Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the British

Industrial Revolution

Author: Whaples, Robert

Publication info: Business History Review 75.2 (Summer 2001): 429-432.
ProQuest document link
Abstract:
Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the British
Industrial Revolution, by Carolyn Tuttle, is reviewed.
Full text:
Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the British
Industrial Revolution. By Carolyn Tuttle. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. ix + 308 pp.
Bibliography, illustrations, index. Paper, $63.00. ISBN 0-813-33698-8.
Reviewed by Robert Whaples
For generations the British Industrial Revolution has been viewed as a morality play, with a
succession of historians writing and rewriting the script. Among the supporting cast, the roles
played by children have always received special attention. The audience yearns to know
which characters in the play are the villains and which are the heroes; one seemingly sure way
to find the answer to this question is to discover the degree to which these child actors were
victims or victors.
Carolyn Tuttle, an economist at Lake Forest College, is the latest to tackle this script. She
begins by enumerating the major occupations among British children and youth in the early
and middle nineteenth century, providing an overview of jobs in British fields, homes,
workshops, factories, and beneath the ground. Tuttle introduces quantitative data whenever
possible, relying especially on parliamentary papers, while meticulously surveying the
substantial corpus of primary and secondary work on the subject. She pays particular attention
to the textile industries, in which approximately half of the workforce was under age eighteen
during the 1830s, and to mining. At mid-century, textile work was second only to domestic
service among girls, while, among boys, textile jobs and mining ranked behind only work in
agriculture and as messengers.
Child employment in textile factories and mining swelled as Britain industrialized.
Ultimately, Tuttle wants to know whether child workers were pushed into these roles by
malignant forces (such as rising poverty or increased parental abuse and greed) or pulled by
more benign forces. To answer this question, she develops a labor-market model, with
competition on the demand side and bargaining within the family on the supply side,
uncovering evidence that children were able to claim a large share of the extra income they
earned when they entered the world of paid work. In a competitive labor market, a rising
supply of child labor pushed children's wages down, while rising demand pulled their wages
up. After concluding that pull factors were much more important, Tuttle takes a closer look at
textiles and mining to determine the source of the rising demand for child labor. She identifies
three critical forces: technological changes that made it necessary for each adult worker to use
more assistants; technological changes that allowed the substitution of unskilled workers for
skilled ones; and an increase in work situations requiring the labor of workers who were
physically small. (Later in the century, children began to leave the labor market as their

parents began to earn higher incomes and were thus less willing to send their children out to
work, new legislation banned certain types of child labor, and further technological
developments reduced the demand for child labor.)
Tuttle's argument suggests a mildly optimistic picture of the British economy during
industrialization, although she is careful to capture the drama of this labor market's rougher
edges with compelling, sometimes hyperbolic, descriptions of wearying, mind-numbing,
degrading work and its detrimental effects. However, a more skeptical reviewer could easily
disagree with her conclusions, as her thesis is handicapped by a shortage of appropriate data.
Economy-wide data do not adequately reveal the crucial evidence: whether or not child and
youth labor-force participation rates were rising or falling before the middle of the century.
Tuttle rejects an outward shift of the child labor supply curve and accepts a rise in demand,
partly based on the fact that average wages for many children's occupations rose between
1839 and 1859. However, these data are too late, since a later table shows that child labor may
have been on the wane by this time: children's share of the textile workforce, for example,
was already on the decline. In addition, the data presented are nominal-not real-wages, and it
is impossible to ascertain whether the wage changes are due to a shift in the composition of
the child labor force. During this period, factory legislation was enacted that helped push up
the average age of child workers, so the upward wage trend could have resulted from
maturing of the young workforce rather than rising demand.
I have questions about all three of the forces the author has linked to the growing demand for
child labor. Evidence on the ratio between adult workers and their helpers in specific jobs
(e.g., piecers and spinners) shows that the ratio of helpers to adults rose, but it does not prove
that the number of child workers performing the tasks increased or that the demand for these
workers was rising. There is evidence that certain innovations reduced the number of adults
needed, and one table even quantifies the number of men thrown out of work by automation
in certain factories between 1829 and 1841, but this evidence does not confirm that more
children were hired to fill their places. Likewise, Tuttle's explanation that children were the
preferred users of certain textile machines seems backward: The argument that the textile
machines (including spinning jennies, water frames, and self-acting mules) required workers
who were small in stature could be plausibly countered by the suggestion that the individual
machines were built to accommodate small workers. The evidence on children's comparative
advantage in certain mining tasks is much stronger. In a book that is otherwise free of
econometric analysis, Tuttle shows a strong relation between the average thickness of coal
seams and the percentage of children in mining workforces, and she describes the economic
advantages of having small people haul coal through the small spaces. Elsewhere, however,
her discussion of the advantages of child labor-listed as dexterity, docility, ease of training,
the ability to withstand monotony, and greater endurance-appears overly anecdotal. For
example, on page 78, she states, "As any parent knows, children seem to have an unlimited
supply of energy and are in constant motion."
Tuttle has summarized a great deal of information about child labor during the British
Industrial Revolution and introduces a subject that is critical to our judgment of that
economy's performance.
AuthorAffiliation
Robert Whaples is associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University. His research
focuses on American labor markets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he

published "Fear and Loathing in the Michigan Furniture Industry: Employee-Based

Discrimination a Century Ago" (with David Buffum) in Economic Inquiry (April 1995). He is
associate director of EH.NET and editor of EH.NET's Online Encyclopedia of Economic
History, which will begin publication in summer 2001 at www. eh. net.
Subject: Book reviews; Industrial Revolution; Child labor; History
Location: United Kingdom, UK
Classification: 9175: Western Europe; 1110: Economic conditions & forecasts
Publication title: Business History Review
Volume: 75
Issue: 2
Pages: 429-432
Number of pages: 4
Publication year: 2001
Publication date: Summer 2001
Year: 2001
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Place of publication: Boston
Country of publication: United Kingdom
Publication subject: Business And Economics, History
ISSN: 00076805
CODEN: BHRVA6
Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Book Review-Favorable
ProQuest document ID: 274390346
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/274390346?accountid=50247
Copyright: Copyright Harvard Business School Summer 2001
Last updated: 2012-02-25
Database: ProQuest Central