatory for children to attend a minimum of two hours of education each day.

Although there were many abuses of the new regulations, there were government inspectors tasked with ensuring they were followed. These officials could demand, for example, age certificates for any child employee or a certificate from a schoolmaster that the required number of hours of education had been given to a specific child.

Progressive changes followed the earlier acts. The 1842 Mines Act stipulated that no child under 10 years of age could be employed in underground work. The 1844 Factory Act limited anyone's working day to 12 hours, dangerous machines had to be placed in a separate workspace, and sanitary regulations were imposed on employers. The 1847 Factory Act further limited the working day to a maximum of 10 hours, a reduction that campaigners had long been lobbying the government to make. There were still many abusers of the new laws, and many parents still desperately needed the extra income their working children brought, but attitudes were finally changing in wider society in regard to using children for labour.

Authors like Charles Dickens wrote such damning works as Oliver Twist (1837) that pointed out the plight of poorer children. In the moralism of the Victorian period, many people now wanted children to preserve their innocence longer and not be so early exposed to the temptations and moral pitfalls of adult life. The idea that childhood was worth keeping but could be lost if not protected saw the foundation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889. The arts continued to prick people's consciences. J. M. Barries' character of Peter Pan , which first appeared in 1901, confirmed this shifting of attitudes and the realisation and recognition that childhood was a thing of value in and of itself, a precious thing that should not be obliterated in the daily grind of mines and factories.

Subscribe to topic Bibliography Related Content Books Cite This Work License

Bibliography

Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Corey, Melinda & Ochoa, George. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt & Co, 1996.
Dugan, Sally & Dugan, David. The Day the World Took Off. Channel 4 Book, 2023.
Hepplewhite, Peter. Industrial Revolution. Wayland, 2016.
Horn, Jeff. The Industrial Revolution . Greenwood, 2007.
Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution . Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Shelley, C et al. Industrialisation and Social Change in Britain. PEARSON SCHOOLS, 2016.

About the Author

Translations

We want people all over the world to learn about history. Help us and translate this article into another language!

Questions & Answers

What did the industrial revolution do to child labour, what was child labour like in britain, when did child labour start in the british industrial revolution, related content.

British Industrial Revolution

The Impact of the British Industrial Revolution

Trade Unions in the British Industrial Revolution

Social Change in the British Industrial Revolution

Agriculture in the British Industrial Revolution

The Textile Industry in the British Industrial Revolution

Free for the world, supported by you.

World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organization. For only $5 per month you can become a member and support our mission to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide.

Recommended Books

Cite This Work

Cartwright, M. (2023, April 12). Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2216/child-labour-in-the-british-industrial-revolution/

Chicago Style

Cartwright, Mark. " Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution ." World History Encyclopedia . Last modified April 12, 2023. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2216/child-labour-in-the-british-industrial-revolution/.

Cartwright, Mark. " Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 12 Apr 2023. Web. 28 Sep 2024.

License & Copyright

Submitted by Mark Cartwright , published on 12 April 2023. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike . This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.

History Classics
Your Profile
Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
This Day In History
History Podcasts
History Vault

Child Labor

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 24, 2022 | Original: October 27, 2009

Child labor, or the use of children as workers, servants and apprentices, has been practiced throughout most of human history, but reached its zenith during the Industrial Revolution. Miserable working conditions including crowded and unclean factories, a lack of safety codes and long hours were the norm. Children could be paid less and were less likely to organize into unions. Working children were typically unable to attend school, creating a cycle of poverty that was difficult to break. Nineteenth century reformers and labor organizers sought to restrict child labor and improve working conditions to uplift the masses, but it took the Great Depression—a time when Americans were desperate for employment—to shake long-held practices of child labor in the United States.

Child Labor in the United States

The Puritan work ethic of the 13 colonies and their founders valued hard work over idleness, and this ethos applied to children as well. Through the first half of the 1800s, child labor was an essential part of the agricultural and handicraft economy of the United States. Children worked on family farms and as indentured servants for others. To learn a trade, boys often began their apprenticeships between the ages of ten and fourteen.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution saw the rise of factories and mines in need of workers. Children were ideal employees because they could be paid less, were often of smaller size so could attend to tasks in tight spaces and were less likely to organize and strike against their pitiable working conditions.

Before the Civil War , women and children played a critical role in American manufacturing, though it was still a relatively small part of the economy. Advances in manufacturing techniques after the war increased the number of jobs—and therefore increased the number of child laborers.

Did you know? In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16.

Immigration and Child Labor

Immigration to the United States coincidentally peaked during the Industrial Revolution and led to a new source of labor—and child labor. When the Irish Potato Famine struck in the 1840s, Irish immigrants moved to fill lower-level factory jobs.

In the 1880s, groups from southern and eastern Europe arrived, provided a new pool of child workers. The trend continues today, as many immigrant children work in agriculture, which is exempt from certain labor laws.

National Child Labor Committee

Educational reformers of the mid-nineteenth century attempted to convince the public that a primary school education was a necessity if the nation were to advance as a whole. Several states established a minimum wage for labor and requirements for school attendance—though many of these laws were full of loopholes that were readily exploited by employers hungry for cheap labor.

Beginning in 1900, efforts to regulate or eliminate child labor became central to social reform in the United States. The National Child Labor Committee , organized in 1904, and state child labor committees led the charge.

These organizations employed flexible methods in the face of slow progress. They pioneered tactics like investigations by experts; the use of photographs of child laborers to spark outrage at the poor conditions of children at work, and persuasive lobbying efforts. They used written pamphlets, leaflets and mass mailings to reach the public.

From 1902 to 1915, child labor committees emphasized reform through state legislatures. Many laws restricting child labor were passed as part of the Progressive Era reform movement . But many Southern states resisted, leading to the decision to work for a federal child labor law. While Congress passed such laws in 1916 and 1918, the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.

The supporters of child labor laws sought a constitutional amendment authorizing federal child labor legislation and it passed in 1924, though states were not keen to ratify it; the conservative political climate of the 1920s, together with opposition from farm and church organizations fearing increased federal power over children, acted as roadblocks.

Depression-Era Child Labor

The Great Depression left thousands of Americans without jobs and led to sweeping reforms under the New Deal programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt . These focused on increasing federal oversight of the workplace and giving out-of-work adults jobs—thereby creating a powerful motive to remove children from the workforce.

Almost all of the codes developed under the National Industrial Recovery Act served to reduce child labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage for the first time, a maximum number of hour for workers in interstate commerce—and placed limitations on child labor. In effect, the employment of children under sixteen years of age was prohibited in manufacturing and mining.

‘Orphan Trains’ Brought Homeless NYC Children to Work On Farms Out West

Over a 75‑year period, up to 200,000 indigent children went from city to farm.

Mormons Tried to Stop Native Child Slavery in Utah. They Ended Up Encouraging It

Children were purchased in an attempt to save them from being degraded, but soon became a vital source of labor for early Mormon settlers.

When a Millionaire Married a Teen And Sparked Opposition to U.S. Child Marriage

Before meeting his young wife, 51‑year‑old New York real estate titan Edward Browning had taken out newspaper ads saying he wanted to adopt a 14‑year‑old girl.

Automatization and Education

Changing attitudes toward work and social reform weren’t the only factors reducing child labor; the invention of improved machinery that mechanized many of the repetitive tasks previously given to children led to a decrease of children in the workforce. Semiskilled adults took their place for more complex tasks.

Education underwent reforms, too. Many states increasing the number of years of schooling required to hold certain jobs, lengthened the school year and began to more strictly enforce truancy laws. In 1949, Congress amended the child labor law to include businesses not covered in 1938 like transportation, communications and public utilities.

Does Child Labor Exist Today?

Although child labor has been significantly stalled in the United States, it lingers in certain areas of the economy like agriculture, where migrant workers are more difficult to regulate. Since 1938, federal laws have excluded child farm workers from labor protections provided to other working children. For example, children 12 and younger can legally work in farm fields, despite the risks posed by exposure to pesticides and farm machinery.

