Apprenticeship and economic growth in early modern England
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Welcome to LSE. My name is Eric Schneider and I'm a professor in the economic history department. And it's really my distinct pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker, Professor Patrick Wallace, who will be speaking about his newly published book, The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship Economic Growth in Early Modern England. A real page turner.

There are copies of the book available to purchase outside, so please feel free to do that. There will also be a reception afterwards upstairs, so you have to go up to the fifth floor. We'll help you get up there later, but if you're looking for some free food or snacks, please join us. And Patrick will also be there signing books, so if you'd like to get it signed, please feel free to do that as well.

I also just want to go over a few rules of the game. So this is a hybrid event, so there are people online joining us. So keep that in mind when you're asking questions because this will be recorded and put online. So maybe, you know, don't give Patrick the nastiest questions that you can think of. Also, if you're interested in social media, you can use the hashtag #LSEevents. And can I also ask you to silence your cell phones so that we're not interrupted during Patrick's talk?

Once the talk is over, we'll have some questions both from the floor here and from online. So please wait to ask your question until you get a microphone. And it's not just for the people in the room, but also for the people online so that they can hear the questions that you're asking. All right, so now onto the main event. So it's our pleasure to welcome Patrick, who's professor of economic history at the LSE.

Patrick started his career as a medical historian, writing about the history of drugs, their marketing and trade between England and the colonies. My favorite paper from this phase of Patrick's career, though, is his paper on the 1666 plague in Eam, in Derbyshire.

And in that paper, he managed to pour cold water on Eames' famous myth that the city self-quarantined during the epidemic and that 78% of the population died. Patrick really convincingly showed that the historical evidence for that myth is extremely thin and was constructed over the course of subsequent centuries. So I imagine Patrick hasn't been welcome in Eames ever since.

Since joining our department in 2004, Patrick has shifted his research towards some of the really crucial questions in economic history. He's shown that the structural change, the shift from agricultural to industrial employment, occurred very early in England. And also that monopsony power was really important in shaping early modern labor markets.

He's also published important work on citizenship in early modern cities and tonight's talk on apprenticeship.

Aside from research, having taught two courses with Patrick, I've witnessed his skill at teaching firsthand. He's really a master at weaving teaching and research together to help students understand how history is made. He recently published a paper co-authored with 14 undergraduate students, a couple of whom are in the audience here. Sorry. And that was based on his course, Economic History Lab, Cities, Economies, Society, 1550 to 1750.

I think we also have to note at this point that Patrick is finishing a four-year term as head of department of our department in July. Most academics avoid these kinds of administrative tasks like the plague, but similar to Patrick's work on EAM, he dived into the role with boundless enthusiasm and energy. And my colleagues and I are very grateful to him for his stewardship and support over the last four years.

So the book we're launching tonight is the culmination of a 20-year research agenda. I actually, I feel a little bit, you know, yeah, it's interesting because this, Patrick presented this part of this work in the second seminar that I saw as a master's student in 2008. So I feel like I've seen this develop over a very long period of time. Since then, Patrick has published half a dozen papers on apprenticeship and its role in the early modern society.

economy, culminating with this book which ties the whole research agenda together. So the book definitely weaves together information on hundreds of thousands of apprentices with qualitative evidence on how contracts were enforced to explain how apprenticeship shaped the market for skill in the past. Patrick argues that apprenticeship was more flexible than sometimes thought and was crucial for training in early modern England. So the book changes the way we think about the acquisition of skill in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution.

But I'm not going to do Patrick's job for him. So, over to you. Thank you very much, Eric. I think I sound kind of exploitative and very slow as a result of that. But I would like to point out that Tim Leuning, who was also there in that seminar, is in the room. So it's not just me who's slow. I know, I know. It's always going to be that kind of talk, sorry.

Thank you all just so much for coming. It's so nice to see so many faces of friends and family here. It's really lovely. So this is partly a sheer celebration, right? We're here, there's a book.

But also to toast it, right, to celebrate its final arrival after a really, really long time. Actually, oddly, the very first thing I ever wrote about this subject was in order to try and get the job at LSE, when I didn't really know anything about economic history. So it's taken a really long time for it all to come together. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to say, I thought, well, you know, I've

Ended up with this title, "The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth." What I should try and do is break that out and really try and explain why I talk about this as a market for skill. It's not obviously what you think of when you think about pre-modern apprentices, right? Like a market? Well, okay, maybe it's very LSE now to say it's a market.

But actually, you know, it's not obvious. And the other is, why do I connect it with economic growth, right? So I'm going to do that over the next 40 or so minutes. I'll try not to weigh too heavily on your patience, because I know there's wine waiting. But I wanted to kind of present these two sides to the book. So the story is going to start with a first half on the market for skill, and then we're going to move into apprenticeship and economic growth.

So I wanted to, I thought like I should, you know, everyone's in the room from different places. There are some who are young, some who are maybe not so young anymore, right? And I thought I should start with a really big question. And this is in some ways the question that all of this work starts with, which is how is it that young people get the skills they're going to need to thrive as adults? How do we actually achieve that as a society?

It's the kind of question that worries me as a parent. I mean, I look at my children. I worry. I'm the beneficiary or recipient of this as the child of parents who tried, clearly tried. And the answers a society develops to this question, they matter a lot. They shape the society that they end up with.

And by writing a book about apprenticeship, I'm really writing a book about the answer to this question in some ways. How a society gives skills to its young people. And it's worth sketching this out, right? Because one very obvious answer is that parents can teach them.

Parents can teach very basic skills, right? How you tie a shoelace, how you walk, how you talk. An enormous amount of really important learning is done through the family. It's worth saying that it was the grandmother who taught my children how to tie their shoelaces. We weren't very good at that, it turned out. But this is really good for a lot of foundational skills.

And for most of human history, this kind of works, right? When we are hunting and gathering, if people are spending their lives in agriculture, then the family's probably going to know most of what the next generation needs to learn because they're all on a farm or they're all hunting or gathering or whatever it is that you do out on the savannah. And so you have the right set of skills to pass on to the next generation.

But actually, as the world becomes more complex, as economies become more complex, this becomes less useful. I can teach my children how to read 16th century handwriting. My undergraduates know I can do that, right? But it's not going to help them very much if they don't become an early modern historian.

And frankly, I wouldn't really advise this as a career for the long term. And this is a problem, right? As economies become more complex, we're less and less likely to do what our parents do. Our society is less likely to need the skills that the previous generation possesses. So, I mean, I can teach these guys how to read manuscripts, but it's probably not where they need to learn.

So there are some problems with this family model. And you could break them down, you could think about them a bit like this. Problem of demand. Parents may give their children skills, but they may not be the skills they're a demand for. Maybe you have too many children to support on the family farm.

if you go into our back garden, if you split it into two and gave half to each of the children, they would starve fairly fast, right? So we have a land labour inequality in my family.

Maybe it's also not really what your kids are well suited to do, right? I mean, my daughter is clearly far better at negotiating than me, hence bedtiles, right? Like my son's better at computers. That's really obvious too. So, I mean, we could put them into the family trade, but actually that may be a waste of their aptitude. It may not really help. It may not suit them.

