We draw on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell’s widely cited manual for prospective apprentices, The London Tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship in mid-eighteenth century London to market forces of supply and demand. We regress...

This paper examines the effect of the early adoption of technology on the evolution of human capital and on industrialization, in the context of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It shows that wrights, a group of highly skilled mechanical craftsmen, who specialized in water-powered machinery in...

In this paper we explore the response of the supply of human capital to changes in demand in the British Industrial Revolution. We use annual information from the Stamp Tax registers on apprentices in England between 1710-1803 and examine the response of tuitions to changes in the annual number...