Employers in the garment industry have turned to the children of illegal immigrants in an effort to compete with imports from low-wage nations. Despite laws limiting the number of hours of work for children and teens still attending school, the increasing cost of education means many are working longer hours to make ends meet. State-by-state enforcement of child labor laws varies to this day.

Youth Employment Laws. The University of Iowa Center . History of Child Labor in the United States. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . Children in the Fields. National Farm Worker Ministry .

HISTORY Vault

Stream thousands of hours of acclaimed series, probing documentaries and captivating specials commercial-free in HISTORY Vault

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Subject List
Take a Tour
For Authors
Subscriber Services
Publications
African American Studies
African Studies
American Literature
Anthropology
Architecture Planning and Preservation
Art History
Atlantic History
Biblical Studies
British and Irish Literature

Childhood Studies

Chinese Studies
Cinema and Media Studies
Communication
Criminology
Environmental Science
Evolutionary Biology
International Law
International Relations
Islamic Studies
Jewish Studies
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Linguistics
Literary and Critical Theory
Medieval Studies
Military History
Political Science
Public Health
Renaissance and Reformation
Social Work
Urban Studies
Victorian Literature
Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Children in the Industrial Revolution

Introduction, general overview.

Anthologies
Reference Works
Pessimists on Child Labor
Optimists on Child Labor
Exploitation of Children
Privileged versus Working Class
Children as Protagonists
Family Economy
Labor Market Equilibrium
The Factory Movement
Effectiveness and Enforcement
Apprenticeship
Informal Education
Formal Education
United States
Global Coverage

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Agency and Childhood
Childhood Publics
Children in Art History
Find more forthcoming articles...
Export Citations
Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Children in the Industrial Revolution by Carolyn Tuttle LAST REVIEWED: 13 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0197

Children aged six to sixteen who had worked on farms, in their homes, or in domestic workshops began to work away from home in textile mills and mines in the late 18th century. The novelty was not that they worked but whether the nature of their work changed and why it became a social problem. There is very little consensus among contemporaries and historians regarding the impact of industrialization on the lives of the working children. Did they benefit or were they harmed? The obvious place to begin is where the first “Industrial Revolution” occurred, Great Britain. Although it wasn’t entirely “industrial” in nature and certainly didn’t occur quickly, scholars concede that it was a time of dramatic change to industry and the economy. Contemporaries and historians disagree, however, on what role children played. Some claim that children constituted a large percentage of the workforce, their tasks were essential to the production process, they were independent wage earners, and their contribution to the family was significant. Other argue that idleness and unemployment was more the problem and that children had been contributing to the family income for decades. The most contentious debate revolves around whether or not children were exploited in the new industries. A few contemporaries were thrilled to see children hard at work while others were horrified and felt it had become a social problem. A group of concerned parliamentarians ordered reports on the conditions in the textile factories and mines, hoping to settle the debate. Factory and mining commissioners surveyed hundreds of working children, parents, and overseers to document the effects of employment on children. The evidence from these reports was used to develop labor legislation that would regulate child labor but not eliminate it. Pessimists used this evidence as well as personal observations to argue that children were exploited and must be protected. Optimists argued the evidence was biased and that factory children suffered no worse than those in domestic industry. As a consequence of the Factory Movement, legislation was passed but its effectiveness is disputable because enforcement proved difficult. Using data from other Parliamentary Papers historians have furthered the debate over children’s welfare by comparing health records of children in industry to others, with conflicting conclusions. There is consensus, however, that a formal education was logistically impossible and not particularly relevant for working-class children. Child labor persisted as other European and North American countries industrialized. History is repeating itself, as research by ethnographers, economists, and historians has documented substantial child labor in developing countries today.

There is considerable debate as to the novelty of child labor during the Industrial Revolution and whether it was dramatically different in the factories and mines than it had been on farms and in homes. Berg 1986 , Pinchbeck 1930 , and Wallace 2010 claim that the nature of child labor did not change by demonstrating that children had been working hard for centuries in the informal economy. Historically, child labor referred to any work children did, whether or not they were paid. This includes a diverse set of activities ranging from running errands to straw plaiting. Other scholars argue industrialization changed the nature of child labor by removing them from their home and parental supervision into factories and mines where they worked long hours in unhealthy conditions and were mistreated. There are a number of scholars who concentrate on child labor in the formal economy in the textile industry. Tuttle 1999 and Pollard 1965 conclude children’s work in textile factories was noticeably worse than in the cottage industry due to the new industrial regime. The textile industry became Britain’s leading industry as the extraordinary demands of the industrialists and their automated machinery placed new burdens on children. The arduous tasks children performed on the new spinning machines are meticulously described by Bolin-Hort 1989 and Chapman 1967 . There are other scholars who focus on children working in the formal economy in the coal and metallurgy mines. In the literature on children working in the mines there is a consensus that this work was dramatically different from work in the cottage industry and that children suffered. Leifchild 1853 and Leifchild 1857 provide extensive details (ages, numbers of children, working conditions) on children working underground in coal mines and above ground in metallurgy mines. Tuttle 1999 augments Leifchild’s data with information from the 1842 Report of the Mines to develop a comprehensive picture of the importance of child labor in coal and metallurgy mines.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

An in-depth examination of “the other Industrial Revolution” is developed by analyzing the life of artisans, their tools, and their skills to shed light on the variety of production types that co-existed during the Industrial Revolution. The extent and broad coverage of children in various cottage industries (metal, leather, silk, paper, and printing) with accompanying illustrations of the techniques they used fills a void in the literature.

Bolin-Hort, Per. Work, Family and the State: Child Labor and the Organization of Production in the British Cotton Industry . Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1989.

This book offers a different perspective on the reason numerous children were employed in the textile mills. A comparative analysis of the new spinning machinery adopted in British, Scottish, and American textile factories casts doubt on a primarily technology-driven argument. Instead, the use of child labor was also driven by labor relations (subcontracting between the spinner and piecer) and union goals to limit the supply of spinners.

Chapman, Stanley D. Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Textile Industry . Devon, UK: Newton Abbot, 1967.

The major problem facing industrialists was the recruitment and retention of a productive labor force for the textile mills. The organization of production under one roof and the adoption of machines that required unskilled labor increased the demand for women and children. A thorough examination of the labor requirements of each innovation beginning with the Spinning Jenny provides an explanation for the increased demand for children in the textile industry.

Leifchild, J. R. Our Coal and Our Coal-Pit: The People in Them and the Scenes around Them . London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853.

An extremely detailed description from a contemporary of the workings of a coal mine and the various tasks performed. Sketches of coal seams, methods of excavation, and personal observations below and above ground reveal the unhealthy and dangerous working conditions of trappers and putters. It also includes some statistics on the number of children employed and their wages.

Leifchild, J. R. Cornwall: Its Mines and Miners . London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857.

A contemporary’s detailed description of the workings of tin and copper mines in Cornwall. In contrast to coal mines, children usually worked with their father and did not work underground. The largest number of children, mostly girls, worked as “bal-maidens” dressing the ores. Along with an analysis of the 1842 Report on the Mines, statistics on the number of children and the output of various mines are presented.

Pinchbeck, Ivy. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1800 . London: George Routledge, 1930.

Pinchbeck offers a broad examination of the role of women and children in the family economy beginning in agricultural gangs, moving to cottage industries (lace makers, straw plaiting, glove making, and button making) and ending in textile factories and mines. She argues that the working conditions and exploitation of children in the cottage industry were far worse than they were in the factories and coal mines.

Pollard, Sidney. The Genesis of Modern Management . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

This book describes how the labor requirements for factory work were dramatically different from those in the cottage industries. It argues that industrialists hired children because they found it difficult to recruit adult workers to enter the factory system with its rules and discipline. The children because of their obedient nature made especially productive workers in this new industrial regime.

Tuttle, Carolyn. Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution . Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

A detailed economic analysis of child labor in the textile and mining industry. It makes the argument that child labor was driven by the demand for labor due to biased technological change. Considerable empirical data from the British Parliamentary Papers and qualitative data on the new automated machinery and underground tunnels offer support that children were preferred because of their physical, emotional, and psychological characteristics.

