T. S. Ashton Prize Essay for 1974. Agricultural Labour Supply in England and Wales during the First World War
O NE of the central economic problems which confront a nation at war is that of diverting factors of production from civilian to military ends. Since civilian living standards have rarely been reduced rapidly enough to release the whole of the necessary factor resources, there has often ensued, at least in the short run, an acute degree of factor shortage. This was the case during the First World War in Britain, when the demands made upon the economy were not only unparalleled in size but largely uncontrolled by the government until late in the day. The civilian labour market was subject to acute shortage, chiefly due to the demands of the Army for manpower. Some 4 7 million men joined the armed forces, out of a prewar labour force of i 2 * 9 million, and this outflow was controlled only in a laggard and ineffectual fashion.2 The impact on individual industries of this sudden loss of labour has so far remained largely unanalysed. Both contemporaries and historians have usually been content to state that there was an acute shortage of labour, without attempting to quantify this shortage. This lack of interest is particularly apparent in the case of agriculture. The conventional view here is that the industry had lost some quarter of a million men by the end of i 9i6. This figure represents somewhere around 28-33 per cent of the number of male employees in the prewar labour force, depending on which estimate of the size of this labour force one adopts.3