Introduction

Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon

that has, at times, been neglected by historians. That’s not to say

that little ink has been spilled about industrialization and child

labor over the past two centuries; quite the opposite. Industrialism’s

role in child labor and its intensification of misery and exploitation

of children has been a consistent theme since industrialization

itself. This essay centers on two more recent, but pivotal texts in

the history of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, namely

Clark Nardinelli’s Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (1990) and Jane

Humphries’s Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010).

While each historian had taken an economic approach to the social

history of the period, the differences between their approaches, using

both quantitative and qualitative methods, are instructive.

Interspersed with these two texts on child labor will be E.P.

Thompson’s celebrated The Making of the English Working Class (1963), to

examine the way historians have went about constructing their social

histories of the British Industrial Revolution. We will also touch on

the standard of living debate, for this touches on important

methodological disputes as well. Finally, this essay will offer a

different approach to examining these historical problems, an approach

to the social sciences pioneered by economist Ludwig von Mises in his

2

magnum opus on economics, entitled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

(1949). This approach will not resolve every question of methodology

and interpretation advanced by the authors we will be reviewing here,

but it will be applied to a few concrete examples to illustrate its

usefulness in resolving some of the historical controversy, or at

least clarify it.

I

Historians have taken different views regarding the outstanding

feature of the social history of the period. T.S. Ashton said the

outstanding feature was the growth of the population. Clark Nardinelli

suggested it was the emergence of child labor in factories. Jane

Humphries indicated it was the extent and significance of child labor

in Britain. E.P. Thompson said it was the formation of the working

class.1 Extending our scope wider than the social history of the

period, it should come as no surprise that we find great divergence.

While all these questions are debatable, that there was “a set of

changes that occurred in Britain between about 1760 and 1830 that

irreversibly altered Britain’s economy and society”—changes that went

beyond merely “the way [in which] goods and services were produced”—is1 T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 4; Clark Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 57; Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7-8; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 12.

3

beyond question.2 Historians have posited the cause of this change, its

direction, its magnitude, and what it entailed for the human

condition, especially for those on the lower rungs of the

socioeconomic ladder, with mixed success.

Whether the Industrial Revolution increased misery or happiness

has been one of the central planes of inquiry in the historiography of

the Industrial Revolution, as well as one of the most hotly contested.

E.P. Thompson is perhaps the most famous historian of the pessimist

school and occupies a prominent place in the historiography examining

the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the working classes,

including on children laborers. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working

Class (1963) classically contended that industrialization left behind

many of the working classes, although in its stead the working class

was forged.3 The Industrial Revolution was catastrophic, both for adult

and child laborers alike. Thompson insisted that “there was a drastic

increase in the intensity of exploitation of child labour between 1780

and 1840, and every historian acquainted with the sources knows that

this is so.”4 But was Thompson’s dogmatism warranted? Or were there

reasons to discount these sources?

2 Joel Mokyr, The Industrial Revolution in Britain (Boulder Co.: Westview Press, 1999), 6; Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.3 Thompson, Working Class, 807.4 Ibid., 331.

4

Thompson began his discussion on child labor by conceding many of

the criticisms of optimists—those who thought the Industrial

Revolution positively affected the working class standard of living.

Child labor was as essential to the pre-industrial economy as it was

to the industrial economy, he said; “children who were scarcely

toddlers might be set to work” in the household; this work was

“arduous, even brutal.”5 Parish apprenticeship, where the worst abuses

took place, was replaced by free labor. Many work environments were

improving, and many employers provided satisfactory work environments.

And yet, according to Thompson, the work was of a different nature.

There was variety in the housework, parental supervision, and time for

rest and games that a factory schedule would never permit.6 Thompson

criticized the work of W.H. Hutt, “The Factory System of the Early

Nineteenth Century” (1926), reprinted in F.A. Hayek’s Capitalism and the

Historians (1954), for asserting that “such deliberate cruelties as did

exist were practised [sic] on children by the operatives themselves,

against the will and against the knowledge of the masters.” Hutt was

“giv[ing] unhesitating preference” to the views expressed by the

employers by preferring their testimony when it conflicted with

testimony of the laborers, and by promoting the Factory Inquiry Commission

5 Ibid., 332-33.6 Ibid., 334-36.

5

Report in 1833 over the Report in 1832, despite each being of a partisan

nature.7

Thompson partly attributed the persistence of the child labor

problem to an “atrophy” of the social conscience of the upper classes

in the early part of the nineteenth century, contrary to the awakening

that Ashton and Hayek each wrote about in Capitalism and the Historians.

