During the last third of the eighteenth century, most parishes in rural southern England adopted policies providing poor relief outside workhouses to unemployed and underemployed able-bodied labourers. The debate over the economic effects of 'outdoor' relief payments to able-bodied workers has continued for over 200 years. This book examines the economic role of the Poor Law in the rural south of England. It presents a model of the agricultural labour market that provides explanations for the widespread adoption of outdoor relief policies, the persistence of such policies until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, and the sharp regional differences in the administration of relief. The book challenges many commonly held beliefs about the Poor Law and concludes that the adoption of outdoor relief for able-bodied paupers was a rational response by politically dominant farmers to changes in the rural economic environment.

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We present new estimates of the British industrial unemployment rate for , which improve on the Board of Trade's prior estimates. We use similar sources, but our series includes additional industrial sectors, allows for short-time working, and aggregates the various sectors using appropriate labor-force weights from the census. The resulting index suggests a rate of industrial unemployment that was generally higher, but less volatile, than the board's index. We then adjust our series to an economywide basis, and construct a consistent time series of overall unemployment for 1870-1999. T he Board of Trade's unemployment series for the period 1860-1913 has been widely used by economists and economic historians to evaluate the labor-market implications of economic fluctuations in the half-century before the First World War. However, many contemporaries and historians have noted that the index has serious shortcomings that limit its usefulness as a measure of unemployment at any point in time. The Board of Trade index was constructed from data reported by trade unions that administered benefit schemes for their unemployed members. It was based on a relatively small, nonrandom sample of industrial workers, and it excluded those in sectors of the economy that were not unionized or in which unions did not offer unemployment benefits. Moreover, in constructing an aggregate unemployment rate the Board of Trade weighted the individual unions included 644Boyer and Hatton in the index by their membership rather than by the size of the labor force in the industries they represented.In this article we provide a new index of unemployment. Our index relies chiefly on trade-union records, but it also incorporates other information where possible, in order to include sectors of the economy for which tradeunion unemployment data are not available. It reweights the component trades with appropriate labor-force weights obtained from the decennial census. We construct versions of the index that include a measure of unemployment for unskilled general laborers, and also a measure of the loss of employment through short-time working, which was common in certain major industries. Finally, we use post-1919 data to adjust our unemployment series, which covers only the industrial sector, to an economywide basis. On this basis we derive a consistent unemployment series for the entire period 1870-1999. Our results support the views of critics who maintained that the Board of Trade series underestimated the level of unemployment in industry. ] The results also support another criticism of the board's index: that it exaggerates the extent of fluctuations in unemployment. In this respect our results parallel those of Christina Romer and David Weir, who have found that the American labor market was more stable in this era than previous estimates suggested. 2 THE EXISTING INDEX OF UNEMPLOYMENTIn 1888 the Labour Bureau of the Board of Trade began reporting a monthly (and annual) unemployment index, calculated from information supplied...

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