West Dunbartonshire District — 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. When providing an overview of how economic activity has changed since 1841, we are blending together very diverse data, so we use a simple seven-way classification.

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 ("occupation"), and what their employer's business was ("industry"). Modern censuses have separate tables for each of these, and from 1931 onwards we mainly present data on industry. NB our 1841 data are geographically crude, which results in some districts in the same county having identical figures.

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We hold these detailed statistics for Sunderland, which we graph and tabulate here:

Available datasets	Period covered	Variables (number of categories)
Simplified Industrial Structure	1841 to 2011	Industry Sector (7)
Standard Industrial Classification (2007)	2011	2011 Industrial Classification (20)
Standard Industrial Classification (2007), by sex	1841 to 1971	Sex (2) 2011 Industrial Classification (20)
Total employed in all industries	1841 to 2011	Employed in all Industries (2)
Workers in Manufacturing	2011	2011 Classification of Manufacturing (7)
Workers in Manufacturing, by sex	1841 to 1971	Sex (2) 2011 Classification of Manufacturing (7)

Read more about how we hold statistics here.