And we know that this is kind of a problem more generally. You know, we've got illustrations of this in fiction, right? Sons may not want to do what their dads want them to do, right? And joking aside, this is a problem, right? Families can teach what they know, but if they do that, an economy in some senses stagnates. Knowledge passes linearly down the line.

But we also know there are some solutions. Since the 19th century, we've had a lot of them. We're standing inside a solution to this problem. It's a university. Schools are obviously an even more important solution. These are ways in some ways to force our children to acquire certain skills.

There are also ways to pay for it. So we pay through our taxes, and they nowadays, as students, pay through their loans. Sorry, guys. For these skills. And this gives them a whole body of general information that they'll use. And there's also another side of this, the kind of vocational training that you learn through work. A lot of this nowadays, a lot of vocational training is learnt informally. You get a job, you pick it up, you pick up little bits of information and skill over time.

And maybe your firm invests in you, maybe it gives you some kind of training, and again, you might get some kind of tax subsidy, college training alongside that. We know the Department of Education likes these types of things, right? And this has been big business, right? I mean, this is the Royal School of Mines. It was set up in the 19th century to make Britain better at mining. It's now part of Imperial College. Their origins in further and higher technical education, well, anyway, never mind, we're not going to go there.

And this encompasses modern apprenticeship, I should say. So this kind of training includes what we think of as modern apprentices today because they're apprentices who are employed by a large organization, a firm or some kind of other part, often part of the state. So I've got an image here because even the Air Force had apprentices in the 1950s and 60s. They're a big organization. They train. They make agreements.

And the important thing about this is that those people then go on to have careers with that organization. So there's an investment, there's a payoff. I mean, despite their haircuts, some of these guys stayed in the Air Force for decades.

and they end up actually helping to run it. So this is exactly the kind of modern training system that we have even today. So if you go to British Aerospace, that exemplar of modern apprenticeship, they will have apprentices who they expect to hire and keep on for decades. But this is the problem. What if you have a small weak state and no big firms? I mean this is the world of early modern England.

In fact, this is the world until modernity, right? So we have this problem. If you have that, you've got no big firms that can invest in young workers. They don't exist. You've got no subsidized training because you've got no tax to invest in that. You've got no careers which might incentivize a firm to invest because they're not going to have you as an employee. So these modern solutions literally don't work. So we've got this gap.

On the one hand we have the family which creates this kind of mode for training and skill transmission that is very powerful but quite narrow. It's really good at perpetuating some skills but not at acquiring new ones. And on the other hand we have this model of the state and the firm which is great but only if you have a state and only if you have firms.

I know, it was in the title, right? This is where pre-modern apprenticeship fits in. It's not the only solution, I'm not pretending that, I don't think it's a perfect solution, far from pretending that. It's not without its flaws, there are several chapters about its flaws. But it is nonetheless a really important solution. So, how does this work? How does apprenticeship work? Well, it's got some generic elements.

Got some young people and their families and they are really interested in making sure that their young people have skills So they're really in the sense buying training and it has some people who have skills who are whatever they are blacksmiths clockmakers Merchants and they are selling skills right there actually interested in selling skills and they're gonna set a price on

And that price might be work that the young person will provide for them. It might be some kind of money that they'll pay. And a lot of the people I'm going to be talking about do pay some money to their master for the privilege of training. Think about that. It's kind of a rough deal, right? But it is the deal that they reach. Now this is something that's really widespread. This is... Sorry, I couldn't get those all to appear at once. This is a mason's apprentice in Yemen. This is the kind of minarets that they built.

There's a lovely book by Trevor Marchand which explores this and really kind of helps lay out how apprenticeship in Yemen looks really very similar to the kind of apprenticeship that I'm talking about now. And you could read equivalent books about Japan, about all kinds of other societies. So there's this general model and this general kind of model looks very like a market. It's got buyers, it's got sellers, it's got prices. So, okay, I'm going for, here's a market for skill, right?

But a lot of what I think interests me is not just saying this is a market for skill. It's trying to understand what makes it a very particular kind of market for skill. And that's in some senses what I've spent a long time trying to uncover. So one of the things I want to do in the book is tell a story about why Europe's, and particularly Britain's, market for skill is so important.

just that bit different to this more traditional, kind of generic model that exists in societies around the world. And this, I think, is where things start to get a little subtle, a little interesting. I want to highlight three things as I tell you this story. The first is something that's kind of legal.

It's the existence of a really standardized contract, a way of specifying who's buying what, what the terms are that they're going to do the deal under, that makes this agreement easy and fairly understandable even to outsiders. Even if you've never trained someone, never put a child there, you can kind of understand what the rules are going to be.

The second thing that really matters in this context is actually about a set of institutions. And these are particularly local courts, often in towns, often town courts, that play a really important part in enforcing these contracts. But it's okay to have a contract, but you need people to go to help make that contract work. If you have a problem, you need people you can appeal to. You need people who are going to help. That exists.

And finally, there's an important bundle of economic and political incentives to do one of these apprenticeships, to train in this form. And those incentives include the right to work in that occupation, they include the right to vote or be a political participant in various towns. And it's this bundle of, on the one hand, institutions, and on the other hand, incentives that come together in this story. Institutions, well, these mean that the contracts that we're talking about

have a really interesting set of characteristics. And this is something that I spent a long, you know, it took a long time. Partly it was trying to understand this stuff, right? What we found out is that bad contracts are escapable. And we know this because we can see young people escape from them.

Hundreds, thousands of young people are there in the courts saying, ah, my master's not so good for this reason or that reason, and they get out of the contract. They're also able to recover bad investments, right? Their parents, they gave some money to buy their training. They can get some of that back. It also means that bad hires can also be ejected. So the master, well, we're less worried about the master in this setting, let me be absolutely honest, but they can actually deal with their problem.

So there's a good set of institutions which are quite distinctive and there's a very particular set of incentives. And this is quite fun because this is like bad policy making. I know there are some policy makers in the audience so I know that your policies have always been good. But just occasionally governments get things wrong. And British, English governments particularly in some senses got things wrong quite badly.

because they tried to keep people out of trade and manufacturing and keep them on the farm. But the rules they set to do that basically created an enormous incentive for parents to push their children towards those jobs, because if they got one, they were fairly well protected in the labour market. And the other thing is, agriculture remained open.

So for most of these jobs, most skilled works, the easiest way to get the right to do that job as an adult was to be an apprentice. So if you wanted to be a merchant or a blacksmith, it was much easier to have trained as an apprentice and then you were licensed essentially to do that as an adult. The nice thing is, if you failed, you could always go back and be a farmer.

So essentially if you had a 15 year old where you've got to worry about what their future is, oh my god, right? You've got some choices. You can push them into farming because well they've got green fingers. Maybe that's right. Or you can push them into some kind of other manufacturing. The good thing is if you push them into manufacturing and it doesn't work out, they can go into farming. The other way around doesn't really work in this setting. It's much more costly, much more fruitful and friction.

So, and this is the end of the kind of very abstract bit. These sets of this package of institutions and incentives essentially does something kind of interesting. It reduces what we think of as the transaction costs, the kind of risks of contracting for training, and it increases the payoffs from up-trading. And the effect of that is to generate a really wide and deep market for skill. And that's what I talk about in the book.