Instead of to a hardening indifference of parents to the material

well-being of their children, “the years between 1790 and 1830 see an

appalling declension in the social conscience of Dissent.”8 When people

did decry the abuses of industrial capitalism, their criticism had its

origins in Tory paternalism or the tradition of liberal dissent,

according to Thompson.9 Disturbed by the appalling apathy displayed by

R.M. Hartwell and other “Nuclear Age” historians, Thompson was

determined “to affirm a more traditional view: that the exploitation

of little children, on this scale and with this intensity, was one of

the most shameful events in our history.”10 Despite the obviousness

Thompson accorded to his view, the question bears examining. Were

7 Ibid., 336-37.8 Ibid., 339-42, 3469 Ibid., 345.10 Ibid., 349.

6

children exploited? Was this event shameful, or simply an unfortunate

incident of poverty?11

Clark Nardinelli seemed to think it was simply part of the

process of development.12 Nardinelli took a neoclassical economic

approach to studying the issue of child labor during the industrial

revolution, that is, applying basic economic logic to the family

economy and the history of child labor, leading him to some surprising

and, for many, uncomfortable conclusions about child labor. First,

“the important decision with respect to child labor…may not be working

and not working but between working at home and working away from

home.” While he understood the overwhelming condescension with which

historians have viewed child labor through history—“writers with

little else in common shared a belief in the immorality of child

labor”—he believed that “the economist rarely deals in absolutes;

thus, the question is not whether something is good or bad but whether

it is better or worse than the alternatives.” 13 All choices entail

opportunity costs, and it is neither legitimate to compare a

11 Thompson even recognized the latter to some extent, since he accepted that “parents not only needed their children’s earnings, but expected them to work”; Ibid,, 339.12 Many development economists today believe that child labor, like sweatshops, are normal parts of the process of development, and disappear as capital accumulates, productivity increases, and wealth rises. An outstanding recent example is Ben Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).13 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 7, 9.

7

historical situation to an objective moral fantasy that was not among

the historical alternatives available, nor to compare it to one which

traverses time and space to make comparisons to the twentieth or

twenty-first century.

Nardinelli began by examining the Factory Inquiry Commission

Report of 1833, which was charged with “collecting information on the

employment of children in the manufacturing districts of Great

Britain.”14 While the interviews conducted contained testimony both

favorable and unfavorable to child labor in factories, the modern

generation—as well as generations before it—has been dismissive of

whatever favorable statements had been given in support of child labor

in the factory as self-evidently absurd, assuming they must reflect

either ignorance or bias. Just as slaveholders were being dishonest

when they had spoken favorably about the happiness and satisfaction of

the slaves with their servitude, and even its positive goodness, so

too must factory owners, managers, and others who were favorably

inclined be shills for the industries. Richard Oastler, for example,

“compared the plight of factory children unfavorably with that of West

Indian Slaves,” stating:

Poor Infants! ye are indeed sacrificed at the shrine of avarice,

without even the solace of the negro slave; ye are no more than he is, free

14 Ibid., 1.

8

agents; ye are compelled to work as long as the necessity of your

needy parents may require, or the cold blooded avarice of your

worse than barbarian master may demand! . . . Ye are doomed to

labour from morning to night for one who cares not how soon your

weak and tender frames are stretched to breaking. 15

The Sadler commission, headed by Oastler’s associate M.T. Sadler,

published a report entitled the Report of the Select Committee on the Bill for the

regulation of the Factories (1832) from which historians and social reformers

up to the modern day have relied on and accepted as evidence of the

mechanized horrors of the Industrial Revolution.16 The work “was

originally planned as half of a balanced account of the factory

system. Sadler was to attack the system and the factory owners were to

defend it. The defense was never carried out. The Report in its final

form was therefore designed to present the factory system in the worse

possible light.” Workers were “carefully selected witnesses [that

were] coached...in advance as to how they should answer Sadler.”17

Much of the early writing on the Industrial Revolution, such as

Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), J.L. and

Barbara Hammond’s The Skilled Labourer (1919), The Town Labourer (1917), and The

15 Ibid., 3.16 Ibid.; Thompson, Working Class, 336.17 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 3. It should be noted that the defense was essentially carried out the following year in the Factory Inquiry Commission Report, which was more closely representative of an employer’s perspective.

9

Rise of Modern Industry (1925), as well as Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Labour

in the Longest Reign, 1837-1897 (1897), relied heavily on testimony from the

workers themselves, as well as social reformers of the period, using

the 1832 Report as the essential foundation in many cases, to catalog

and describe the ill effects the Industrial Revolution had on factory

laborers—hence their unreliability. Of course, the concern for the

outcomes of these children was only natural, given the approximately

200,000 children employed in industrial settings in England and Wales

by 1874, even if this number represented less than ten percent of

English and Welsh children and therefore was not a typical childhood

by this point.18

Such testimony is very useful for the historian looking this far

back, since the dearth of materials from lower class men and women in

the distant past has been the greatest obstacle to historical work

pertaining to these past societies. We are often left with the

writings of government officials, leaders, and other upper class,

wealthy, landowning men whose perspectives, personal history, and

records—if we were to base our evaluation of the period on these data—

would leave us with a distorted picture of the period under study.

