Households and entrepreneurship in England and Wales, 1851–1911

ABSTRACT

This article uses the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) to examine the relationship between the household and entrepreneurship in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The BBCE allows three kinds of entrepreneurial households to be identified: those where an entrepreneur employs co-resident family members in their business, those where two or more household members are partners in the same firm, and households with two or more entrepreneurs resident who are running different firms. The article traces the number of these different households across the period and examines their sector and gender breakdowns as well as their geographical distribution. The article demonstrates that these different kinds of entrepreneurial households served different purposes; co-resident family businesses were used in marginal areas where other sources of labour and capital were scarce and the incidence of such firms decreased over this period. In contrast, household partnerships and co-entrepreneurial households were used to share risk or diversify; they were found throughout England and Wales at similar levels during this period.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• household
• census
• England and Wales
• economic history

Acknowledgments

The data used derive from two sources, the first is Schürer, K. and Higgs, E. (2014). Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM), 1851–1911. [data collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], SN: 7481, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7481-1. A special acknowledgement is made to Kevin Schürer, Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett, Joe Day, Hanna Jaadla, Xuesheng You, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and other members of the Campop I-CeM group who, with the authors, have collectively worked on updated versions of I-CeM. The second is Bennett, R., Smith, H., van Lieshout, C., Montebruno, P., Newton, G. (2020). British Business Census of Entrepreneurs, 1851–1911. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 8600, https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=8600. It links with I-CeM through each individuals’ RecID. The geographical boundary files for mapping parishes derive from A.E.M. Satchell, P.M.K. Kitson, G.H. Newton, L. Shaw-Taylor, E.A. Wrigley, 1851 England and Wales Census parishes, Townships and Places (2016). The RSD boundary files were created by J.D. Day, Registration Sub-District Boundaries for England and Wales, 1851–1911 (2016). This dataset was created by the Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline project (PI: A.M. Reid) funded by ESRC grant ES/L015463/1. Thanks are also due to Philip Stickler for preparing the figures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Own account refers to individuals who were self-employed sole proprietors.

2. Note that the census information for 1871 is not currently included in I-CeM for England and Wales.

3. BCCE supplementation is based on a logit model to which assigns employment status based on demographic characteristics, occupation and location. This is an approximation. Most farmers, but around 40% of non-farm employers, returned their workforces, the rest had to be supplemented. This process helps to identify other proprietors in the responses; it is explained in detail elsewhere (Bennett et al., 2019b).

4. One exception is explicitly identified partners, namely those individuals who reported themselves as partners in such a way as to allow their partners who lived in different households to be identified. We have examined these individuals elsewhere (Bennett, 2016).

5. Houseful includes the household head, relatives, servants and residential inmates (boarders, lodgers etc.)

6. Own account is the census status that describes an entrepreneur as a sole proprietor employing no-one else (except perhaps undeclared family members).

7. Some enumerators were more assiduous in recording household members’ occupations; for example, in 1901, over half of the male residents of the parish of Kenton in Devon who were aged between 15 and 65 (people we would expect to mostly be occupied) and who were not heads of households, had no occupation. In contrast, all but 35 of the 7,267 men with the same characteristics in the parish of Portland (part of Weymouth) had occupations. This indicates that the geographical variation in the presence of co-resident family businesses was related, in part, to enumerator variation.

8. 10% of these women were married with their spouse absent, which was an ambiguous marital condition.

9. For this urban classification see Smith and Bennett, 2017

10. The census questions did not explicitly ask for information on ‘partnership’ and hence what is available occurs only as a chance that it was recorded by household heads. Analysis of those that were explicit is given in (Bennett, 2016).

11. The ten most common were carpenter, farmer, shoemaker, butcher, grocer, tailor, blacksmith, mason, wheelwright and house painter.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by theEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number ES/M010953], ‘Drivers of entrepreneurship and small businesses’. Extraction of 1881 data was undertaken by Gill Newton, supported by the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RG66385], ‘The long-termevolution of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)’.