Peer-reviewed article

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

Xuesheng You, Alexander Tertzakian · 21 Mar 2025

Abstract

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