Child day-labourers in agriculture: evidence from farm accounts, 1740-1850<superscript>1</superscript>.

While child labour has always been an important part of the industrial revolution story, there is little quantitative evidence about the number of child workers in the 1740-1850 period. This article estimates trends in the percentage of the agricultural day-labouring workforce that were children. By using the wage level to identify child workers, it is possible to estimate child labour for a large sample of English farms. It is found that girls were rarely employed as day-labourers, while boys were employed about as frequently as women. The percentage of boys in the day-labour workforce increased until the 1820s and then declined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]