The Breakdown of the English Society of Orders: The Role of the Industrial Revolution

We study the role of the English Industrial Revolution in promoting social mobility and ending the society of orders: one based on rigid social categories and regulated by inherited characteristics. We combine two new datasets on individual wealth holdings before and after the Industrial Revolution. Our main finding is that noble and gentry titles as well as surnames explain significantly less of the variation in wealth after the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, these declines are substantially larger in the parts of England most impacted by the Revolution. We also explore the extent to which different characteristics predict being rich. We then study a key facet of this increased social mobility – geographical and occupational mobility. We show that people with surnames that were more mobile tended to be in the north and working in manufacturing. Moreover, areas that experienced greater outward mobility were more urbanized; less agrarian; had institutionalized markets; more gentry; were poorer (as proxied by tax revenues); and were more likely to be the residence of a member of parliament.