Research

Current Working Papers

1. What is Technological Unemployment? (University of Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, No. 218, March 2025), with Anselm Küsters. 

2. Where is Place in the History of Work? Worksites, Workspaces, and the Home-Work Nexus (University of Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, No. 213, October 2024), with Jane Whittle. Revise and resubmit, Explorations in Economic History.

3. The Past and Future of Work: How History can Inform the Age of Automation (CESifo Working Papers, No. 10766, November 2023), with Hillary Vipond. 

4. Good Jobs and Bad Jobs in History (University of Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, No. 202, Revised Version, November 2023) Accepted (as "Job Quality in History"), European Review of Economic History.
   
   

Historical Job Quality Indicators
The latest version of the HJQI codebook will shortly be published in the European Review of Economic History. This supercedes the version in the working paper above.
From January 2023 to October 2024 I led the Work and Wellbeing in History project funded by the Center for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Published:

1. "Technological Unemployment in the British Industrial Revolution: The Destruction of Hand Spinning", Advance Access, Past & Present. Link 

2. "Living Standards and Development Paths: Factory Systems and Job Quality during US Industrialization, 1790–1840", International Review of Social History 70 (2025): 193–226 . Link (Open Access)

3. "Gender Equality, Growth, and How a Technological Trap Destroyed Female Work", Economic History of Developing Regions 36 (2021): 428–438. Link
   Ungated working paper version: Link

4.  "Losing the Thread: A Response to Robert Allen", Economic History Review 73 (2020): 1137–1152. Link
   Twitter thread
   An extended working paper (ungated) is also available:
   "Wages at the Wheel: Were Spinners Part of the High Wage Economy?", University of Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, No. 174. Link

5. "Spinning the Industrial Revolution", Economic History Review 72 (2019): 126–155.  Link
   Ungated working paper version: Link
   
   

PhD Thesis: Technological Change and Work
Abstract
Conclusion
Summary published in the European Review of Economic History (December 2023)

Image: Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Cheshire, UK
© Ben Schneider 2021