Now, okay, that's like quite abstract. I can see judging by the children how that's landing. So let's kind of bring this down a little bit, right? Ultimately, apprenticeship is about a choice. It's about a choice about what to do with children, with young people. What are you going to do with your kids? So let's introduce a family.

This is not my family obviously we didn't have paintings like this. We don't even really have holiday snaps. You know This is Sir Thomas and Lady Jane Burdett You can tell by the fact there in the early 17th century and they have a painting that they're not your average people Right, I'm not gonna say that they're average in fact. They're very much not average right so Sir Thomas and

At the point that this is painted, he's just been made a minor member of the aristocracy. He's a baronet. He's a member of the local government. He's the sheriff of Derbyshire, not the sheriff of Nottingham, which I think is a more exciting job. The sheriff of Derbyshire, and he's doing pretty well, right? He's very successful at having children, as you can tell. Two sons, four daughters.

I don't know whether that's a good balance. I can't speculate about that. And just as some measure of how well he's doing, this is the house that his heirs built, right? A couple of generations later. Clearly, whatever he did was not good enough, but this is not bad. And actually, this is now Repton School. So it's actually a minor public school. I don't know whether Repton... Is Repton minor? I don't know. Anyway. But he's got a problem. He's got kids. And this is one of them. This is the...

Problematic second son, right? I have sympathy. I'm a second son. And Robert, right? Robert is actually about 11 when this portrait is painted. But there's this question about what do you do with junior, right? You know, senior, we know what's going to happen to number one, right? He's going to get the land. Eventually there'll be some nice kind of building, at least somewhere in the future. What do you do about number two? Well,

What they do is really simple. They send him to London to be an apprentice. Again, probably not surprising given the subject of the talk, right? This is not a story with punchlines, right? In 1629, this young chap goes down to London to become an apprentice to a guy called Nathan Wright. He's a London merchant. Now Nathan, he's not an everyday London merchant.

He's actually an incredibly successful one. This is a guy who's going to end up as the master of his guild. He's going to end up one of the people who run the East India Company. This is the small East India Company of the 1640s, not like the British Empire, but it's still not trivial to be running it. He's wealthy enough to lend thousands of pounds to various sides in the Civil War. Of course, when he retires, he builds a big house.

I figured that for a British audience, centering this around house porn was really like a good thing. It's in Essex, but I still quite like it. So this is a very, very prosperous person to place your son with. And it pays off.

The second son does well. Robert becomes a really successful merchant in his own right. I've read his will. It goes on for pages. He's got a bunch of money. He's got property in Covent Garden. He's got thousands of pounds in cash. So this is a younger brother. Did all right. There's no picture of his house. Can't give you that. But I think the point is made. This is a successful outcome.

And to some extent you're kind of like, you should be going, well, okay, this is Britain. You've shown us a rich kid becoming a rich adult. Right? Stories of social immobility are, well, British, aren't they? Well, I mean, I understand more general if I follow my colleague's work, right?

So why do I use this as a story of apprenticeship? Well, partly because it's the only painting I found where you've got the apprentice beside his dad. Like, having a face helps. But also because it encapsulates some of the problems, right? Why is it that apprenticeship... What is it that apprenticeship is helping with here? Well, let's think about the challenges that the Burdettes face. They live in Derbyshire.

That's not bad in its own right. We went there for Easter. It's a nice place. But it's a really long way from London. It's 120 or so miles. That's about a week's journey in 17th century terms. There's no phone. There's no email. The postal service is pretty expensive, pretty fragmentary. So they're doing something which is quite bold. I don't know. You could send your child to...

I don't know, somewhere in the outer Philippines and it might take about the same amount of time. It's a long journey, it's a big distance. And they're also doing this across not just a physical distance, but a social distance. They've got no connection to Nathan Wright. There's no family tie, there's no link. They don't know this person. They've got no reason to trust him.

And they've got no link to commerce. They're wealthy people, right? But they are landowners. They've got no family experience as merchants. So they don't really know what they're buying in that sense. And yet despite that, they're able to somehow identify a highly successful merchant and make an agreement with him. And he will then train a potential future rival.

So this is what I think is kind of interesting. And this is what I think that apprenticeship does in this case. It's a system that's robust enough to deal with this kind of problem of contracting at a physical and social distance. It's able to allow bridges to be built across social, economic, geographical boundaries. And it's also interestingly skill biased.

It's not the losers of the labour market who are offering these, it's the winners who are able to sell their skill. And in that sense, this is why I think about this as a market for skill. This is a system that provides and sustains a market in which investments in skill can be made that even the elite are willing to make for their children. I do think there's... I mean, these are the gentry, but I think if you see the gentry doing something...

Sometimes it's dumb, like fox hunting, but quite often it's kind of cunning, right? Now, as I said, these are gentry. I mean, I'm showing them because they've got a picture as much as anything else. But just the same choices were made by a great many families from all kinds of social backgrounds. And that's what, in some ways, I'm going to show a little bit. But I'm perfectly on time to move on. To talk about why growth, right? I mean, growth...

Growth isn't really what we're meant to think about as pre-modern economic historians, right? Growth is a problem of the modernist, or problem, opportunity, achievement of the modern world. That's what the hockey stick of income tells us. This is something that is really thought of as a kind of post-industrialization phenomenon. But we're, I think, increasingly sure that the period of the 16th through the mid-18th century is one of growth in England and other parts of Europe. Can I just...

show you some, a little bit fuzzy, but show you some evidence that we can see this in three measures I'm just going to present. One is a real classic, urbanization. So Britain is growing much more urbanized in this period. People are familiar with this from a long time ago, right? This is the percentage of people living in towns and cities over 10,000 people, which rises dramatically. A lot of that is London, and we'll talk a lot more about London in a moment.

We also see really dramatic structural change. And what this means is that far fewer people are working, far fewer adult males are working in farming by 1750 than they were by 1550. Really sharp change from about 1600. And when we look at this in terms of enrichment, we can really see this. So estimates of GDP per capita developed relatively recently by Steve Roybury and co-authors show us that GDP per capita really starts to rise after 1600.

Now, this is not the same as we've experienced since 1800. But it is a period of what we think of as efflorescence, of sustained growth. And actually, out of this, in some ways, comes Britain's empowerment, colonies, empire, and also, arguably, this lays the groundwork for industrialization. I'm not going to talk about the Industrial Revolution apart from that, right? Just put it out there.

What I want to talk about instead is how this happens. I'm not going to claim that apprenticeship is everything for this. Far from it. There's lots of things going on. But apprenticeship does matter. And it matters when we think about what this kind of growth involves. Let me put that to you. What underpins these kind of changes?

The first thing is you've got to move a lot of people from the countryside to the cities. You've got a lot of physical mobility, literal sheer movement of people. That has to happen. The second thing, you've got to move a lot of people out of farming families into manufacturing industry and services, jobs that their parents did not have. So you need a lot of occupational mobility.