Wallace, Eileen. Children of the Labouring Poor: The Working Lives of Children in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire . Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.

Using testimony of children from factory inspectors, school log books, and newspaper accounts of living conditions, this book provides a thorough examination of the lives of working children during 19th-century Hertfordshire. It describes, and often illustrates, children working in agriculture, straw plaiting, brickfields, silk, papermaking, domestic service, textile mills, and chimneys. Wallace concludes that children in brickfields and chimneys suffered the most (not the factory children).

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

About Childhood Studies »
Meet the Editorial Board »
Abduction of Children
Aboriginal Childhoods
Addams, Jane
ADHD, Sociological Perspectives on
Adolescence and Youth
Adolescent Consent to Medical Treatment
Adoption and Fostering
Adoption and Fostering, History of Cross-Country
Adoption and Fostering in Canada, History of
Advertising and Marketing, Psychological Approaches to
Advertising and Marketing, Sociocultural Approaches to
Africa, Children and Young People in
African American Children and Childhood
After-school Hours and Activities
Aggression across the Lifespan
Ancient Near and Middle East, Child Sacrifice in the
Animals, Children and
Animations, Comic Books, and Manga
Anthropology of Childhood
Archaeology of Childhood
Ariès, Philippe
Art History, Children in
Attachment in Children and Adolescents
Australia, History of Adoption and Fostering in
Australian Indigenous Contexts and Childhood Experiences
Autism, Females and
Autism, Medical Model Perspectives on
Autobiography and Childhood
Benjamin, Walter
Bereavement
Best Interest of the Child
Bioarchaeology of Childhood
Body, Children and the
Bourdieu, Pierre
Boy Scouts/Girl Guides
Boys and Fatherhood
Breastfeeding
Bronfenbrenner, Urie
Bruner, Jerome
Buddhist Views of Childhood
Byzantine Childhoods
Child and Adolescent Anger
Child Beauty Pageants
Child Homelessness
Child Mortality, Historical Perspectives on Infant and
Child Protection
Child Protection, Children, Neoliberalism, and
Child Public Health
Child Trafficking and Slavery
Childcare Manuals
Childhod, Agency and
Childhood and Borders
Childhood and Empire
Childhood as Discourse
Childhood, Confucian Views of Children and
Childhood, Memory and
Childhood Studies and Leisure Studies
Childhood Studies in France
Childhood Studies, Interdisciplinarity in
Childhood Studies, Posthumanism and
Childhoods in the United States, Sports and
Children and Dance
Children and Film-Making
Children and Money
Children and Social Media
Children and Sport
Children and Sustainable Cities
Children as Language Brokers
Children as Perpetrators of Crime
Children, Code-switching and
Children in the Industrial Revolution
Children with Autism in a Brazilian Context
Children, Young People, and Architecture
Children's Humor
Children’s Museums
Children’s Parliaments
Children’s Reading Development and Instruction
Children's Views of Childhood
China, Japan, and Korea
China's One Child Policy
Citizenship
Civil Rights Movement and Desegregation
Classical World, Children in the
Clothes and Costume, Children’s
Colonial America, Child Witches in
Colonialism and Human Rights
Colonization and Nationalism
Color Symbolism and Child Development
Common World Childhoods
Competitiveness, Children and
Conceptual Development in Early Childhood
Congenital Disabilities
Constructivist Approaches to Childhood
Consumer Culture, Children and
Consumption, Child and Teen
Conversation Analysis and Research with Children
Critical Approaches to Children’s Work and the Concept of ...
Cultural psychology and human development
Debt and Financialization of Childhood
Discipline and Punishment
Discrimination
Disney, Walt
Divorce And Custody
Domestic Violence
Drawings, Children’s
Early Childhood
Early Childhood Care and Education, Selected History of
Eating disorders and obesity
Education: Learning and Schooling Worldwide
Environment, Children and the
Environmental Education and Children
Ethics in Research with Children
Europe (including Greece and Rome), Child Sacrifice in
Evolutionary Studies of Childhood
Family Meals
Fandom (Fan Studies)
Female Genital Cutting
Feminist New Materialist Approaches to Childhood Studies
Feral and "Wild" Children
Fetuses and Embryos
Films about Children
Films for Children
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales and
Freud, Anna
Freud, Sigmund
Friends and Peers: Psychological Perspectives
Froebel, Friedrich
Gay and Lesbian Parents
Gender and Childhood
Generations, The Concept of
Geographies, Children's
Gifted and Talented Children
Globalization
Growing Up in the Digital Era
Hall, G. Stanley
Happiness in Children
Hindu Views of Childhood and Child Rearing
Hispanic Childhoods (U.S.)
Historical Approaches to Child Witches
History of Childhood in Canada
HIV/AIDS, Growing Up with
Homeschooling
Humor and Laughter
Images of Childhood, Adulthood, and Old Age in Children’s ...
Infancy and Ethnography
Infant Mortality in a Global Context
Innocence and Childhood
Institutional Care
Intercultural Learning and Teaching with Children
Islamic Views of Childhood
Japan, Childhood in
Juvenile Detention in the US
Klein, Melanie
Labor, Child
Latin America
Learning, Language
Learning to Write
Legends, Contemporary
Literary Representations of Childhood
Literature, Children's
Love and Care in the Early Years
Magazines for Teenagers
Maltreatment, Child
Maria Montessori
Masculinities/Boyhood
Material Cultures of Western Childhoods
Mead, Margaret
Media, Children in the
Media Culture, Children's
Medieval and Anglo-Saxon Childhoods
Menstruation
Middle Childhood
Middle East
Miscarriage
Missionaries/Evangelism
Moral Development
Moral Panics
Multi-culturalism and Education
Music and Babies
Nation and Childhood
Native American and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood
New Reproductive Technologies and Assisted Conception
Nursery Rhymes
Organizations, Nongovernmental
Parental Gender Preferences, The Social Construction of
Pediatrics, History of
Peer Culture
Perspectives on Boys' Circumcision
Philosophy and Childhood
Piaget, Jean
Politics, Children and
Postcolonial Childhoods
Post-Modernism
Poverty, Rights, and Well-being, Child
Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods
Premodern China, Conceptions of Childhood in
Prostitution and Pornography, Child
Psychoanalysis
Queer Theory and Childhood
Race and Ethnicity
Racism, Children and
Radio, Children, and Young People
Readers, Children as
Refugee and Displaced Children
Reimagining Early Childhood Education, Reconceptualizing a...
Relational Ontologies
Relational Pedagogies
Rights, Children’s
Risk and Resilience
School Shootings
Sex Education in the United States
Social and Cultural Capital of Childhood
Social Habitus in Childhood
Social Movements, Children's
Social Policy, Children and
Socialization and Child Rearing
Socio-cultural Perspectives on Children's Spirituality
Sociology of Childhood
South African Birth to Twenty Project
South Asia, History of Childhood in
Special Education
Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence
Spock, Benjamin
Sports and Organized Games
Street Children
Street Children And Brazil
Subcultures
Teenage Fathers
Teenage Pregnancy
The Bible and Children
The Harms and Prevention of Drugs and Alcohol on Children
The Spaces of Childhood
Theater for Children and Young People
Theories, Pedagogic
Transgender Children
Twins and Multiple Births
Unaccompanied Migrant Children
United Kingdom, History of Adoption and Fostering in the
United States, Schooling in the
Value of Children
Views of Childhood, Jewish and Christian
Violence, Children and
Visual Representations of Childhood
Voice, Participation, and Agency
Vygotsky, Lev and His Cultural-historical Approach to Deve...
Welfare Law in the United States, Child
Well-Being, Child
Witchcraft in the Contemporary World, Children and
Work and Apprenticeship, Children's
Young Carers
Young Children and Inclusion
Young Children’s Imagination
Young Lives
Young People, Alcohol, and Urban Life
Young People and Climate Activism
Young People and Disadvantaged Environments in Affluent Co...
Privacy Policy
Cookie Policy
Legal Notice
Accessibility

