Falkirk O41area — Current theme: Industry

Even the first census of 1801 divided the population into those 'chiefly employed in agriculture', those 'chiefly employed in trade, manufacturers or handicraft', and others. From 1841 onwards, information was gathered on each person's occupation and this formed the basis for very detailed tables. The 1841 occupational tables, used here, listed over 3,000 different occupational titles. This was partly because no advance plans had been made for dealing with the enormous range of job titles people gave, but by 1881 the more organised classification used in the county level tables covered 414 categories. Unfortunately, because of the need to reorganise these statistics into different areas, for 1971 to 1991 we must work with data for over 10,000 wards, and only a very simple industrial classification is available for these. We therefore present long-run industrial change using just six broad sectors.

In general, early census reports applied just one classification to occupations, which led to three separate issues getting mixed up: social status, what the individual worker did, and what their employer's business was. Modern censuses have separate tables for each of these. NB our 1841 data are geographically crude, which results in some districts in the same county having identical figures.

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Our detailed statistics are held in structures called nCubes, which you can think of as tables with one dimension, or with two ... or with twenty. Their dimensions are defined by the variables each nCube combines, and each variable is made up of categories. These nCubes are available at national level for this theme:

Available nCubes	Period covered	Variables (number of categories)
Total employed in all industries	1841	Employed in all Industries (2)
Occupation data classified by the Booth main sectors plus sex	1841	Sex (2) Booth-Armstrong Industrial Sectors (10)