And the third thing you need is you need to give them the skills in how to make things, in productivity, in techniques, in technology, that they did not have before. So you need to diffuse a lot of knowledge. So this is, in some sense, if you want to think about it in modern terms, is a problem of intellectual property. You've got to get a lot of ideas around the economy fairly fast. Fast in early modern terms. Maybe not. Not the kind of thing that Rachel Reeves wants, maybe. Now, apprenticeship...

It's one of the ways in which this happens. And you kind of should see the outlines of this already, right? It's able to bridge farming and industry by opening occupations to people outside of the family. It gives them a way to train people who are not their children and gives them a reason to do that. It bridges the town and the country together.

by giving migrants a real reason to make this move, like the chance to pursue a really profitable occupation in something they wouldn't otherwise do, it gives them a trustworthy method. Apprenticeship contract, the institutions around that make it fairly safe to do, and it gives them in that sense a safe destination. You know, I want to send my children somewhere far from me, that's fine, right? But I want them to be in the hands of someone when they arrive.

Like the kind of migration that we think of with 19th century America with people traveling across the sea and then having to hustle to find somewhere to live. That's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about them landing and ideally having a household where they'd be taken in, someone to make sure they're just about okay. This is not TLC, right? But it is security.

And it also spreads innovation. It does this by concentrating training among the most successful masters. Now, Burdett, not just a picture, not just a pretty face, he also, the story illustrates all of this, right? They shift to a new occupation, to trade, not landholding. They shift from Derbyshire to the smoke. They move to not just any merchant, but one of the best merchants. And again, wow!

they're just one family but let's you know what about the rest and to do that and this is this is why it was a slow book to write actually there are lots of reasons a couple of them there um is because i thought well you know to answer this question you need to do it in scale and that's what makes this i think a problem of economic history um so i've got about three quarters of a million apprentices that i talk about in the book um three quarters million is quite a lot

I could be accused of being greedy. And I thought, like, so when I was talking about this, Rosie suggested that I kind of explain what this means. Well, this is the starting point. This is the London Brewers Company. It's a London guild. They're court minutes from 1630. And this is the kind of raw material for this project.

They write down everything official that happens because, frankly, they're very diligent and slightly dull, despite making what we hope is good beer. And among the things they write down are records of these apprenticeship contracts. And this is what we rely on a lot in this project. And this is an example. This is the transcription. This is the contract record for Christopher Gibson.

Now, he's the kind of person we're talking about. He's the son of John Gibson from Leaven in Yorkshire. His dad's a yeoman, so a farmer. And he's going to apprentice himself for seven years to James Brown from the day of this court meeting. So that's the kind of raw material that we've got. The reason we're able to do this for England is that this is not just for the Brewers Guild. We've got this for most of London's more than 100 guilds.

And we've got versions of this for quite a few English towns. Which is a wonderful problem of abundance of sources, right? Tons of stuff, yay! Unfortunately, when you add that up, it's basically an impossible amount of raw material. So, I spent quite a lot of my life with these records. But I was also incredibly lucky. Because around 30 years ago, the family historians of this country

They just did some wonderful things because they typed a lot of these up. And when I mean typed, I really mean typed. And one person, Cliff Webb, who is really one of genealogy's minor deities, did an enormous amount of this for London. So while I spent a long time with manuscripts, I've probably spent even more time with Cliff's transcripts.

which are beautiful, but those of you who know data will realize these are not a data set, they're text. And that presents some fun problems which I don't need to go into. So we've got a lot of information and what I do for the book in some ways is digest an enormous amount of this. London, there's a big chunk of it, but also a lot of other cities, Bristol is kind of cool, Gloucester, Boston. And then we connect it together.

which is the other thing that's a bit different about this project.

So this is just an illustration. This is a guy called Roger Rice. He's in Bristol. He's a brass founder. And we're able to reconstruct all of the apprentices that he takes over time, stick them together. And for these people, we also find out where they came from. For some of them, we work out whether they were a first son, second son, third son, whether they died, when they married, all this kind of stuff. It's basically very sticky fingers for data and lots and lots of sticking together.

And what we end up with, and in the book I discuss, is basically one in ten English teenage boys across three centuries, which is really a very large share of the young people who are working outside of farming. Which means that we can really not just come out with theories, we can actually say just how much apprenticeship did. And I'm going to just spend a few minutes just backing up a few points on this, right?

Now I said apprenticeship moves people from the town to the city. So we can make these kind of wonderful maps. Now this is a map of where apprentices in London came from in the early 17th century. And you can see the big circles of places which send 100 to 150. They're really scattered. And they include places up here in Northumberland, Durham in fact, and cities and towns across the country. So this is a really big labor market.

I show you this map and you go, well, that's pretty. You learn how to use GIS. Well done. You know, what does this mean? Well, it means when you actually look at it, that the average London apprentice in the early 17th century, they're traveling further than the average undergraduate in 2014. They're not just mobile. They're exceptionally mobile in my modern benchmarks.

Remember that the subjective distance, like this is miles without letters on foot, right? This is a really long way. We also can tell you roughly where they're coming. I said London would feature. It's because they mostly want to come here. In 1650, when you add them all up, more than three quarters of all English urban apprentices are training in London, which is a kind of striking thing.

And then you have to ask yourself, well, why London? And this is where you get a sense of this being a real market. They're coming to London because London is literally where stuff is happening. London is where the ports are, where international trade is taking off, where the capital is, where all of the kind of high-skilled manufacturing is. London, those streets paved in gold, that's very visible in the 17th century. They are, in short, able to respond to incentives. And I say, well, we can say, how much does this matter?

Well, this is London's male population. Think about this. Current apprentices are making up more than a quarter, up to about 30-40% of all males living in London. And former apprentices, there are enough of them, they basically populate the entire city.

So this is not like, well, something happening on the margins. This is how London is populated in the period when it's growing fastest and is becoming England's most important and richest city. Moving people out of agriculture? Well...

it's kind of obvious if they're coming from the countryside to the sound, to the towns that they're doing that. And that's what you find, right? So when we graph the share from agricultural backgrounds, you can see a very large share are coming out of agriculture. It declines over time. It does so for the simple reason that those towns are growing big enough to generate some of their own apprentices.

We can also see that the Burdettes are not that unusual. There's lots and lots of people from gentry backgrounds. Perhaps one in five London apprentices in the mid 17th century claimed to be gentry. And that's okay. But what I think is really interesting, and actually this is what you heard back in 2000 and whenever. When we look at who they're training with, this is a really open world.

We can choose to find our masters among our family, we can choose to find them among people where we've got a connection, but when we do that, we find that is really rare. So these green bars for Bristol, Gloucester and London, that's the share of young people who are training with a relative. It's tiny. The blue bars are the people training with someone in the same trade as their parent. It's a bit bigger, still not very much.

The red, those are the share training with someone who themselves migrated from the same village. So maybe they lived somewhere near Oxford and they'd come to London. Maybe their apprentice came from the same village. That doesn't happen very often. Most people are able to train with someone they do not know. And in fact, to give you a benchmark, when we look at evidence for the 19th and 20th centuries, there's more mobility in the 17th century than there is in the modern economy.

So, in the 19th century you're more likely to do what your dad did than you are in the 17th century in English cities. So this is not just more geographically mobile than 2014 undergraduates, it's more occupationally mobile than the 19th century industrial city. Now the final thing I want to talk about is this little claim that apprenticeship spreads the best products and techniques. Now I've shown you some graphs.