[81.177.182.159]
81.177.182.159

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

Download Free PDF

Child Labor, Social History, and the Industrial Revolution: A Methodological Inquiry

Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon that has, at times, been neglected by historians. That’s not to say that little ink has been spilled about industrialization and child labor over the past two centuries; quite the opposite. Industrialism’s role in child labor and its intensification of misery and exploitation of children has been a consistent theme since industrialization itself. This essay centers on two more recent, but pivotal texts in the history of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, namely Clark Nardinelli’s Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (1990) and Jane Humphries’s Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010). While each historian had taken an economic approach to the social history of the period, the differences between their approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, are instructive. Interspersed with these two texts on child labor will be E.P. Thompson’s celebrated The Making of the English Working Class (1963), to examine the way historians have went about constructing their social histories of the British Industrial Revolution. We will also touch on the standard of living debate, for this touches on important methodological disputes as well. Finally, this essay will offer a different approach to examining these historical problems, an approach to the social sciences pioneered by economist Ludwig von Mises in his magnum opus on economics, entitled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949). This approach will not resolve every question of methodology and interpretation advanced by the authors we will be reviewing here, but it will be applied to a few concrete examples to illustrate its usefulness in resolving some of the historical controversy, or at least clarify it.

Related papers

Historians agree that Industrial Revolution is associated with technical innovations, increase in industrial production, a renaissance of world trade, and rapid growth of urban populations. However, they disagree on the interpretation of these great changes with respect to whether they were "good" or "bad" and the extent to which they improved the lives of the citizens. Perhaps no other issue within this realm has generated more intellectual heat than the one concerning child labour. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that more than 250 million children are working around the world, often in occupations that are detrimental to their physical, mental and emotional well-being. An estimated 120 million children work full time, with no opportunities for education and the accompanying promise of a better future. The paper argues that though industrial revolution is not the direct cause of child labour given that children had worked in farms earlier on, it increased and intensified the opportunities for the exploitation of children especially in the face of globalisation. It therefore recommends Ratification of certain Conventions,

The World Bank Economic Review, 2003

Development and Change, 1982

This article examines the removal of children from factories and their integration into the school system in the early nineteenth century, using decommodification as a conceptual framework. The Swiss canton of Aargau serves as a case study - a region where the textile industry flourished and a liberal government came to power after the July Revolution, subsequently enforcing compulsory education. Through a nuanced exploration of diverse sources, the article argues that decommodification was a deeply contentious process marked by conflicts between working-class families, factory owners, the state, and the church. Simultaneously, these conflicts unleashed dynamic forces that coded working-class childhood in terms of age and gender. It is this transformational power that underscores the interpretative potential of decommodification as a constructive process of Vergesellschaftung (sociation). Beyond simply freeing children from labour obligations, the prohibition of factory work reintegrated them intricately into the social fabric of the economy.

The Economic History Review, 2015

International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

Social History of Medicine, 2017

Journal of Social History, 2008

International Journal of Publication and Social Studies

Studia Historiae Oeconomicae Volume 41 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023), 2023