Even when we do have these materials, one still ought to question the

reliability of the records and to what extent the records we do have

18 Ibid., 4-5.

10

are representative of the groups in question as a whole, as a general

proposition. For countless historians to base their studies on child

labor and the Industrial Revolution on data as tainted as that of the

1832 Report is nothing short of remarkable, and not in the positive

sense. This method has rendered these studies, therefore, unsound in

practice, even if using statements from laborers during the period

itself is sound in order to humanize the subject under study and

convey some aspects of its qualitative dimensions.

Nevertheless, using statements in this manner to assess the

Industrial Revolution is not the most reliable method. As we can see,

this method is subject to serious shortcomings if the historical data

is unreliable. Not only this, this method is subject to misuse. The

historian must choose between a sea of statements and testimony on

opposing sides, and the choice means that the historian could very

easily fall prey to selection bias, whereby the historian’s sample is

not representative of the historical data as a whole. In addition,

even if the historian is careful to balance the quantity of evidence

for and against his or her proposition, the particular statements

chosen might be qualitatively skewed, with those statements in support

of the historians view being strong, and those against being weak.

Almost inevitably this kind of thing will occur, wittingly or

unwittingly, since historians are trying to prove their proposition

11

and will choose the strongest evidence in favor of it in order to

prove their thesis. Granted, these problems lie at the core of all

historical inquiry, but there is no reason to think that using

statements by laborers during the Industrial Revolution has any

peculiar ability to overcome this systemic bias.

II

The conventional view regarding the role of child labor during the

British Industrial Revolution was that

A shortage of adult males willing to work in factories caused

children to become a necessary part of the factory work force.

Children were treated harshly in the factories, and their

employment kept the wages of adult males too low to support their

families, which in turn forced adults to send their children to

work in factories. The conventional view concludes that the

employment of young children declined after 1835 only because

Parliament adopted a series of child labor laws.19

Nardinelli argued that the Industrial Revolution counterintuitively

decreased the exploitation of children, rather than increased it as

most assume.20 He measured this quantitatively by measuring taking the

wage and subtracting it from the value of the marginal product, where

19 George R. Boyer, Review of Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution by Clark Nardinelli, The Business History Review Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter, 1991): 1009.20 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 98.

12

he found that there “was no neoclassical exploitation of children.”

Nardinelli buttressed his claim using indirect measures that include

“the state of children's health, changes in adult wages, the migration

and mobility of child workers, the presence of apprenticeships, and

the existence of compensating differentials.” 21

He also argued that by moving from laboring in the agricultural

setting to an industrial one, the children moved from a setting where

their value was negative to one where their production could exceed

their consumption, respectively.22 One of his final claims was that it

was rising family incomes and productivity-enhancing technology that

decreased the demand for labor, not the Factory Acts. Nardinelli

supported this claim by pointing out that child labor was already

decreasing before the statute was passed. As Nardinelli stated:

The increasing competitiveness of the labor market reduced

imperfections and thereby reduced opportunities for exploitation.

The increasing industrial employment of children gave them the

freedom to leave harsh or exploitative parents. Moreover, in the

long run the industrial revolution ended child labor by

increasing working-class incomes, because as family incomes rose,

child labor declined. Industrialization, far from being the

21 Ibid., 70; Carolyn Tuttle, Review of Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution by Clark Nardinelli, The Journal of Economic History Vol. 51, No. 4 (Dec., 1991): 976.22 Tuttle, Review of Child Labor: 975-976.

13

source of the enslavement of children, was the source of their

liberation.23

Nardinelli, in order to make his claims regarding the family

economy, used Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker’s model to map

out the family economy in Britain during this period, explaining the

rise and fall of child labor in the factories from this economic

model.24 Becker’s insight was that household’s are both producers and

consumers, where the “household combines its own time and purchased

inputs to produce commodities for consumption.”25 A household,

therefore, may either be producing for the market or for the household

at all times, in addition to investing in human capital through

training and education, and must determine how to allocate its scarce

resources just as a firm would. With children, Nardinelli insisted we

must distinguish between household production and household

consumption, or work and leisure, which generally defines work as

housework, chores, and caring for children, with leisure consisting of

everything else.26

23 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 102.24 Ibid., 37; Boyer, Review of Child Labor: 1009; Jeffrey G. Williamson, Review of Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution by Clark Nardinelli, Population and Development Review Vol. 17, No. 3 (Sep., 1991): 535.25 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 38.26 Ibid., 38-39. Education and schooling would fit under the category of work.