So let's have a little story. Just a little final story. This is Thomas Tompion, the possessor of a lovely wig and the maker of excellent watches. There's a little watch grasped in his hand there. Now, Tompion...

He comes from a small village in Bedfordshire, born around 1639. I figure we've actually cycled there in a couple of hours, right? It's near Sandy. He's the son of a blacksmith. He doesn't apprentice in London, but he comes to London because that's where the action is.

And he is arguably the father of English clockmaking and watchmaking. He comes out, he helps develop the way, the kind of internal mechanism for pocket watches that holds for the next couple of hundred years.

He collaborates with scientists. His clocks still stand in Greenwich Observatory. So if you went to Greenwich Observatory, you'd find the Tompion long case clock. It's so good you wind it up once and you don't need to wind it till after a year has passed.

Pretty good, right? And with that, the astronomer, Royal John Flamseud, can work out basically the rotation of the Earth. I can't explain it better than that. I'm a historian of apprenticeship, not science. So he's really at the forefront of technology.

He's also really at the forefront of making money through technology because his clocks and watches they go everywhere, right? So Peter the Great has one Philip the fifth of Spain has one the Dauphin has them in France You know, there's a watch that he makes which is called the Kings watch. That's for the king here And he makes a bunch of money. So this is someone who has IP right? He really knows his business. He's got the best technical secrets in the trade

What should he do? I mean, you could say, well, the thing you should do is hold those secrets tight because they are the source of your profit. That's the modern world of IP, of patents, of trolling. Does he do that? No. He trains 23 apprentices, each of whom can presumably learn the Tompion techniques and magic.

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That's kind of bold, right? And this is, I think, essentially because he's paid quite well in their labor and their cut in cash for doing this. And this is the general point I want to make through this story. Apprenticeship is high skill biased.

It's the best masters, people like Tompion, who are able to train, who end up training the most people, and that generates actually a quality improvement generation by generation because it's the best people who are training the next generation. I can show you very, I'm not going to spend much time on this, but I worked this out for around, well, quite a lot of people in London and Bristol and Gloucester, just to be sure. And what we find is that apprenticeship is really concentrated.

Each of these little icons represents a young person, right? The oranges are those who train with a master who only trains one or two over their career. The blues are people who train in workshops where a lot of people go and train. And you can see that more than half of young people are training with masters who actually train a whole bunch of people by early modern standards. Burdett, he trains in the blue category, right? He takes a lot.

But when we look at this from the employer's perspective, and this is representing everyone who's able to take an apprentice, they're qualified, they're freemen, they've got the right, they've got little workshops. Most of them don't take anyone. A fair number take one or two. And only this little group of red people, less than one in ten, will train a large number of apprentices. So most training is in the hands of a few people.

"Training is concentrated" doesn't mean they're good, right? They could be terrible, they could be exploitative, like me with my undergraduates, right?

So who are these large masters? Well, you know, we had to work out who they were. There's a variety of things in the book which I use to demonstrate that these are the most successful, the most skillful, the most prominent in their trade. The best thing we did, though, was find them. Find out who's supplying the best customers. The courts, the

whose stuff is good enough that it survives in the museums of the Hermitage and other great music collections, because it's really good. And when we do that, we find obviously people like Tompion,

We also find his partner, George Graham, who trained 16 and is another founder of English clockmaking. And when we do this for other trades, so I did this for carvers. This is William Clear. He carves the triumphal arch that Charles II comes through when he returns to London in the Restoration. He trains nine, which is a really high number for carvers. It happens in the apothecaries. I put this in for Maggie. You know...

Even the leading apothecaries of their day. Here, Gideon de Laun, who's the royal apothecary, trains 11. All of his knowledge is secret in some senses. Or lots of his knowledge is secret.

And it's not crazy to think of a world like this because if you want to train your children, where do you want to place them? You want to place them with the best masters. And again, like, you know, fiction backs this up, right? You know, you want to find the best masters, you take, you know, best training, you take them to the best master. This didn't end well. I realized that after I put the slide in. But fortunately, there were no Sith in 17th century London.

So let me just conclude. The book in some senses makes a really simple argument. It suggests that apprenticeship is a way to give skilled workers, people with knowledge and ability, masters, a way to sell their training as well as their products and services. And it gives, in the particular form it takes in Europe and particularly in England, a way for parents to be able to invest in their children's future

and a reason to do it, this package of incentives, that allows them to do so with a measure of confidence that the problems, the crises, the issues that can come out of any relationship can be resolved. Not necessarily pretty, it's not necessarily fair, there are downsides to this, I'm not an uber apprenticeship optimist, but this is a really viable and effective system.

And its existence means that once you start to get signs that prosperity is rooted in cities like London, you have a mechanism that can essentially generate a virtuous cycle where young people migrate and sustain urbanization and skill diffusion through this investment in training. Now, there's a lot more, a lot more,

That's not a short book, but you'll have to buy it to find out. But before I do that, I just wanted to flag up some credits. This is a long project, right? There are many names in the acknowledgements, but it's worth saying that this all started with a debate with one person who's not with us anymore, Larry Epstein, and he brought this to my attention.

It's also really worth saying that this would have been impossible without the work of people like Cliff Webb, Michael Scott, Karine van de Beek, who shared and generated so much of the evidence I've used. It would also have been impossible for me without the people who made me as a historian, Maggie, Mark, who are here, and without readers like Jane and Martin Prack, who helped make the book much better through constructive criticism.

Also, this is in some senses my story, certainly my errors, but there's been quite a few co-authors along the way. Chris is in the room, Chris Cassan, but also Chris Minns, who a lot of the core work that goes into this book, a lot of the core ideas were worked out in papers with Chris. Without him, it would not exist in any way the same form that it does.

So those are professional and personal, but there were a lot of personal debts as well. So I owe you all, many of you, a huge vote of thanks, whether you've been wonderful colleagues, friends, or family. So thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much, Patrick. That was fascinating. We can open up the floor for questions. Again, please wait for the microphone to get to you before you ask a question. Why don't we start here on the end?

Hi, good evening. Thank you so much for your thorough research going through all the scripts. It's really a huge work that you've done. My name is Karina and I'm a master student at LSE. My question is,

Recently I returned from Iceland and I was served in a local shop by a really young guy. And when I asked him how old he was, he was around 15 years old. And he proudly announced that he started his first job at the age of 12. Then led me to a thought that

right now we're sort of facing a crisis in demographics than unchecked immigration, young kids are stuck to their screen, glued to their screens, the loneliness, the isolation, and whether a solution could be provided from a similar type of apprenticeship for young kids without being labeled as a child labor.

