Work and Workloads During Industrialization: The Experience of Forgemen in the British Iron Industry 1750–1850

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which working practices and workloads changed in the course of British industrialization by tracing the experience of one group of skilled workers: iron forgemen. A well-established historiographical tradition assumes that workers were subjected to a more burdensome discipline during the Industrial Revolution. However, empirical studies of workplace practice in early industrial Britain are scarce, and those few studies that have been attempted stress the continuity of workers' experience. But this study argues for discontinuity, exploiting a range of data on the output levels achieved by individual forge crews c. 1750–c. 1850 to identify substantial increases in the burdens imposed upon forgemen.