14

Children play three different economic roles in household

production, namely commodities produced by the household, supplier of

productive inputs, and consumers of commodities. Children are

commodities produced by their parents, as their number and quality

determine household production. They supply their time as labor to

produce within the household. Lastly, they consume some of the

commodities produced by the household, which is usually determined by

parents.27 As “the welfare of children depends on the particular mix of

production, consumption, and investment activities chosen for them by

their parents,” it follows that “the assessment of child labor, then,

depends on how parents regard their children.”28 If parents see the

children as producers for the parents, household child labor will

appear objectionable, while if they see the children as consumers with

intrinsic value, child labor will be less objectionable. But we must

also remember that more productive children means more commodities

available for the household to consume, including the children

themselves.29 While concluding that until at least the teenage years,

children were net consumers in the household, “the family economy and

the economic role of children underwent profound changes as a result

of the industrial revolution. In short, the most profound (and

27 Ibid., 39-40.28 Ibid., 40-41.29 Ibid., 41.

15

publicized) effect of industrialization was the emergence of child

labor in factories.”30 What was different about child labor was that

now they could and did work outside the home for wages, which

Nardinelli accounted for not in changes in parents’ attitudes, but

changes in technology that made child labor in factories a more

attractive alternative for the family economy: If “the division

between market production and household production for any given

member of the household d[id] not depend on attitudes, affections,

customs, sexual stereotypes or outside coercion,” then “it depend[ed]

only on relative productivities.”31 Machinery made children more

productive outside the home than in it, and the family economy adapted

to the changing economic environment.32 Nardnelli’s claims on parents’

attitudes did not go without criticism, however. Historian Pat Hudson,

reviewing Nardinelli’s work, criticized him because

The underlying assumptions of the analysis such as unchanging

intergenerational attitudes and efficient functioning of the

labour market are equivocal; there is little sensitivity to the

30 Ibid., 57.31 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 59. Nardinelli believes that the attitude of parents to children remained relatively unchanged between 1600 and 1900, basing this on the empirical work of Peter Laslett and Richard Wall’s Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and others32 Oddly enough, Nardinelli notes that with the increase in family income accompanying child labor in industry, children stayed at home longer than theyhad in the preceding centuries.

16

importance of regional and sectoral variations; too much

attention is paid to the factory sector and to textiles and too

little to the issue of child labour in sweated trades and in the

service sector.33

Essentially, Hudson thinks Nardinelli was playing fast and loose with

the evidence. While she had a strong point about regional variations,

as Nardinelli rarely delved into differences throughout Britain,

Nardinelli did spend a good deal of time going over the reasons why he

suspected there were no intergenerational changes in attitudes, citing

numerous sources to support his thesis, rather than assuming this—

although it can be argued he didn’t actually prove it, either.34 We

already know that the industrial revolution involved a significant

change in technology over time, and that technology served to increase

productivity, so even if this opportunity to bring in more income to

the family influenced parents to become more “greedy” and be willing

to subject children to harsher working conditions, it would still

remain that the technology was the root cause of children, and

laborers generally, moving into industry. And even so, this self-

interestedness would still serve to benefit the children with

increased consumption.

33 Pat Hudson, Review of Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution by Clark Nardinelli, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May, 1992), 426.34 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 42-45, 57-59.

17

Nardinelli moved on to consider whether children were

economically exploited during the industrial revolution, since there

was no reason to assume it was self-evidently true, despite most

historians’ unequivocal assertion that it was. Most of the historical

discussion surrounding exploitation has been dominated by a vague and

murky description of what constituted exploitation, and usually

amounted to the existence of “low wages, long hours, and harsh

treatment.”35 Nardinelli offered three common groupings of how

exploitation was defined by historians, including one that saw it as

product of greed to subject children to labor while still developing,

another that saw profit as inherently exploitative, since all value is

created by labor, and a third where a worker is paid less than the

value of what he produces for the firm, or their marginal revenue

product. The first definition tended to be centered within novels,

including those by Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles

Dickens, but the view was shared by others such as Friedrich Engels.36

The second view, unsurprisingly, was the view Karl Marx took whereby

children were used by capitalists to increase the degree of

exploitation. The last view Nardinelli closely associated with the

35 Ibid., 66.36 Ibid., 66. As examples, Nardinelli offers Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong,The Factory Boy (1840), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

18

neoclassical view on economic exploitation in the master-slave

relationship, where slaves did not receive back the full market value

of the fruits of their labors.37 Addressing the third view, because of

the fact that data from the period on wages, prices and output are

suspect, and a variance in the estimates leads to wide disparities in

either direction, “the question of the exploitation of children cannot

be resolved through the direct measurement of neoclassical

exploitation.”38

Before looking at indirect measures of economic exploitation,

Nardinelli examined the competitiveness of the labor market and found

that both the industrial and labor markets were competitive, and that

industrial concentrations were not increasing. Even the most exploited

workers had mobility, contrary to the persistent myths that large

firms were coming to dominate industry and workers were “unable to

move from factory to factory...forced to accept low pay and harsh

conditions because they could not hope to find a job elsewhere.”39

37 Ibid., 67-68.38 Ibid., 70-71.39 Ibid.. Nardinelli draws his conclusions on industrial concentration from a paper by V.A.C. Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 33 (February, 1980), which showed that “the size distribution of firms in the Lancashire cotton district was changing slowly or not at all during the nineteenth century”; Nardinelli, Child Labor, 73. On labor mobility, Nardinelli used the Report of the Select Committee (Parliamentary Papers, 1831-32, 15) to show that every worker documented by the committee had worked for at least two employers, with only four teenage workers working for exactly two, and the group averaging five employers, belying the claim of monopsony power by