Children's Literature, 2015

Law Journal of Donbass, 2020

Briefing Notes in Economics, 2010

Journal of Economic Literature, 1999

Labour and Value, 2019

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

The Economic Journal, 2005

Liverpool History Society Journal, 2010

Sign in through your institution

Browse content in A - General Economics and Teaching
Browse content in A1 - General Economics
A12 - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
A13 - Relation of Economics to Social Values
A14 - Sociology of Economics
Browse content in B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches
Browse content in B2 - History of Economic Thought since 1925
B25 - Historical; Institutional; Evolutionary; Austrian
B26 - Financial Economics
Browse content in B4 - Economic Methodology
B40 - General
B41 - Economic Methodology
Browse content in B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches
B52 - Institutional; Evolutionary
Browse content in C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods
Browse content in C0 - General
C01 - Econometrics
Browse content in C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General
C11 - Bayesian Analysis: General
C12 - Hypothesis Testing: General
C14 - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods: General
C15 - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
Browse content in C2 - Single Equation Models; Single Variables
C21 - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions
C23 - Panel Data Models; Spatio-temporal Models
C25 - Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models; Discrete Regressors; Proportions; Probabilities
C26 - Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation
Browse content in C3 - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables
C31 - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions; Social Interaction Models
C33 - Panel Data Models; Spatio-temporal Models
C38 - Classification Methods; Cluster Analysis; Principal Components; Factor Models
Browse content in C4 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics
C40 - General
C41 - Duration Analysis; Optimal Timing Strategies
C49 - Other
Browse content in C6 - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling
C60 - General
C61 - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis
C62 - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium
Browse content in C9 - Design of Experiments
C90 - General
C99 - Other
Browse content in D - Microeconomics
Browse content in D0 - General
D00 - General
D01 - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
D02 - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
D03 - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
Browse content in D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics
D13 - Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation
D14 - Household Saving; Personal Finance
D19 - Other
Browse content in D2 - Production and Organizations
D21 - Firm Behavior: Theory
D22 - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
D23 - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
D24 - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
Browse content in D3 - Distribution
D31 - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
Browse content in D4 - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design
D41 - Perfect Competition
D43 - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
Browse content in D5 - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium
D53 - Financial Markets
Browse content in D6 - Welfare Economics
D61 - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
D62 - Externalities
D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
D64 - Altruism; Philanthropy
Browse content in D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
D72 - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
D74 - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
D78 - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
Browse content in D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
D80 - General
D81 - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
D82 - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
D83 - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
D85 - Network Formation and Analysis: Theory
Browse content in D9 - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics
D92 - Intertemporal Firm Choice, Investment, Capacity, and Financing
Browse content in E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
Browse content in E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy
E21 - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
E22 - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity
E24 - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
Browse content in E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
E32 - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
Browse content in E4 - Money and Interest Rates
E40 - General
Browse content in E5 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit
E58 - Central Banks and Their Policies
Browse content in F - International Economics
Browse content in F0 - General
F00 - General
F02 - International Economic Order and Integration
Browse content in F1 - Trade
F10 - General
F11 - Neoclassical Models of Trade
F12 - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
F13 - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
F14 - Empirical Studies of Trade
F15 - Economic Integration
F16 - Trade and Labor Market Interactions
F18 - Trade and Environment
Browse content in F2 - International Factor Movements and International Business
F20 - General
F21 - International Investment; Long-Term Capital Movements
F22 - International Migration
F23 - Multinational Firms; International Business
Browse content in F3 - International Finance
F30 - General
F31 - Foreign Exchange
F32 - Current Account Adjustment; Short-Term Capital Movements
F33 - International Monetary Arrangements and Institutions
F34 - International Lending and Debt Problems
F36 - Financial Aspects of Economic Integration
Browse content in F4 - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance
F40 - General
F41 - Open Economy Macroeconomics
F43 - Economic Growth of Open Economies
F44 - International Business Cycles
Browse content in F5 - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy
F50 - General
F52 - National Security; Economic Nationalism
F55 - International Institutional Arrangements
Browse content in F6 - Economic Impacts of Globalization
F60 - General
F61 - Microeconomic Impacts
F63 - Economic Development
F65 - Finance
F66 - Labor
F68 - Policy
Browse content in G - Financial Economics
Browse content in G0 - General
G00 - General
G01 - Financial Crises
G02 - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
Browse content in G1 - General Financial Markets
G10 - General
G11 - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
G12 - Asset Pricing; Trading volume; Bond Interest Rates
G14 - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
G15 - International Financial Markets
G18 - Government Policy and Regulation
Browse content in G2 - Financial Institutions and Services
G20 - General
G21 - Banks; Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
G22 - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
G23 - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
G24 - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage; Ratings and Ratings Agencies
G28 - Government Policy and Regulation
Browse content in G3 - Corporate Finance and Governance
G30 - General
G31 - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies; Capacity
G32 - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
G34 - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
G38 - Government Policy and Regulation
Browse content in H - Public Economics
H0 - General
Browse content in H1 - Structure and Scope of Government
H11 - Structure, Scope, and Performance of Government
H12 - Crisis Management
H13 - Economics of Eminent Domain; Expropriation; Nationalization
Browse content in H2 - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
H20 - General
H21 - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
H23 - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
H25 - Business Taxes and Subsidies
H26 - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
H27 - Other Sources of Revenue
Browse content in H3 - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents
H31 - Household
Browse content in H4 - Publicly Provided Goods
H41 - Public Goods
H43 - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
H44 - Publicly Provided Goods: Mixed Markets
Browse content in H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
H52 - Government Expenditures and Education
H53 - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
H54 - Infrastructures; Other Public Investment and Capital Stock
H55 - Social Security and Public Pensions
H56 - National Security and War
H57 - Procurement
Browse content in H7 - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations
H70 - General
H71 - State and Local Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
H72 - State and Local Budget and Expenditures
H73 - Interjurisdictional Differentials and Their Effects
H74 - State and Local Borrowing
H75 - State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
H76 - State and Local Government: Other Expenditure Categories
H77 - Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism; Secession
Browse content in H8 - Miscellaneous Issues
H81 - Governmental Loans; Loan Guarantees; Credits; Grants; Bailouts
H89 - Other
Browse content in I - Health, Education, and Welfare
I0 - General
Browse content in I1 - Health
I14 - Health and Inequality
I18 - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
Browse content in I2 - Education and Research Institutions
I20 - General
I21 - Analysis of Education
I22 - Educational Finance; Financial Aid
I23 - Higher Education; Research Institutions
I24 - Education and Inequality
I25 - Education and Economic Development
I28 - Government Policy
I29 - Other
Browse content in I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
I30 - General
I31 - General Welfare
I32 - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
I38 - Government Policy; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
Browse content in J - Labor and Demographic Economics
Browse content in J0 - General
J01 - Labor Economics: General
Browse content in J1 - Demographic Economics
J10 - General
J11 - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
J12 - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
J13 - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
J15 - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
J18 - Public Policy
J19 - Other
Browse content in J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor
J21 - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
J22 - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
J23 - Labor Demand
J24 - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Browse content in J3 - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
J30 - General
J31 - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
J32 - Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions
J38 - Public Policy
Browse content in J4 - Particular Labor Markets
J40 - General
J41 - Labor Contracts
J42 - Monopsony; Segmented Labor Markets
J44 - Professional Labor Markets; Occupational Licensing
J45 - Public Sector Labor Markets
Browse content in J5 - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining
J50 - General
J51 - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
J53 - Labor-Management Relations; Industrial Jurisprudence
Browse content in J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
J60 - General
J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
J62 - Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility
J63 - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
J64 - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
J65 - Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings
Browse content in J7 - Labor Discrimination
J71 - Discrimination
Browse content in J8 - Labor Standards: National and International
J80 - General
J81 - Working Conditions
J83 - Workers' Rights
Browse content in K - Law and Economics
Browse content in K0 - General
K00 - General
Browse content in K2 - Regulation and Business Law
K23 - Regulated Industries and Administrative Law
Browse content in K3 - Other Substantive Areas of Law
K35 - Personal Bankruptcy Law
K37 - Immigration Law
Browse content in K4 - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior
K41 - Litigation Process
K42 - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
K49 - Other
Browse content in L - Industrial Organization
Browse content in L0 - General
L00 - General
Browse content in L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
L10 - General
L11 - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
L13 - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
L14 - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation; Networks
L16 - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics: Industrial Structure and Structural Change; Industrial Price Indices
Browse content in L2 - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
L20 - General
L21 - Business Objectives of the Firm
L22 - Firm Organization and Market Structure
L23 - Organization of Production
L25 - Firm Performance: Size, Diversification, and Scope
L26 - Entrepreneurship
Browse content in L3 - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise
L30 - General
L31 - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship
L38 - Public Policy
Browse content in L5 - Regulation and Industrial Policy
L51 - Economics of Regulation
L52 - Industrial Policy; Sectoral Planning Methods
L53 - Enterprise Policy
Browse content in L6 - Industry Studies: Manufacturing
L60 - General
L62 - Automobiles; Other Transportation Equipment; Related Parts and Equipment
L63 - Microelectronics; Computers; Communications Equipment
L64 - Other Machinery; Business Equipment; Armaments
L65 - Chemicals; Rubber; Drugs; Biotechnology
L66 - Food; Beverages; Cosmetics; Tobacco; Wine and Spirits
L67 - Other Consumer Nondurables: Clothing, Textiles, Shoes, and Leather Goods; Household Goods; Sports Equipment
Browse content in L7 - Industry Studies: Primary Products and Construction
L71 - Mining, Extraction, and Refining: Hydrocarbon Fuels
L74 - Construction
Browse content in L8 - Industry Studies: Services
L80 - General
L81 - Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce
L82 - Entertainment; Media
L83 - Sports; Gambling; Recreation; Tourism
L84 - Personal, Professional, and Business Services
L85 - Real Estate Services
L86 - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
Browse content in L9 - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities
L90 - General
L91 - Transportation: General
L92 - Railroads and Other Surface Transportation
L93 - Air Transportation
Browse content in M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics
Browse content in M1 - Business Administration
M10 - General
M13 - New Firms; Startups
M16 - International Business Administration
Browse content in M2 - Business Economics
M21 - Business Economics
Browse content in M3 - Marketing and Advertising
M30 - General
M31 - Marketing
M39 - Other
Browse content in M5 - Personnel Economics
M51 - Firm Employment Decisions; Promotions
M52 - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
Browse content in N - Economic History
Browse content in N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations
N10 - General, International, or Comparative
N13 - Europe: Pre-1913
N16 - Latin America; Caribbean
Browse content in N2 - Financial Markets and Institutions
N20 - General, International, or Comparative
N25 - Asia including Middle East
Browse content in N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
N30 - General, International, or Comparative
N33 - Europe: Pre-1913
N34 - Europe: 1913-
N37 - Africa; Oceania
Browse content in N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation
N44 - Europe: 1913-
Browse content in N5 - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries
N50 - General, International, or Comparative
N51 - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
N57 - Africa; Oceania
Browse content in N6 - Manufacturing and Construction
N61 - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
N64 - Europe: 1913-
Browse content in N7 - Transport, Trade, Energy, Technology, and Other Services
N70 - General, International, or Comparative
N71 - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
N72 - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
N73 - Europe: Pre-1913
N74 - Europe: 1913-
N77 - Africa; Oceania
Browse content in N9 - Regional and Urban History
N90 - General, International, or Comparative
N92 - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
N93 - Europe: Pre-1913
N94 - Europe: 1913-
N95 - Asia including Middle East
N97 - Africa; Oceania
Browse content in O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth
Browse content in O1 - Economic Development
O10 - General
O11 - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
O12 - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
O13 - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Other Primary Products
O14 - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
O15 - Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
O16 - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance
O17 - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
O18 - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure
O19 - International Linkages to Development; Role of International Organizations
Browse content in O2 - Development Planning and Policy
O20 - General
O21 - Planning Models; Planning Policy
O24 - Trade Policy; Factor Movement Policy; Foreign Exchange Policy
O25 - Industrial Policy
Browse content in O3 - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights
O30 - General
O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
O32 - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D
O33 - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
O34 - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital
O38 - Government Policy
Browse content in O4 - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity
O40 - General
O41 - One, Two, and Multisector Growth Models
O43 - Institutions and Growth
O47 - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
Browse content in O5 - Economywide Country Studies
O51 - U.S.; Canada
O52 - Europe
O53 - Asia including Middle East
O54 - Latin America; Caribbean
O55 - Africa
O57 - Comparative Studies of Countries
Browse content in P - Economic Systems
Browse content in P1 - Capitalist Systems
P12 - Capitalist Enterprises
P13 - Cooperative Enterprises
P16 - Political Economy
P18 - Energy: Environment
Browse content in P2 - Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies
P20 - General
P25 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
P26 - Political Economy; Property Rights
Browse content in P3 - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions
P30 - General
P31 - Socialist Enterprises and Their Transitions
Browse content in P4 - Other Economic Systems
P48 - Political Economy; Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies
Browse content in P5 - Comparative Economic Systems
P51 - Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems
Browse content in Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics
Browse content in Q0 - General
Q00 - General
Q01 - Sustainable Development
Q02 - Commodity Markets
Browse content in Q1 - Agriculture
Q10 - General
Q12 - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets
Q15 - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
Q16 - R&D; Agricultural Technology; Biofuels; Agricultural Extension Services
Q17 - Agriculture in International Trade
Browse content in Q2 - Renewable Resources and Conservation
Q20 - General
Q28 - Government Policy
Browse content in Q3 - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation
Q32 - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development
Q34 - Natural Resources and Domestic and International Conflicts
Q38 - Government Policy
Browse content in Q4 - Energy
Q40 - General
Q42 - Alternative Energy Sources
Q48 - Government Policy
Q49 - Other
Browse content in Q5 - Environmental Economics
Q50 - General
Q51 - Valuation of Environmental Effects
Q52 - Pollution Control Adoption Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
Q53 - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
Q54 - Climate; Natural Disasters; Global Warming
Q55 - Technological Innovation
Q56 - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth
Browse content in R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics
Browse content in R0 - General
R00 - General
Browse content in R1 - General Regional Economics
R10 - General
R11 - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes
R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
R13 - General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies
R14 - Land Use Patterns
R15 - Econometric and Input-Output Models; Other Models
R19 - Other
Browse content in R2 - Household Analysis
R20 - General
R21 - Housing Demand
R23 - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics
R28 - Government Policy
R29 - Other
Browse content in R3 - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location
R30 - General
R31 - Housing Supply and Markets
R32 - Other Spatial Production and Pricing Analysis
R33 - Nonagricultural and Nonresidential Real Estate Markets
R34 - Input Demand Analysis
R38 - Government Policy
R39 - Other
Browse content in R4 - Transportation Economics
R40 - General
R41 - Transportation: Demand, Supply, and Congestion; Travel Time; Safety and Accidents; Transportation Noise
R42 - Government and Private Investment Analysis; Road Maintenance; Transportation Planning
R48 - Government Pricing and Policy
R49 - Other
Browse content in R5 - Regional Government Analysis
R50 - General
R51 - Finance in Urban and Rural Economies
R52 - Land Use and Other Regulations
R53 - Public Facility Location Analysis; Public Investment and Capital Stock
R58 - Regional Development Planning and Policy
R59 - Other
Browse content in Y - Miscellaneous Categories
Browse content in Y8 - Related Disciplines
Y80 - Related Disciplines
Browse content in Z - Other Special Topics
Browse content in Z1 - Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology
Z10 - General
Z11 - Economics of the Arts and Literature
Z12 - Religion
Z13 - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Social and Economic Stratification
Z19 - Other
Advance articles
Author Guidelines
Submission Site
Open Access
Why Publish
About Journal of Economic Geography
Editorial Board
Advertising and Corporate Services
Journals Career Network
Self-Archiving Policy
Dispatch Dates
Terms and Conditions
Journals on Oxford Academic
Books on Oxford Academic
< Previous