But yet, their skills could be used to something really useful in large corporations through training and giving them meaning and purpose. Because one could argue if parents allow their kids into doing some instruments, some music, some, I don't know, sports, and for some it becomes the professional endeavor later on. Why not to do the same but for

like high on the market skill sets right now that could be developed relatively early. Wow, thank you. That's a really novel suggestion. I would probably have to think a bit more about it. I think there are some real pros for getting people into work. And I think that there's lots of attempts to get young people into diverse experiences.

and I think that that's probably a real positive. I think that one of the big differences and one of the difficulties of this is the system I'm describing is one where the incentive for the firm, for the master rather, to take these young people on is really clear.

and the difficulty with a lot of training today is making sure that the firm is aware that it has an incentive to provide training and i think this holds for older apprentices who are currently a policy problem i think it might also hold for attempts to get younger people into employment in the way you describe as well so and i think this is one of the big challenges um of making sure that investment can be delivered where it needs to be delivered because people will only do

at an economic level what makes sense for them. I think that's one of the big challenges that faces the modern training market and I think might also be a struggle a little bit for that kind of really innovative and interesting idea. But I will certainly have to think about it to work it through. Thank you. Yes, come to the front here. Thank you, Bernard Casey. That was fascinating. I am a labour economist, a modern one as opposed to a historical one,

I'm also, despite my name, a German and I spend a lot of time studying apprenticeships and how they work in Germany. As a labour economist, I'm always terribly concerned about the issue of general skills and the fact that these are disincentives to provide training. And I was struck by what you said about these people teaching people who are going to be their future rivals. One of the things that one knows about

the way the system in Germany works is that for a lot of people and for a lot of apprentice providers, this is basically a form of cheap labour. And therefore it is justifiable for the employer to do it,

and the outcome for the trainee is things often other than a set of skills. I mean the story which I always like to tell is that there were sort of far more trainee or trained bakers and cooks on things like the Volkswagen or Ford production lines because they got, they learned social skills and work skills in general but not specific skills.

What was the incentive of these large scale trainers who are training their future rivals, and you emphasized that twice, to do this? They were getting presumably cheap labor, so there is this argument is going in as well, but to what extent

were these people really their rivals or were they actually able to disseminate something, disseminate production at a time when production was therefore growing? It didn't matter very much. Thank you. That's a great question. I mean, I think that the 19th, 20th century, 21st century German case is a really interesting and classic case for apprenticeship. And it's a case where firms are providing these apprenticeships, right? And so it's...

My RAF example was similar to that. But your question is a really important one. What's the point for the employer? In this setting, they're definitely getting paid through labor. This is not just cheap labor. This is often almost entirely unwaged labor where they are providing bed and board. So they're getting paid in labor. They're also often getting cash paid.

these people, apprentices, particularly in the more prosperous trades, their families are investing potentially quite substantial amounts of money to buy them the place. And which is why one of the kind of characteristics of this is that while there's a version of this where there is exploitation, and undoubtedly that happens,

Where you see really substantial investments on the parts of apprentices and their families, they do show through their actions that they are attuned not just to having an opportunity to work and survive, which does exist in part of the market, but quite often to ensuring that they're trained well.

And we see a lot of disputes about whether or not training is of sufficient quality, whether they're getting the chance to learn the full range of the job, that type of thing. And I think it's very easy to generalize. I painted a very general picture tonight. And there are bits of the market which you wouldn't want to be too optimistic about. And I haven't talked at all about poor, poor apprentices and very poor people being trained.

But the crux to this working as a market is that the employer is definitely paid through labor and often money.

because they're so explicitly receiving a payment, it's very clear that the people involved are monitoring the quality of what's being provided. And I think that gets not away from the fact that there's a mix of general and specific skills, because there definitely is, but it certainly gets away from the problem that a lot of what's being provided is of poor quality, because people are being exploited and just put to jobs that aren't worth it. Does that make sense, Bernard? I'm

I think that probably covers your question. But I love talking to labor economists about this because the world is a really different and interesting one today. Thank you. Yes, can we go in the back there?

Hi, my name is Nigaris Mayazadeh. I'm actually from Azerbaijan working at the Ministry of Education and last 12 years I've been engaged in apprenticeship reforms of Azerbaijan, investigated this in many countries, about like 20 countries. And my experience is that apprenticeship reforms sometimes doesn't work once it doesn't have incentives, proper incentives.

So in our country, for example, while it doesn't have, like lacking incentives from government, it's partially working. Not systematically. In some companies, mostly large companies that have like capacity to train apprentices, but like while we wanted to have like access in regions,

Since Azerbaijan is oil dependent country, it just didn't work, just like hospitality sector, service sector, like most sectors that were employer related. So my question is how in UK government incentivize apprenticeships?

hosting like mail? It's a great question. I mean, in this period, they don't mean to let me be absolutely clear, right? This is this is that dumb policy making. They're actually trying to stop people being apprentice and they're trying to they do it by basically setting up what's the equivalent of a modern occupational licensing scheme.

is the best parallel where completing one of these apprenticeships gives you the licensing privilege to then practice it as an independent practitioner. So, labor economists generally are quite cynical about these things for various reasons to do with raising the price of those jobs. But what it definitely does, what it seems to do in this case is give a lot of incentive to

pursue that training. As you can see, I think if you look at modern graduate decisions today, right, there's a lot of people who will pay a lot to get to go through a professional graduate school, pharmacy, medicine, all of those jobs, in part because the outcome at the end is a defended position in the labor market with fairly good chance that they'll do all right. So we have a set of incentives and rules around this, which is what happens here.

I think in a modern economy, there's a lot of trade-offs about whether you'd actually want to go down that path, particularly for a lot of the kinds of work that we're talking about in this setting. So I think I'm not sure how translatable that policy lesson would be, but it's very much, I think, an important driver of the motivation to train in this period, is the chance to basically be able to operate in a more protected place in the labor market. And that seems to incentivize people's willingness to invest.

It doesn't incentivize the firms. The individuals have to pay for that, essentially, by accepting very low wages or no wages. So I think it's quite, it's a hard one to translate, I'm afraid. But I would happily talk more because I think the problems would be really interesting to discuss. Thank you, Patrick. Very, very interesting lecture. My name is Kevin Keer. I was an undergraduate here. I graduated in 2001.

from the departments of Dudley Baines, Mary Morgan, etc. Obviously one of the things I learned very quickly was that the reason why the UK, or shall I say Great Britain, industrialized was because number one it had a very efficient agricultural sector and it was efficient

in transferring both capital and labor from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector. Is it any surprise from what you have detailed tonight that we were the first industrialized country in the world?

I know that's a huge question, but... I said no industrial revolution! I mean, this in some senses you could think of as part of a foundation for industrialization. And there's an ongoing debate about how important apprenticeship is. And some strong arguments have been made that

an abundance of highly skilled workers is one of the ingredients for industrialization. And that's an argument that Joel Marquier particularly has been developing over the last 15 years. I'm slightly in two minds. And I go back and forth a little bit about this. One of the reasons is that

In some ways the Industrial Revolution is also breaking the old system of apprenticeship because it's generating firms and when you map where apprentices are training in the 18th century, they're ever less likely to be found in the industrial heartlands and ever more likely to be found in those kind of efficient rural backwaters essentially where the main bit of the economy is agriculture.

So there's kind of two sides to this story. Yes, I'm hedging my bet on this while I try and think, in some ways try and work out what we're going to say in the next paper. But the kind of things that you cited, efficient agriculture, the movement of capital from farming into industry, one of the reasons for efficiency is that this is a great way to not have to subdivide your farm.

