The period covering the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War brought the Slovene lands an economic transformation based mainly on non-agrarian activities, both as regards changes in industrial and handicraft production on the one hand and in communications on the other. With the beginning of the construction of the railway from Vienna to TriestelTrst, and even more after its completion in 1857, the Slovene lands underwent a more intensive industrialization. This process was accompanied by the disintegration of agriculture, of cottage industries and of the peasantry, with the rural population increasingly moving to the towns in search of employment, and migrating to Western Europe and North America. The process of industrialization and its attendant changes in the social composition of the population in the Slovene lands during the last fifty years of Slovene existence under the Habsburg monarchy is one of the key, but unfortunately still not sufficiently explored, questions in the Slovene history of this period. In this article I deal only with one segment of this large set of problems. I analyze the data of the Austrian statistical service concerning the active earning population employed in handicrafts and industry which were published as the final results of five censuses taken between 1869 and 1910. The occupational, and the resulting social, articulation of the population is undoubtedly one of the most important elements of any outline of economic and social development. Professional statistics provide an insight into the size, and into the directions of the divisions, of labor and social differentiation, thus also reflecting the articulation and the degree of economic growth. Moreover, the study of the occupational composition of the population, recorded at ten-year intervals, reveals a major developmental trend in the changes affecting the economic composition of the population. For this reason it is of the utmost importance to study occupational statistics in order to research the social and economic development of our past. Since I am interested in industrialization, it is important to analyze that part of the population that was employed in handicrafts and industry during this period.