Childhood and child labour in the British Industrial Revolution Jane Humphries

Article contents
Figures & tables
Supplementary Data

Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Childhood and child labour in the British Industrial Revolution Jane Humphries, Journal of Economic Geography , Volume 11, Issue 5, September 2011, Pages 921–922, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbr012

Permissions Icon Permissions

Child labour in the Global South evokes emotive responses often displacing the realities of material scarcity and socio-economic inequity which precipitates the use of labouring children in the working world by deprived families. From Jane Humphries brilliant, humane and imaginative account of child labour in Victorian Britain, it also seems that current debates dominating development and economic debates are devoid of historical understanding of the ways in which social and economic inequities fundamentally intersect and lead to its persistence. She shows how shifting away from child labour occurs only with sustained improvements in wages earned by men, decreased wage inequality and legislative initiatives eventually put in place to protect vulnerable workers from lengthy working days. In other words, when workplaces begun to be regulated. Understanding these historical processes is done through the lens of working children's autobiographies. Humphries caringly enlivens their life stories for us; she goes beyond, however, to creatively use this source to elicit quantitative evidence and merge a proxy household survey so that we can appreciate working-class boys and the realities of working-class families in their myriad forms.

Personal account

Sign in with email/username & password
Get email alerts
Save searches
Purchase content
Activate your purchase/trial code
Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with username/password
Recommend to your librarian
Institutional account management
Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutionâ€™s website and Oxford Academic.

Click Sign in through your institution.
Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutionâ€™s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see â€˜Sign in through society siteâ€™ in the sign in pane within a journal:

Click Sign in through society site.
When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Short-term Access

To purchase short-term access, please sign in to your personal account above.

Don't already have a personal account? Register

Month:	Total Views:
January 2017	3
February 2017	12
March 2017	12
April 2017	6
May 2017	4
July 2017	2
August 2017	4
September 2017	3
October 2017	6
November 2017	4
December 2017	15
January 2018	1
February 2018	2
March 2018	3
April 2018	3
May 2018	2
June 2018	2
July 2018	1
September 2018	6
October 2018	12
November 2018	13
December 2018	17
January 2019	4
February 2019	4
March 2019	3
April 2019	11
June 2019	2
July 2019	1
September 2019	3
October 2019	3
November 2019	9
December 2019	11
January 2020	8
March 2020	2
April 2020	6
September 2020	3
October 2020	5
December 2020	9
January 2021	1
February 2021	2
March 2021	5
May 2021	2
June 2021	8
July 2021	2
August 2021	2
September 2021	5
October 2021	19
November 2021	2
December 2021	6
January 2022	1
February 2022	8
March 2022	3
April 2022	6
May 2022	6
June 2022	3
July 2022	1
August 2022	3
September 2022	1
October 2022	5
November 2022	3
December 2022	11
January 2023	3
February 2023	2
March 2023	5
April 2023	5
May 2023	1
June 2023	8
July 2023	1
October 2023	13
December 2023	7
February 2024	22
March 2024	7
April 2024	8
May 2024	1
June 2024	2
July 2024	2
September 2024	3

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

Online ISSN 1468-2710
Print ISSN 1468-2702
About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Rights and permissions
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

History & Society
Science & Tech
Biographies
Animals & Nature
Geography & Travel
Arts & Culture
Games & Quizzes
On This Day
One Good Fact
New Articles
Lifestyles & Social Issues
Philosophy & Religion
Politics, Law & Government
World History
Health & Medicine
Browse Biographies
Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
Environment
Fossils & Geologic Time
Entertainment & Pop Culture
Sports & Recreation
Visual Arts
Demystified
Image Galleries
Infographics
Top Questions
Britannica Kids
Saving Earth
Space Next 50
Student Center

child labour

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Canadian Encyclopedia - Child Labour
EH.net - Child Labor during the British Industrial Revolution
Social Welfare History Project - Child Labor
International Labour Organization - What is child labour
Academia - Child Labour in India
National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Challenges and perspectives of child labor
child labor - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
child labor - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

child labour , employment of children of less than a legally specified age. In Europe , North America , Australia , and New Zealand , children under age 15 rarely work except in commercial agriculture, because of the effective enforcement of laws passed in the first half of the 20th century. In the United States , for example, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set the minimum age at 14 for employment outside of school hours in nonmanufacturing jobs, at 16 for employment during school hours in interstate commerce , and at 18 for occupations deemed hazardous.

Child labour is far more prevalent in developing countries , where millions of children—some as young as seven—still toil in quarries, mines, factories, fields, and service enterprises. They make up more than 10 percent of the labour force in some countries in the Middle East and from 2 to 10 percent in much of Latin America and some parts of Asia. Few, if any, laws govern their employment or the conditions under which work is performed. Restrictive legislation is rendered impractical by family poverty and lack of schools.

