At first sight the title of this chapter may appear to bring together an odd group of topics. One pair within the trio of topics, the importance and frequency of migration as urban and industrial growth got into its stride, has already been touched upon, but will support further consideration. Both migration and occupational structure, however, were also very closely connected to changes in the structure of aggregate income, and by considering all three and their interrelation jointly, some of the most important features of the transformation of England in the period between the reigns of Elizabeth and Victoria can be brought into focus.

Occupational structure and migration

Radical occupational change virtually connotes large-scale migration. Primary employment is necessarily spread wide and thin because it is so closely linked to the land. Indeed, controlling for differences in the fertility of the soil, the distribution of agricultural employment, which constituted the great bulk of primary employment as a whole, largely reflected acreage. The bigger the area of farmland, the larger the population. Consider table 5.1. Of the forty-one English counties in 1841 all but eleven had between thirty and fifty males employed in agriculture for every thousand acres of the land surface of the county, a very limited spread.