economy (what statisticians refer to as an appropriate weight). The big prob-
lem with eighteenth-century Britain is the spectacular rise of the cotton textile
industry. Between 1770 and 1815 cotton output increased by 2,200 per cent,
while output in other sectors at most doubled. This huge increase in output was
combined with a very competitive market and so sharp falls in the relative price
of cotton. To calculate ‘correct’ weights we need to account for these huge and
simultaneous shifts in output and relative prices. There is no widespread agree-
ment among statisticians on how to do this. There are also significant problems
with data as the first occupation census (survey) in Britain did not take place
until 1841 and the first census of industrial production not until 1907. There is
also little price information for the cotton sector before the 1790s.
Overcoming these big problems to produce estimates of GDP growth for
eighteenth-century Britain has become an academic specialization in its own
right. From pioneering work in the 1960s through to more recent work there
has been a gradual revision downwards of growth estimates as data and tech-
niques have improved (Deane and Cole, 1962; Crafts and Harley, 1992). Early
estimates showing GDP growth suddenly accelerating to over 3 per cent per
annum after 1780 have been superseded by estimates showing a more gradual
acceleration to around 1.3 per cent. John Nef (1934) argues that British indus-
trialization was actually a long process dating back to the sixteenth century.
Nef finds good evidence of an enormous expansion,beginning in the mid-
sixteenth century,in the output of coal, salt, glass, ships, alum, soap, gunpow-
der and metal goods. The annual output of a coal mine before the middle of the
sixteenth century rarely exceeded a few hundred tonnes; by the century end
collieries producing between 10,000 and 25,000 tonnes of coal annually were
‘common’.
The idea of ‘revolutionary change’ has been revived by some scholars who
look beyond the cotton textile sector and argue that there was dramatic change
in more traditional industries such as food and drink, shoemaking, tailoring
and blacksmithing (Berg and Hudson, 1992). The wool textile sector, for
example, developed new forms of wholesaling, retailing, credit and debt. They
argue that there was no BritishIndustrial Revolution but a regional story that
has been missed by the use of national aggregate statistics. While the output of
the British wool textile sector increased by (only) 150 per cent during the entire
eighteenth century this period marked its dramatic concentration in Yorkshire,
which accounted for about two-thirds of national output by 1800.
Labour
There is no agreement among scholars on whether there was any significant
acceleration of population growth that contributed to economic growth
(Wrigley and Schofield, 1981; Pomeranz, 2000). What is more widely agreed
upon is that there were dramatic changes in patterns of labour mobility and the
composition of the labour force. In 1500 18.5 per cent of the English labour
force worked outside agriculture in either rural or urban areas and by 1800 this
had increased to 64 per cent (Brenner and Isset,2002).
Introduction 15