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January 24 2025
Occupational Titles in Census Data: England and Wales
Matteo Calabrese, Bas van Leeuwen
Author and Article Information
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2024) 55 (2): 243–267.
https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_02039Abstract
Historical census data are a pivotal source for studying occupational dynamics, yet analyzing them is often challenging due to the large number of unique occupations and the need to standardize unspecific titles. A new methodology for attributing occupational titles to industrial sectors, demonstrated with the 1939 National Register for England and Wales (a dataset of approximately 42 million entries), produces findings that align with the trends across the agriculture and mining, secondary, and tertiary sectors identified in previous studies. At the subsector level, however, this procedure revises the shares for agricultural workers and individuals employed across the tertiary subsectors. At the district level, the sectoral allocation process results in a redistribution of workers into certain secondary subsectors driven by more precise sectoral estimations for previously underrepresented groups and the empirical allocation of generic laborers.
