The source used to reconstruct the child labour data at the family level is the Ensenada Cadaster, a unique source for studying the eighteenth-century society and economy of the Crown of Castile, constituting three-quarters of current territory of Spain.
It was carried out between 1750 and 1756 in 90 cities and in more than 15.885 towns and villages. The name of the cadaster was due to its promoter: the first Marquis of Ensenada, Secretary of the Treasury, who had the aim of unifying the fiscal system. This process had two levels of investigation, at the individual level and at the municipal level. At the individual level, households had to declare their properties and incomes as well as their names, marital status, profession and age in a document called Memorial58. At the municipal level, a survey of 40 questions regarding various aspects of the population was carried out, known as Respuestas Generales. The group responsible for the investigation consisted of an intendant, a royal notary, assistants of the royal notary, a geometer, several surveyors, a legal advisor and a bailiff, among others (Camarero Bullón 2002).
58 The memorials used in this research are as follows: “I belong to the General estate, my trade fuller, married, my family is formed by myself, 46 years old, Ynés López Zamorano, 40 years old. I have four daughters, Agustina, 20, her occupation weaver, Isabel, 13, her occupation spinning, María, 11, her occupation going to sewing school, María Teresa, 2 months” Archivo Histórico Provincial de Ciudad Real, Ciudad Real Ensenada section, Antonio López Rufián, Campo de Criptana, box 502, declaration 77 (Sarasúa 2019: 483).
Although information about others living in the household was requested, “most householders did not declare the occupations of their wives or children because they were not asked to do so, since any subsistence wages earned by wives and children would not be taxed” (Sarasúa 2019: 483). The towns and cities studied in this paper must meet the criterion of at least 15 per cent household’s declarations include the occupation of the family members and not exclusively that of the head of household in the census. However, most of them involve at least 40 per cent (Sarasúa 2013: 2019). Figure 4.3 shows the map of the towns included.
The sample consists of 4,005 boys and 3,661 girls aged between 5-14 resulting in a total of 4,204 families analysed. The places studied are 22 towns that belong to the current provinces of Guadalajara, Madrid, Toledo, Ciudad Real and Albacete. The sample extends from small villages with around 200 inhabitants to cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants, such as Guadalajara and Almagro. The only provincial capital included in the analysis is Guadalajara, the other cities shown in bold on the map are used in order to distinguish between the different provinces.
As mentioned, in Guadalajara and Brihuega, there were textile royal factories. The factory of Guadalajara was founded in 1719 and it was closed in 1822. The subsidiary of Brihuega was built in 1750 (López Barahona 2020). The occupational structure by sector also differs among the sample: some towns such as Villamanrique del Tajo, Quintanar or Ajofrín were mostly industrial and others such as Villaviciosa, Bolaños or Pedro Muñoz were largely agricultural, according to the occupations of the inhabitants. The only city where the tertiary sector was the largest by labour force participation was Guadalajara
(45.9%)59. This occupational data allows for an analysis of different places with different economic specialisations.
The first analysis performed is based on the occupation of the male head of each household. When women the females were head of households it meant that they were widows (only a few cases and different characteristics). These occupations have been classified following the Armstrong codification scheme (Armstrong 1972). In total there are six different occupational categories. The first one it is the professional group or those with higher education dedicated to local and national government services or professions as a doctor. In second place, semi-professionals or non-manual, are mostly dealers.
Individuals with occupation in industry, craftsmen or sellers are in the groups of skilled.
The fourth groups contain semi-skilled individuals. Day labourers are included in the fifth group. Finally, farmers are assigned to their own group. Farmers were a special group of primary sector workers because they enjoyed a higher income as well as a certain decision power about how much food would be sold on the market and how much food could be consumed by the farmer family. In previous research, it has been shown that these two factors could contribute to farmers having a higher level of human capital (numeracy) than other primary sector workers in agriculture and livestock (Tollnek and Baten 2017).
The ratio of first-letter teachers (primary school teachers) to school-age children has been estimated, differentiating between the teachers of boys and girls. In addition to the self-reported occupations from the memorials, the number of male first-letter teachers (primary school) in the Respuestas Generales have been confirmed. For example, question number 25 asked about the public spending that the town council had to pay, while questions 32 and 33 provided a summary of the number of professions that were
59 Data calculated from Sarasúa (2019: 495) Table 4.
carried out in each town, whether professional or manual and their earnings. Using this information, it was possible to double check the number of first-letter teachers in each town, comparing them with the data obtained through the responses from the head of each household60. Furthermore, using these sources, it has been possible to know the salary they received. For the ratio of female teachers to school-aged girls, only women reported as teachers in the memorials have been considered since they were not recorded in the Respuestas Generales. To calculate this ratio, one finds that the minimum and maximum ages of children enrolled in elementary school had not yet been established. Rather, it was the family's decision to send or stop sending their children to school when they thought it was appropriate. In addition, as noted above, there was also no rule regulating school attendance. In this paper, it is assumed that the school-age children were between five and ten years of age. Therefore, the number of teachers in each town has been divided by the number of children aged five to ten, distinguishing between boys (male teachers) and girls (female teachers).