The sectoral allocation of male labourers: A solution to the problem for England and Wales 1851–1911.

One major obstacle to the economic analysis of occupational structure is that historically large numbers of men were described as ‘labourers’ with no indication of the sector to which they belonged. This is a big problem for the pre-census era in which in England and Wales in the eighteenth century as many as 30 per cent of men were so described. It is a more limited but still serious problem for the census period 1841-1911 when, agricultural labourers were differentiated from ‘general labourers’ but no sector was specified for as much a seven per cent of the labour force. This appendix presents an approach for assigning labourers to sectors between 1851 and 1911 and compares it with a number of other approaches. We omit 1841 because the reporting of female occupations is unsatisfactory.