You've got something else to do with your younger children and a way to get them off the farm. It's also one of the ways in which British services

develop because it's a very good way of developing commerce and trade by bringing young people in to learn and advance those skills. So those kind of infrastructure elements that help that happen are in some senses supported by this training regime. So I think that I would go that far. I'm going to hold my ground on not wanting to have to come out on a hard line on the Industrial Revolution at this point though. Great. I'm going to do one online and then we'll go to Tim. We'll bring in the co-authors and give them a chance.

But this is coming from online from Lawrence Jones. He says, "You've stated that the 17th century apprentice was more mobile and innovative than an apprentice in the 19th century. Would you say that by the mid-20th century the apprenticeship system had effectively ossified?

and was no longer responding to national growth requirements? And if so, was it because a more rigid labor market or because there was a more rigid labor market that existed in the 17th century? That's a great question. I wouldn't say that the 19th century apprentice is necessarily less innovative.

than the 17th century apprentice. I don't have a measure for that. I obviously don't know the answer. I mean, I know that some mid-20th century apprentices were obviously ossified, being related to some. But I actually wouldn't generalize in that way. I think it's more that as...

the economy changed as particularly different sectors evolved very different relationships to unions, to their way in which they certify and invest in training. You end up with a really varied mix of training in England across Britain. Some of this is about union politics, about the kind of ways in which employers and large firms fight or don't fight with employees. So printing, for example,

printing and publishing has really strong apprenticeship really late in some other industries like construction it dies out quite early so it's not a kind of simple story but what you end up with is much more of a kind of a collapse of a unified story Germany's different the German agreement is developed a bit later but in England you end up with a variation in part because of developments in the 19th century that in some ways

just lead really different solutions to be picked in different industries. So I wouldn't say that by the mid-20th century the system has collapsed. I think it's survived in some areas, it's disappeared in others, and what there is is a real lack of policy coherence in the 20th century about how to fix it, and if you wish to fix it, who will do that? And that, I think, is one of the real problems that you see in the 20th century. There's a lack of

politicians and employers and workers sharing a vision of how to solve this problem together. So I think I would see it more in that way. I'd be a bit more generous to the 20th century than I think the question suggests. Thanks. Yes, Tim. Tim Loinig, former faculty member in the Economic History Department and one of Patrick's co-authors.

Today, there is very strong price competition for international students between universities. If a foreigner wants you as their supervisor or Eric, it will cost them £82,500 to do a three-year undergraduate degree in economic history. Other universities are available, and they're sometimes half the price.

Do you find the same level of price competition between masters in the same trade and in the same place back in your period, or is it more of a one-price-fits-all world? We do see quite a lot of price variation. We see literally sticker price variation of the kind you're talking about, where particularly at the upper end, so you cite LSE's extraordinary fees. Thank you. What can I say? We hope so.

At the upper end of the market, you do see people really willing to pay very large sums. You know, hundreds, multiple hundred pounds for access to really, to people running big businesses, bankers, financiers, that type of people. There is also a very, very large kind of

what you might think of as dull middle, where you're basically going to pay about the same amount for about the same trade. And those are where it's just really hard to see how being a blacksmith can earn much more as a better blacksmith than a more average blacksmith. So we do very much see price competition at sticker price, also in terms of the amount of time you have to sign on for. And that's one of the... I mean, so this is work that Chris and I did a long time ago, where you really can actually see the price elasticity of...

of training really vary according to who's providing it and what they're offering. And it's one of the things that started me on this story is that we found that people charge more as their training career progresses. So masters literally are able to lift the price as they're able to show that they're able to train. So you'll pay more for your fifth, your fifth apprentice pays more than your first apprentice.

You can see why, right? Number one, bit of a gamble. By number five, the families should be fairly convinced that you're okay. You can do the job. So very much so. Thank you very much, Patrick, for that fantastic lecture. Beautifully illustrated. I just want to take you back in time. I'm a medieval historian of London. Almost all the things that you describe, apprenticeship,

people coming from a distance to London, being trained, masters having numbers of apprentices, all those characteristics were there in late 14th and 15th century London. But you do not get economic growth.

Why not? And this, this is why I was very careful not to say this is the only answer or even the full answer. Right? And it's lovely to have you here, Caroline. I should say, I took the medieval bit out when I got scared.

I think the answer is that this is a system. How the system operates, the pace at which it operates, depends on a whole lot of different things. And here, one of the big drivers is opportunity. So... Yeah? Mm-hmm.

And I think that's definitely part of it, right? So part of this is about having more people and finding out places for those people. But the flows of apprenticeship we see persist even in periods when the growth of population stabilizes. So it's not like this diminishes when we've gone off that kind of, like, big push. I think you're absolutely right. This is, in some ways, a system that takes shape across medieval Europe, not just in London, but in other medieval...

European cities and gradually takes form and it's in some senses a mechanism that then in this period

provide a way to accelerate a change and structure a change that might otherwise have happened more slowly and with a lot more pain and with a lot less investment. So in that sense, I'm absolutely not saying this is the driver of growth. I think it's a mechanism by which when it becomes clear that actually, you know, if you're thinking about where to put this excess sun because of population growth, London would be good.

it provides a way to kind of focus and structure that exchange even if you're a really long way from the city which i think is quite hard to do otherwise so it's a response to all the changes that are happening in the 16th century that helped london start to take off

I think there are some other things, though. I think that the statute of artifices further accentuates this. So there is some further dumb policymaking, let me put it like that, that helps the system become more general. But you're right. And this is a European system as well. So I would also argue that this is not something that couldn't have happened in other places. In fact, you can see bits of it happening in other places. But what it really...

What I'm able to show in some ways, better than we could somewhere anywhere else, is the scale of the impact that it has in the English case. Yes, here in the center. Thank you very much, Patrick. That was absolutely brilliant. Mine is Mark Jenner. I'm another ex-co-author with Patrick. I was really struck by the comparisons you were making between early modern apprentices and modern university students.

But what you kind of quietly skipped over was that modern university students involve both women and men. And the story that you were telling about skill and indeed the economy seemed to be one that was strongly linked to a sexual division of labor and seemed to be reproducing the sexual division of labor and the sexual

division of acquisition of skill. I was wondering if you could say a bit more about that. Yeah, Mark taught me when I was an undergraduate. You're always going to be scared when your undergraduate teacher comes back with some questions, right? Part of my answer would be like, there's a chapter, half a chapter on women, and like all of the, a lot of what I would say here, I would absolutely preface as being this is very much a story about men, in part because

It is largely a story about men, but there is a bit of a story which is about female apprentices and female skill. And part of that is a story which says, well, why aren't there more? And how does that come about? Because there are roughly one twentieth of the number of female apprentices in England that we would expect if women had the same chance to gain skill in this mechanism as men.

So women are massively missing out in the terms of that equal division of labor that we might set as some kind of modern metric, and I love a modern metric for a public audience. So I own that. So apprenticeship partially reproduces the division of labor. This system doesn't have strict barriers against female training, and Laura Gowing has written a lovely book really focusing in on this.