19

Once he turned to the indirect measures of economic exploitation,

including health, adult wages, migration and job mobility,

apprenticeship, the future prospects of child laborers, and

compensating differentials, Nardinelli found these measures indicated

that, if anything, exploitation was not prevalent. The only source

where exploitation would have been common was for parish apprentice

children, who were farmed out by government under the Poor Laws to

factories to work and reduce overcrowding in the parish workhouses.

Here, children did not have the bargaining power of parents, nor they

did not go into the skilled trades where their skills would come at a

premium.40 The exploitation that was ad nauseam documented in the works

by the Hammonds and their like were of parish apprentice children, not

free laboring children. This is a crucial distinction because it

suggests that the evils existing under this “capitalist” arrangement

were not the result of unfettered markets and the nature of wage

labor, but of government legislation creating a system that would more

appropriately be called state capitalist slavery than laissez faire

industrialism.41 Not only this, but industrialism reduced exploitation

of children because apprenticeship, which had far preceded

cruel mill-owners; Nardinelli, Child Labor, 75.40 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 87-88.41 Lawrence Reed, “Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution” The Freeman 41, no 8 (1991).

20

industrialism, began to disappear, first in the textile mills and then

generally, as industrialism ran its course.42

There still remained the possibility of child exploitation in the

home: “That many parents did indeed greedily neglect the welfare of

their children is beyond question.” And yet, “few working class

families were permanently free from poverty; the employment of

children became necessary in order for families to stay above the

poverty line.” 43 Another factor influencing the level of exploitation

of children was parental drunkenness, many examples of which were

evident. How much this affected child exploitation and how regular it

was that drunken parents exploited their children is still an open

question.44

Child labor was not new, nor was exploitation; the industrial

revolution didn’t create that. Too often, it is blithely assumed that

the industrial revolution intensified these trends or expanded them,

without adequately addressing the extent to which these arrangements

were present in the pre-industrial period. At least through the

Hammonds in the early twentieth century, the myth of this golden age

was still alive and just as well as it was during the age of Engels

42 Nardinelli, Child Labor, 88-89.43 Ibid., 94-95.44 Ibid., 95-96.

21

and Marx.45 Today among historians the thinking that there was a golden

age of labor before the industrial revolution, whether for child or

adult labor, is nonexistent; yet historians still cling to the notion

that proving that there was exploitation during the industrial

revolution, or low wages, or poor conditions, sanitation, etc.

suffices to show that the industrial revolution made things worse. But

the perennial question that must be asked is “compared to what?” If

there is no in-depth historical comparison between the two periods, it

cannot be asserted that the industrial revolution increased

exploitation, let alone caused an increase.

III

Jane Humphries, in her work Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial

Revolution, took a notably different approach to studying child labor and

the industrial revolution. While she addressed many of the same

questions that Nardinelli did—she is also an economic historian—her

45 R.M. Hartwell, “Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: A Methodological Inquiry,” Journal of Economic History (June 1959): 246. “Engels basedhis account on the borrowed notion of a more primitive, but more contented, past where cottagers had enjoyed a material condition ‘far better than that oftheir successors.’”; Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 12, quoting from Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1993), 16. Engels classic formulation stated that “the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors”; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 2.

22

approach was to study more than 600 working class autobiographies and

use various quantitative and qualitative methods to generalize about

the content of the memoirs, and then incorporate this material in

concert with conventional accounts synthesizing traditional materials.

The particularly data she compiled included the age children began

work, information on the outcomes of children both occupationally and

educationally, the extent and significance of apprenticeship to the

family economy, and copious qualitative evidence regarding the family

and family relationships. 46

She found that child labor was systematic and entrenched,

occurring at “astonishing levels.”47 Humphries, contrary to the

“condescension” of many historians, also found that apprenticeship was

“respected” by families and had a positive impact on human capital

formation. It was “a gateway to better economic options and...a wise

family investment.”48

The problem with the study of child labor has been the lack of

sources, particularly quantitative ones.49 While Humphries was able to

identify and incorporate 617 working class autobiographies into her

work, this is a small sample compared to the working class population,

46 Humphries, Childhood, 1, 7, 13.47 Ibid., 7-8.48 Ibid., 10.49 Ibid., 12.

23

and the sources most often consulted by historians come from the other

classes, including Parliament, social reformers, the legal profession,

employers, and doctors, all of whom were educated. In regard to

relying on the autobiographies themselves, Humphries frankly discusses

the drawbacks and limitations of relying on the autobiographies

themselves, including the possibilities that the memoirs will reflect

“childish understanding and failures of memory...may be refracted

through the lens of ideology or indeed consciously designed to

misinform or mislead.”50 Not only this, but “the handful of working

people who were willing and able to write down their experiences was

by that very act a selected sample; to draw conclusions from such

rarified evidence might be foolhardy to the extreme.”51 Yet, with care

and an understanding that the sources cannot be used as “eyewitness”

