Abstract
The British census asked employers to record their workforce numbers. The responses to this instruction provide a unique resource on firm size. While the responses were digitized and included in the Individual Census Microdata (I-CeM) deposit, their format limits their utility. A further data deposit, the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE), overcomes I-CeM’s deficiencies by infilling data gaps and parsing employer and workforce data into separate fields. This paper evaluates the coverage in I-CeM and BBCE data for this specific census question, and compares these with the published census analysis of the same data. The results prove the benefits of the BBCE data over I-CeM on the subject of firm size, and demonstrate the need for caution in using the published tables.
Highlights
Before the deposit of digital records of the British population censuses, quantitative studies on long-term economic and social trends in nineteenth-century Britain relied on published aggregate tabulations of the census, case studies that consulted individual records, or the valuable but necessarily restricted 5 percent sample of the 1851 census (Anderson, Collins, and Scott 1979)
This paper evaluates the quality of coverage by the digital records in Individual Census Microdata database (I-CeM) data and British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) for the specific 1851–81 census questions to business proprietors on the size of their workforce
This paper evaluates the data in I-CeM and BBCE on employers’ workforces against the published tables
Summary
Before the deposit of digital records of the British population censuses, quantitative studies on long-term economic and social trends in nineteenth-century Britain relied on published aggregate tabulations of the census, case studies that consulted individual records, or the valuable but necessarily restricted 5 percent sample of the 1851 census (Anderson, Collins, and Scott 1979). Over the past five years, the I-CeM data containing census records of the full population of England, Wales, and Scotland have been used to develop new interpretations of childhood mortality (Jaadla and Reid 2017; Atkinson et al 2017), family structure (Schu€rer et al 2018), fertility (Garrett and Reid 2018; Reid et al 2019), business proprietors (Bennett, Smith, and Montebruno 2018; Bennett et al 2019; Van Lieshout et al 2019), business partnerships (Bennett 2016), agriculture (Montebruno et al 2019a), women’s occupations (You 2019), portfolios in farming (Radicic, Bennett, and Newton 2017), migration (Schu€rer and Day 2019; Smith, Bennett, and van Lieshout 2019), and urban structure (Smith, Bennett, and Radicic 2018), and have been visualized and further made available in the online atlas Populations Past (Reid et al 2018) These analyses have considerably improved on scholarship based on the only source that was previously available with national coverage: the published tabulations created by the census administrators (the General Register Office: GRO) at the time of the censuses.
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