The movement to regulate child labour began in Great Britain at the close of the 18th century, when the rapid development of large-scale manufacturing made possible the exploitation of young children in mining and industrial work. The first law, in 1802, which was aimed at controlling the apprenticeship of pauper children to cotton-mill owners, was ineffective because it did not provide for enforcement. In 1833 the Factory Act did provide a system of factory inspection.

Organized international efforts to regulate child labour began with the first International Labour Conference in Berlin in 1890. Although agreement on standards was not reached at that time, similar conferences and other international moves followed. In 1900 the International Association for Labour Legislation was established at Basel, Switzerland, to promote child labour provisions as part of other international labour legislation. A report published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) of the United Nations in 1960 on law and practice among more than 70 member nations showed serious failures to protect young workers in nonindustrial jobs, including agriculture and handicrafts. One of the ILO’s current goals is to identify and resolve the “worst forms” of child labour; these are defined as any form of labour that negatively impacts a child’s normal development. In 1992 the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) was created as a new department of the ILO. Through programs it operates around the world, IPEC seeks the removal of children from hazardous working conditions and the ultimate elimination of child labour.

Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

< Back to search results
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
Content listing

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

Refine listing, actions for selected content:.

View selected items
Save to my bookmarks
Export citations
Download PDF (zip)
Save to Kindle
Save to Dropbox
Save to Google Drive

Save content to

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to .

To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service .

Jane Humphries
Online ISBN: 9780511780455
Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511780455

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

18 results in Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

Jane Humphries , University of Oxford
Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp vii-vii
Get access Check if you have access via personal or institutional login Log in Register
Export citation

3 - Families

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 49-83

Introduction

Exceptional individuals, perhaps, but faced with ordinary circumstances. Is the characterization of those men who by writing their histories selected themselves for inclusion in this study accurate? This chapter is concerned with the boys' family circumstances. It investigates whether their households resembled in size and structure those thought typical of the era. Along the way, there are discoveries about the families and their internal and external relationships, for the distinctive time horizon, standpoint and focus of the autobiographies illuminate hitherto enigmatic aspects of family life.

The conventional sources and the methods developed to analyze them are not conducive to an understanding of family relationships and kin ties. Early modern household surveys coldly enumerate household members and provide bare descriptions of their relationships (‘wife’, ‘grandchild’, ‘lodger’). Families remain black boxes whose inner workings are a matter for speculation based on their outside appearances. In contrast, the autobiographies describe life within families. They deepen understanding of relationships with mothers, fathers and siblings, and, more generally, the nature of kinship and the economic and social networks that bound kin together, aspects of family life explored further in chapters 5 and 6 below. The picture that emerges provides the context for understanding key aspects of working-class childhood: reasons for starting work; nature of first job; choice of apprenticeship; and extent of schooling.

Frontmatter

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp i-vi

4 - Household economy

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 84-124

Chapter 3 demonstrated that in terms of size and structure, the frequency with which they were extended, and the kinds of non-nuclear kin admitted, the autobiographers' families fit demographic expectations. There were also surprises: the extent of fatherlessness, the prevalence and origins of lone-mother households and the multifaceted reasons for household extension, suggesting more complex readings of duty and reward than conveyed in standard ideas about exchange and reciprocity. This chapter turns to the economic circumstances of these same families. Were they, too, typical, and, if so, how did material conditions influence the supply of child labour?

The autobiographies do not contain the kind of systematic information needed to construct indices of real wages or family incomes. But occasional evidence on the occupations and earnings of husbands and fathers can be compared with standard accounts of the male labour force and men's wages in order to check that low-paid occupations or low-paid men within those occupations are not over-sampled, thereby presenting an unduly gloomy picture. Going further, by capturing the division of labour within families and relative contributions of different family members to family income, the autobiographies provide perspective on men's jobs and wages.

Although historians have paid lip-service to the need to look beyond men's earnings and include the contributions of other family members, self-provisioning and poor relief in computations of family incomes, practical efforts in this direction are rare.

List of figures

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp viii-viii
Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 430-439

6 - Wider kin

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 151-171

Although most autobiographers' early lives were dominated by parents and siblings, this did not preclude meaningful relationships with grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives. This chapter asks what roles wider kin played in children's lives and particularly how wider kin both protected children from and prepared them for the world of work.

The conventional starting point for discussion of kin ties has been the frequency of household extension. Mortality, separation, abandonment and even mobility in search of work left many nuclear households without a male head, and since men were families' main support, such loss was potentially catastrophic. Mothers also died, and as fathers found it difficult if not impossible to be both breadwinners and carers, this too threatened family break-up. Other, less desperate circumstances such as unemployment, eviction and illness left families and individuals needing help. One possible source of support was wider kin with whom asylum could be sought. As earlier chapters suggested, despite the dominance of nuclear households, a number of autobiographers' families opened their doors (and their hearts) to other kin and even (though rarely) to non-kin. This chapter looks at the frequency of and motives for family extension from the other side: the supplicants' standpoint.

While shelter was the most valuable kind of informal assistance, it also took other material and non-material forms. Together these were usually insufficient to preclude the need to apply for poor relief (Horden and Smith, 1998; Horrell and Oxley, 2000; Saaritsa, 2008a,b).

10 - Schooling

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 306-365

Schooling in this period has been a popular topic for historians. They have frequently sought evidence, indeed inspiration, from ordinary people's accounts. David Vincent's (1981) classic study of working-class perceptions of the economic and social changes of the period and Jonathan Rose's more recent (2001) evocation of working-class intellectual life both rely heavily on working-class autobiography (see also Burnett, 1982). This chapter could not possibly supplant these excellent studies. Fortunately, its focus is different. My interest is in the relationship between education, children's work and early industrialization. The first step is to extract quantitative evidence from the memoirs for comparison with data from more conventional sources. If autobiographers' exposure to schools was consistent with what is known for the population at large, then other evidence from these accounts can be used to fill gaps in the history of schooling, to answer questions about the motives for attending school, to explore its costs and benefits and to establish the quality of education. The larger aim is to develop the idea that forms of schooling that paid off relatively cheaply, primarily because they could be combined with early employment, contributed to the economic growth of the era.

A useful starting point is how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schooling has featured in accounts of the industrial revolution. One problem is the nature of the evidence.

2 - Sources, models, context

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 12-48

This study uses new sources and ideas borrowed from development economics to explore the role of child labour in an updated economic history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The starting point must be a defence of the unconventional sources: working-class autobiographies. Readers will likely be suspicious of such memoirs, especially as repositories of quantitative evidence, and they must be shown fit for purpose. Next, the chapter outlines several models of labour markets with child labour. Development economists use such models to identify conditions hostile to child labour and policies to hasten its demise, but they can also illuminate circumstances in which historically child labour might have increased, involved younger children and spread to hitherto exempt sectors of the economy. The third section sketches in the background: the British industrial revolution. There is no attempt to summarize the massive literature and ongoing debates. The mainstream view of the industrial revolution has undergone extensive revision in recent years. The current conventional wisdom downplays the importance of the cotton industry and of factories, factors earlier considered instrumental in promoting child labour. Nonetheless, new interpretations leave room for an extension and intensification of children's work. The argument of this book goes further. The claim is that a more gradual industrial revolution, sanitized by the relegation of dark satanic mills to a lesser role, nonetheless retained at its heart and pulsing through its life-blood this shameful feature of its older heroic variant.

5 - Family relationships

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 125-150

Autobiography, for all its defects, is unusual in allowing historians inside the working-class family. It is a poor memoir that does not afford glimpses inside the home or offer some commentary on the meaning of family relationships. Historians have plumbed many reminiscences, including several that feature in this investigation, for what they reveal about family life (Vincent, 1981; Ross, 1993). Since this has been done, and done with skill and elegance, duplication is unnecessary. What does deserve further attention is the way in which family relationships conditioned the availability of children to work and the welfare implications of their labour. This suggests three areas for investigation (each with an associated research question): first, the economic circumstances of the families and their levels of economic need (was poverty the main cause of child labour?); second, altruism (did parents love their children and have their welfare in mind?); and, third, authority (were these families dominated by the husband/father who made the decision when and where a child went to work?).