testimonials to objective external contemporary events, but as windows

into the author’s perception of their own experience, these

difficulties can be overcome.52 In essence, there is a distinction to

be made between facts and experiences. Experiences are always

tinctured by the personality, memory and prejudices, which must first

be recognized as part of the critical process to determine what is

relevant or useful within each particular autobiography. In short, the

50 Ibid., 5.51 Ibid., 5.52 Ibid., 5-6.

24

historian has to interpret the source, not accept it uncritically.53 In

the case of these autobiographies, Humphries assures us that these

works contain a treasure trove of information on childhood, and that

while many works when dealing with life in adulthood resort to

prevarication or ex post rationalizations, descriptions of childhood tend

to be free from these defects, as well as free from a teleological

selection of choice facts illustrating the precursors that would

manifest themselves in later life—what E.P. Thompson would call the

“‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ orthodoxy.”54 Additionally, by using the data in

a quantitative manner, any downplaying or exaggerating by the

autobiographer will average themselves out. It’s also not important

whether in some respects the individuals writing the autobiographies

were exceptional in some way or self-selected—she downplays each of

these characteristics’ application to her sample generally—but whether

their circumstances in their childhood as they described it was

exceptional; for her autobiographies, the answer was no.55

Emma Griffin started off her study, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the

Industrial Revolution (2013), with a slightly different question than

Humphries, and more in line with the standard of living controversy,

viz., “what was the impact of the world’s first industrial revolution

53 Ibid., 16-17.54 Ibid., 18-19; Thompson, Working Class, 12.55 Humphries, Childhood, 20-23.

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on the ordinary men, women and children who lived through it?” Griffin

took aim at autobiographical literature as well, consulting over 350

works (roughly the same ones at Humphries). Griffin agreed with

Humphries, going against the first autobiographical study by David

Vincent, that even if there was something exception about those who

wrote the autobiographies, their circumstances were not, and they

represented the variety of different occupations, skills and

backgrounds that you would find within the working class.56 She too

noted the drawbacks. Like historians, those writing memoirs had to

choose what to write about, which necessarily left other things out.

In some cases they had to censor themselves due to Victorian

sensibilities. Even if we understand that a writer cannot extract him

or herself from their writing, it must be remembered that these

writers often made serious attempts to write things as close to “a

truthful and accurate account of their lives” as possible.57

In describing Nardinelli’s neoclassical approach to the issue of

child labor, where Humphries characterizes Nardinelli as “arguing that

since families had the option not to send their children to work and

yet did so, child labour was optimal, the best outcome possible in the

56 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 5-6. According to Griffin, the first major study of working-class autobiography was David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (London, 1981).57 Ibid., 8-9.

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circumstances faced,” she gets at the crux of the problem with

neoclassical economic interpretations: the rational economic actor. A

rational economic actor, essentially, is one who consistently chooses

the best means to accomplish their ends, given the constraints of

their situations. Many people intuitively find this approach

problematic, since a close investigation of most actors will reveal

that there were better alternative means to achieve the ends of the

actors, yet they often do not choose the “best” means. While the

complaint is justified, what the neoclassicist would respond is that

it isn’t so much that a rational actor is one who always chooses the

objectively best means in a vacuum, but choose the best means given

the variety of constraints existing, including their ideologies, etc.

This is a good response, but an insufficient one, since the

neoclassical economic model actually does not incorporate these

constraints, since it assumes perfect information on the part of each

actor, which isn’t present in the real world. What they would then

fall back on is the more defensible claim that it’s not that actors

choose means in a hyper-rationalistic way, but that by assuming people

are rational actors, we can better understand the behavior of

strangers than by assuming some alternative human psychological

tendency. Humans might achieve results close to what a rational actor

model might predict, but it may be due to trial and error or evolution

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and selection, rather than simply rational thinking. This claim is

sensible, but this brings us back to Nardinelli’s view that by

choosing to send their children to work rather than not to, child

labor was the best outcome, in fact.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t have to be factually

true. It may be that sending a child to work in a factory in any

particular situation was not optimal, and the family economy would

have been optimized under an alternative arrangement, given a

retrospective evaluation if we actually were in possession of perfect

information. My assertion is that whether or not child labor was truly

optimal cannot be inferred from the existence of an individual’s

choice to send the child to work in a factory instead of choosing any

of the other conceivable alternatives. What can be inferred, however,

is that in the act of choosing to send their child to labor in a

factory (or not), an individual expressed their belief that this

choice was optimal. They expressed their preference for child labor in

a factory to all other alternatives, and this is all that can be

inferred. This is a subtle, but powerful distinction. It suggests to

me a reprioritizing of evidence in the history of child labor, of

social history, and the history profession generally.

