Occupational Structure Reconstruction
Occupational structure reconstruction uses the distribution of the workforce across economic activities to chart how an economy's sectoral composition evolved before modern statistics. The Cambridge Group, led by E. A. Wrigley, developed the Primary-Secondary-Tertiary (PST) system, a classification purpose-built for historical occupational descriptors that sorts every recorded occupation into agriculture and extraction (primary), manufacturing and processing (secondary), or trade, transport, and services (tertiary), with finer subdivisions beneath. By coding occupations from censuses, parish registers, probate inventories, trade directories, and militia lists, the method estimates the share of workers in each sector and tracks its movement across benchmark years. Because the shift from primary to secondary and tertiary employment is the structural signature of economic development, these reconstructions illuminate the timing and geography of industrialization with a directness that aggregate output figures cannot match, complementing and constraining national-accounting estimates of growth.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Wrigley, E. A. (2010). The PST System of Classifying Occupations. Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. · URL
- Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. · ISBN 9780199227204
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.