Earlier chapters have established that while demographically and materially representative, the families of the autobiographers were insecure and often needy. Chief among the circumstances leading to poverty was ‘breadwinner frailty’. Families, even before the era of the classic industrial revolution, had become dependent on a male breadwinner and characterized by a division of labour between mothers and fathers usually associated with a later time and a more developed economy.

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 210-255

While continuing to exploit the rich detail on early employment, this chapter turns attention from age and circumstances of starting work to the jobs undertaken, and to recruitment, remuneration and motivation. The chapter begins by identifying the most popular jobs for children and exploring how these related to adult jobs and to the organization of work. Next, the distribution of first jobs is compressed into the same broad occupational categories used earlier, and these are studied over time and in comparison with fathers' jobs to uncover the differences between child and adult labour and how these differences developed. Comparisons can test for the emergence of an exclusively child labour market devoted to part-time and seasonal work and marginal to the main industrial and agricultural activities and so establish whether the mid-nineteenth century saw an ‘adulting’ of the labour force and the segmentation and ultimate disappearance of children's work (Coninck Smith et al ., 1997; Cunningham, 2000).

Inter-generational comparisons between fathers' and sons' occupational distributions highlight the micro-processes at work in the restructuring of the British economy during the industrial revolution. The extent to which sons in particular groups followed in their fathers' footsteps and fathers in particular groups recruited their sons suggests different patterns of expansion and contraction and different levels of self-recruitment across the occupational groups.

List of tables

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp ix-x

9 - Apprenticeship

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 256-305

While child labour has generally been condemned, the attitude to its combination with on-the-job training, as in an apprenticeship, is more ambivalent. The classic economists were famously suspicious of apprenticeship, and modern economic historians have followed their lead in interpreting it as a hangover from a pre-modern immutable world dominated by monopolistic guilds and restrictive corporation. The recent rethinking of guilds and their economic role has spilled over into renewed interest in apprenticeship and a less negative stance on its contribution to economic growth (Ward, 1997; Epstein, 1998; Humphries, 2003; De Munck et al ., 2007). This chapter uses the autobiographers' experience both to fill gaps in historians' account of apprenticeship and to explore its role in the British industrial revolution.

Classic apprenticeship involved indentures which bound master and apprentice for a pre-specified period during which the master undertook to teach the apprentice, provide him with board and lodging, introduce him to the modus operandi of his trade and safeguard his moral welfare. In return, the apprentice promised to work for his master as he trained and sometimes provided a premium or cash payment. While apprenticeship's legal history is well known, few historians have been willing to estimate its quantitative significance and changes in its popularity over time.

The accounts offer insight into basic trends. Apprenticeship was widely thought to be of vital importance both to boys' prospects and to families' futures.

1 - Introduction

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 1-11

‘Perhaps as I tell you my story, which, with variations, is the story of hundreds of thousands of my East End neighbours and of millions of my brothers all over the country, you will begin to understand’ (Thorne, 1925?, p. 13). Will Thorne was born (1857) into poverty and illiterate until adulthood. He wrote his autobiography, fittingly titled My Life's Battles , to provide his readers with the background for his views and to explain his lifetime commitment to socialism. Thorne was branded, as he acknowledged, by his bitter experiences as a child worker. Such experiences were far from unique. Thorne's story, along with more than 600 other working-class autobiographies, constitutes the basis for this study. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of these memoirs provides new insight into the role that child labour played in the British industrial revolution and thereby into the process of industrialization itself.

The child worker was a central if pitiful figure in both contemporary and classic accounts of the British industrial revolution, but in modern economic history, the children who toiled in early mills, mines and manufactories have become invisible. The standard economic history textbook (Floud and Johnson, 2004), contains only five references to child employment, all but one of which derive from the rather peripheral chapter on ‘Household Economy’. As a topic of research, children's role in industrialization has become passé (Bolin-Hort, 1989). Clark Nardinelli's (1990) revisionist interpretation provided an exception that shocked traditional historians.

7 - Starting work

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 172-209

The great virtue of approaching child labour through autobiography is the ability to see the issue in context, to be able to trace the labour supply to its origins in family and community. Chapter 2 suggested a number of interconnections between child labour and the economic and social changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and concluded that the industrial revolution, as now understood, may well have both unleashed a boom in children's work and itself been fed by children's work. The current chapter explores this hypothesis at the micro-level in terms of factors that likely promoted or retarded entry into the labour force such as social norms, a child's family circumstances and local employment opportunities. In so doing, it builds on key findings from earlier chapters: first, an apparent precocious dependence on men and men's earnings, manifest in attitudes to mothers and fathers and perceptions of their duties; and, second, the extent of fatherlessness, and particularly de facto fatherlessness, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together these two features imply a ‘breadwinner frailty’. Dependence on men's earnings meant that the loss or interruption of male support, an all too common experience in these years, jeopardized families' survival. Like its close relation ‘nuclear hardship’, the precocious adoption of this particular family form left individuals vulnerable when families failed. Unless the authorities were prepared to let mothers and children perish (and they were not) an alternative system of support was needed.

11 - Conclusions

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp 366-373

This book has explored more than 600 autobiographies by men who lived through the British industrial revolution and described their labour as children, their childhoods, their family and social connections, their careers and their schooling. It has searched these accounts for patterns and relationships. What has this prosopography revealed?

The autobiographies suggest that the classic era of industrialization, 1790–1850, saw an upsurge in child labour. This finding is consistent with other recent studies, which have reaffirmed the importance of children's work in the industrial revolution. Moreover, the evidence is equally emphatic, and again in line with other recent findings, that child labour was endemic in the early industrial economy, entrenched in both traditional and modern sectors and widespread geographically.

It is hardly surprising that agriculture, small-scale manufacturing, and services should provide the majority of jobs for children. After all (as the new view of the industrial revolution emphasizes), these sectors, along with customary methods of production, dominated the developing economy, with factories and mechanization but tiny islands of modernity until well into the nineteenth century. Ironically, recognition of child labour's importance in traditional employments has coincided with a new appreciation for the role of agriculture, small-scale manufacturing and services in industrialization and so has helped to restore child workers to the centre of the economic stage.

However, child labour was not supplied passively to farms, workshops, domestic enterprises, shops and offices.

Book: Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Published online: 06 December 2010 Print publication: 24 June 2010 , pp xi-xiv

This book has been a long time in the writing. One reason is that it began life as something else. I wanted to investigate the age at which children started work in the era of industrialization, and searching for a source of information that could track back into the eighteenth century, I stumbled on writings by working men in which they reminisced about their first jobs and the reasons for their entry into the labour force. I decided to search the now extensive body of known working-class autobiography and extract quantitative information on age at starting work, first jobs and so on, a laborious task to be sure but using a source which promised to provide information about individuals and span the now elongated era of industrialization and therefore of great value. A deeper interest has always been the interface between the family and the economy: how the family both responds to economic opportunities and moulds economic development. Children stand side by side with women at this margin. This ambiguous position has governed children's meaning and importance as they have made the transition from contributors to family resources and social insurance for parents to the expensive luxury consumption goods that they constitute today. Historians have neglected children's metamorphosis yet it is surely one of the social and economic revolutions of modern times, though here again, as the dismal catalogue of recent cases of appalling abuse makes clear, even in rich economies with well-developed welfare states not all children have managed to become the ‘priceless’ possessions that modernity promises.

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.

Home / Essay Samples / History / Industrial Revolution / Child Labour During the Industrial Revolution

Child Labour During the Industrial Revolution

Category: History
Topic: Industrial Revolution

Pages: 1 (645 words)

Downloads: -->

--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.

Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?

are ready to help you with your essay

You won’t be charged yet!

Louisiana Purchase Essays

Great Depression Essays

Manifest Destiny Essays

Industrial Revolution Essays

Salem Witch Trials Essays

Related Essays

We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Your essay sample has been sent.

In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->