According to Ludwig von Mises, one of the basic truths about all

of human action—that is, purposeful behavior—is that individuals aim

28

to “substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less

satisfactory”58 one. Thus, for example, it is a priori true that whenever

individuals agree to an exchange, each participant necessarily

benefits, for they each give up something that they value less than

what they receive in return. What this means for history is that we

must focus on the individuals existing during the time under study and

acknowledge the legitimacy of their choices, examining the settings in

which workers choose between various employments, with their choice

indicating they prefer the situation they chose to the others they had

forgone.59 Hence, the best and most reliable way we can understand

history is to examine an individual’s action, not their statements—and

this is precisely where many histories, such as those by Thompson,

Humphries and Griffin, have went wrong or have not achieved their full

potential.60 It can still reveal important information about the

individuals’ thoughts and other psychological factors, but this

information will always be less reliable than human action data.

This point may seem elementary, but evidence of individual

choices are all too often set aside or replaced with more questionable

source material, such as verbal or written declarations, the wage or

58 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 2nd ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), 13.59 Ibid., 11-13.60 In more familiar terms, “Actions speak louder than words.”

29

price statistics, and retrospective evaluations of the “objective”

change.61 We must also remember that, while there were costs to leaving

the one’s employment that not everyone could bear or, at least, was

not willing to bear, during the eighteenth century, one million

individuals left Britain and flocked to America.62 This truth belies

the attempts by historians to characterize mutually agreed upon

factory employment not only as exploitative, but as coercive. For not

only could the laboring poor choose to leave factory employment or

cities if they so desired, they could leave the country—and many did.

Thompson notably criticized economic historians such as Hayek and

Ashton on just such grounds, arguing that what mattered was not what

the historian believed to be an improvement in the standard of living

but what the working class laborer him or herself felt was an

improvement.63 While this is more in line with an approach centered on

human action, to focus on an individual’s perception of value and

choice, it suffered because the evidence Thompson relied on was

inferior, since an individual’s statements do not have the apodictic

certainty that evidence of individual choice has. Thompson, among

others, also tried to use statements by the worker in order to

61 E.P. Thompson did this very often, providing mountains of quotations of individuals from numerous sources as expressions of their preferences, but less frequently used individual action as evidence of individual preferences.62 T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 5.63 Thompson, Working Class, 319.

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consider whether their conditions improved or deteriorated, or whether

workers felt they were being exploited or not. We cannot know with a

high degree of certainty the veracity of a worker’s claim that their

conditions were deplorable, or worse than their laboring conditions in

the field, any more than we can know whether an observer touring the

factory in the early 1800’s was exaggerating when he described workers

as lively elves64 (though we might reasonably suspect one is much

closer to the truth than the other). What we can know for sure is that

individuals who chose to move into the city from the fields considered

the former to be an improvement over the latter, just as those who

chose to work in a factory rather than on a farm considered the former

employment an improvement over the latter.

In his chapter in McCloskey’s Economic History of Britain since 1700,

entitled “Unequal living standards,” Peter Lindert provided us with

indirect support for my proposition: “To weigh seemingly immeasurable

qualities of life against the purchasing power of income or

consumption, the key is to use the values of the people whose welfare

is being weighted.”65 This means one needs to examine the settings in

which workers, for example, chose between various employments, with

64 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufacturers (1835; London: Frank Cass, 1967), 301,quoted in Ashton, Industrial Revolution, 81-2; Nardinelli, Child Labor, 9.65 Peter H. Lindert, “Unequal Living Standards,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Volume 1: 1700-1860, ed. R.C. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 376.

31

their choice indicating they prefer the situation they chose to the

others they had forgone.66 This methodology can be applied to the

Industrial Revolution in many instances, with important results for

both the standard of living debate and the historical study of child

labor.

In some sense, the critique of the Marxists and even some

neoclassicists of exploitation of children was appropriate, although

not for laborers. The idea of exploitation to a Misesian is

incomprehensible, for in any mutually voluntary employment

relationship, each party expressed their preference in acting, and

therefore each party necessarily benefited; and furthermore, we cannot

make interpersonal comparisons of utility,67 i.e. we cannot compare

subjective values, hence to claim that one party to a voluntary

exchange disproportionately benefits is nonsensical. However, the

relationship between a child and his or her employer cannot

necessarily be considered voluntary. This opens up the possibility

that this relationship is a zero sum game rather than a positive sum

game, and thus the possibility that an employer is disproportionately

benefiting of benefiting at the expense of the child; Nardinelli does

not adequately consider this possibility because he was operating66 Mises, Human Action, 11-13.67 Murray Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises, ed. Mary Sennholz (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1956), 224-262.