But it's very clear that far fewer families are willing to invest in this kind of training for their daughters, and there are far fewer female mistresses who are able to offer training. I have a view on why that comes about without...

there being strict rules against training which exist in some parts of the world and that links very much to the set of incentives and the kind of payoffs that come from training because in this environment, well apprenticeship doesn't have rules against women gaining skills. It does have rules on how long the payoff lasts if you marry and the intersection of marriage rules which strip away the legal and political privileges that women gain on marriage really reduce some of the incentives to train.

I would say A, sorry, B, very much this does reproduce gender inequalities but it largely does through the impact of other institutions affecting that bundle of incentives. If I could leave the answer there. Yes, did you have a question? Yeah, yes.

Hello. Thank you for your lecture. My question is, I was really interested when you were talking about how the more skilled apprentices, or masters are the ones who take the most apprentices. And I was wondering if you think that that's entirely because of the higher price that I'm assuming they could charge, or if you think there are other reasons that might have to do with, I don't know, like wanting to push your trade forward or whatever else it might be. I think that a lot of it's about money. I think that without...

being able to profit from this, it's really hard to see why they're doing it. I think because, you know, and profit includes low wage labor, right?

But most of these people are existing in a situation where there are other employees, often who've served apprenticeships, who they could hire as temporary workers. So there is a labor market around these things, and yet they choose to take apprentices on. And these are apprentices they're going to have to ensure learn a full range of the trade and skills. And so in some sense, they're making a choice about

who are they going to give space to? I think the only reason to really understand why they give space to these young people who they're going to have to train as well is because they're really profiting from them. Now, that profit is partly in labor. These people are useful. It's helpful to have someone to be a dog's body. It's also partly because they become more productive over time. But I think a lot of it is actually that there's a profit to be made here. There's real money on the table. So I think that's a fairly big part of it.

Thank you. I think I'm going to bring another question in from online here. So, and actually, Ben, could you delete some, just, I'm going to ask the Dominic's question. So I can't read the bottom. So if you could just, and I can't scroll, unfortunately. We have a great technology at LSE. I'll start at the top. So this is a sixth foreign student, Dominic Appleton Pilbeam. And he's interested in early modern economic history. And he's

He's interested. So he's saying regarding the expensive seven-year apprentices that the trade guild enforced, would you say that the high price results in apprenticeships being limited to members of the upper middle and gentry classes like the family you described? Or is it really something that's open to really all classes in society? Dominic, that's a really great question. It is a system that is open formally.

When you look at who's getting these places, they are disproportionately middle and upper class. But we do see a lot of people still coming in from laboring backgrounds, laboring families. So poor people can access this. They're just less likely to be able to. And that is in part a reflection of the price that they have to pay. So it is not in any sense kind of some...

It's not a solution to the problem of social mobility. And in fact, when we look at the kinds of jobs that people do, they mostly move horizontally. They don't move from low-income backgrounds to high-income backgrounds by who they choose to train with. They're mostly horizontal movements from the same income level in one area to a similar income level in manufacturing. But it is at least open to the bottom. It's just that they're less likely to be represented because of the price. Thank you.

Yeah, Charlie. Well, first of all, thank you very much for a wonderful talk. My name is Charlie Udale. I am one of Patrick's former apprentices. So I think it's only fair that we have at least one question. Although I think Zane has one as well. I'm really interested in the structure of this market. You've talked about distance. You've talked about the institution of the contract. And we're talking about people who are coming a long way.

How did they match apprentices with masters? And how were those contracts, how were they monitored? And what happened when they broke down?

Is that one question, Charlie? I've snuck in a few, I'm sorry. No, it's great. Thank you. Charlie's a fabulous PhD student. Went into the law. You can tell from the question. So how does this work? Well, I mean, you've got this problem, right? Long distance matching, finding a master when your parents are a long way away.

We had a lot of trouble with referees when we put this idea forward in the first place. And I spent a long time kind of reading letters and diaries to find out descriptions of what happens. And essentially, the solution's not that surprising. People have friends.

And they use those friends, associates, that extended network to find the master who might be able to take on their child. And so when you look at this, you find people, to the extent we have written evidence of this, and obviously that's not going to cover everyone, people kind of writing back and forth about finding a place for little Jimmy, right? There's this great Quaker minister who literally...

goes to Dublin and has said to a family, "I'll find somewhere for your son." And off he goes and he finds a master and then a few months later the son has to go over. So we know that this is basically done through friends who act as representatives of the family.

I think that they provide a fair degree of the monitoring to the extent that we can see. It's very hard to see the monitoring, but I think that the apprentice themselves are serving as a monitor. I mean, although we think of them as young and I presented them in some ways as children, actually, you know, by the end of their training, they're often in their early 20s, they're fully aware of what's going on. What happens when it breaks down?

Well, a lot of arbitration, a lot of kind of like practical agreements and bargaining clearly goes on. But I mentioned all these courts. We see something like 5% to 10% of these apprenticeships in London ending with a small, very cheap court case that just says, we're done, right? And that really helps resolve these kind of issues. So if the point is if you can't agree your informal deal, you can actually use a formal get-out-of-deal.

I think of it as a divorce court, right? Like it's a no-fault divorce. You know, no one's happy, no one's unhappy, but we're out of the contract. I solved the breakdown problem. Yes, here in the middle. Oh, now they're all coming for me. Mark taught me as an undergraduate. Maggie supervised my PhD. So in terms of vehement criticism... Guilty as charged.

I'm going to typecast myself actually by this question which we have discussed before I think. But there is, to my mind, an important psychological dimension in this whole calculus that parents are making. And that is that if you send your apprentice son to London, he is quite likely to die. The mortality rate is high.

I mean, it's a morbid image, isn't it? Coffin, cash. LAUGHTER

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's one of the ways that I tell the story sometimes is that this is a tremendously risky thing to do, right? You're sending a young person hundreds of miles to a city where they're really quite likely to die of an infectious or contagious disease at some point in the next five to ten years. I have a PhD student now, Emma, who's actually trying to work out what the mortality rate was

It doesn't look brilliant. It doesn't look quite as bad as we might have thought, but it's a really interesting kind of challenge. So there's a lot of risk taking here. I think you're right to highlight this as one of the kind of real challenges that these people are undertaking. What that means for the kind of the parental relationship and what kind of choices

those parents are making when they send that child off, I'm not sure. I think it's very clear that they don't seem to lose the kind of social and affectional relationship. And we very much see kind of like...

kids run back home during plagues if they can, right? So there's definitely some attempt to manage some of the risk, at least when it gets very extreme. So yes, I think you're right to emphasize the kind of degree to which this is not just an economic choice. It's a choice with real physical risks to it. In terms of whether they get the money back when they die, I'm not sure either. I've never seen anyone arguing for it.

But maybe I just haven't read the right courts records And I don't think it's I don't think there's a law a legal precedent about it So I don't know the answer to that so I think I've any partially answered your question but you're absolutely right to kind of raise the Underlying the degree of risk that this involves

Unfortunately, I think we're going to have to leave it there. Patrick will be available for every question that you'd ever want to ask him in the reception. Again, the reception is going to be on the fifth floor. And the lifts are a bit, they're not dodgy, I would say. They're just very slow. So if you want, it might be better for some people to take the stairs up. And with that, I think we should thank Patrick for a really fascinating talk. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Thank you.

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