32

within a neoclassical framework rather than a Misesian one. Of course,

children present a problem under this methodology. For children are

not voluntary actors. Action can only express an individual’s

preference if they choose a course of action voluntarily. At most, we

can say that a parent’s decision to send a child to labor in the

factory meant that they found this alternative more desirable than any

others.

What is clear from the migration of individuals during this

period is that many workers, on their own volition, chose to move to

cities and take up jobs in the factory.68 We have already noted that

one million individuals expressed a preference for the conditions of

American to Britain by emigrating in the eighteenth century, which

also tells us that the monopsony power of the employer—being the sole

purchased of labor services in a area—was not so great that poor

workers who were mistreated could not “vote with their feet”; this

applied to both children and their families. Nutrition had

traditionally been a mark in favor of the pessimist case, with even

the more recent optimistic estimates observing a mild decrease in

68 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 4. Surprisingly, as Lindert notes, the increase in population of cities and industrial jobs during this period was not as significant as one might think. As he states, “the rise of industrial jobs…wasonly about 10 per cent of the labour force… [and] the rise of the share of thepopulation living in cities was only 14.89 per cent”; Lindert, “Unequal LivingStandards,” 377.

33

calories per capita.69 However, as Horrell and Oxley observe, though it

may have been that the range of choices was unhealthier, “people chose

palatability and ease of effort over (little understood) nutritive

content [emphasis added].”70 It might be regrettable that people chose

an unhealthy or calorically inferior food product for consumption,

but this is hardly something one can indict the Industrial Revolution

with, as we observe this phenomenon today, when people chose processed

foods over fresh ones. In The state of the poor (1797), a study written by

Sir Frederic Morton Eden, Eden discovered that working class wages

were not insufficient for survival, provided the poor used their

resources economically, but this was often not the case, as the poor

tended to be victims of their own injudiciousness.71 If the condition

of the poor was largely a function of their own choices, it is

problematic to second guess their decision by imposing present-day

evaluations of what options improved the standard of living of the

poor.

Conclusion

69 Sara Horrell, and Deborah Oxley, “Bringing Home the Bacon? Regional Nutrition, Stature, and Gender in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 65, no. 4 (November 2012): 1354.70 Ibid., 1355.71 Sir Frederic Morton Eden, The state of the poor: or, an history of the labouring classes in England, vol. 1 (1797), 491, quoted in Horrell and Oxley, “Bringing Home the Bacon,” 1356.

34

Where action and written declarations conflict, we ought to privilege

the former over the latter as a valid reflection of their preference,

since by their action they demonstrated their preference. To the

extent that historians try to overturn evidence of choice, they will

produce dubious conclusions. Successful historians will be those who

build on the foundational evidence of human action, supporting it with

other evidence, such as statistics, logic, and written testimony. They

will also be those who understand that the role of this other evidence

is to nuance the historical explanation, to fill in gaps, or to

explain historical events that deal with elements of human psychology

more than human action, what Mises would describe as “the

psychological events which result in an action.”72 Rejecting the

utility of statements over action, Mises admonished that

To express wishes and hopes and to announce planned action may be

forms of action in so far as they aim in themselves at the

realization of a certain prupose. But they must not be confused

with the actions to which they refer. They are not identical with

the actions they announce, recommend, or reject.73

Therefore, they cannot incontrovertibly establish a historical fact,

such as an individual’s preference, nor overturn this choice. While it

72 Mises, Human Action, 11-1273 Ibid., 12.

35

has been the mission of many historians to overturn choices made by

historical actors—choices that they dislike, such as laborers choosing

to work in industry, or parents choosing to send their children to the

factory—by finding fault with capitalism or industrialism, rather than

finding fault with those workers who thought it was in their interest

to do work in factories or those parents who thought it was acceptable

to send their children into industry, these efforts have largely

proven unsuccessful. However, these historians can still play a role

in describing the extent of harsh treatment of laborers, the grimness

of working conditions, the depths to which wages may have plunged,

etc.

A final important point this essay has touched upon is the role

of economics and economic logic in history. Ludwig von Mises believed

that all of economics stemmed from the action axiom, which we defined

earlier as the proposition that individuals act to “substitute a more

satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory”74 one. If

historians are in the business of establishing the veracity of

observable facts, collecting and organizing historical data, and

telling a narrative to explain that data, they must have some way of

explaining the observable facts, which we would call a theory.

Likewise, the historian, in order to organize historical data and

74 Ibid., 13.

36

decide the ultimate relevancy of an infinite number of data points,

must also resort to a theory of causal relationships. Economics is a

discipline that attempts to establish causal relationships between

observable facts in the economic world. If the economic world is

synonymous with the sphere of human action, as Mises implied, and the

study human action is necessary to establish the veracity of

observable facts in history, as this essay has proposed, it is crucial

for the historian to understand economics in order to develop useful

historical work.

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