We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task” level occupational data. I apply this to the English bootmaking industry as it mechanized. The new data reveal sharp structural changes: 152,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete, while 144,000 new jobs emerged. However, incumbent bootmakers were rarely displaced. Instead, the decline was driven by young men no longer entering the artisanal trade. These findings challenge assumptions about displacement, showing how slow adoption and persistent demand can shield existing workers, while opportunities vanish for new entrants.

That is a recent paper by Hillary Vipond, a recent PhD from LSE.  Via Lukas Freund.  Here are other papers by Hillary, some of them on what we can learn about automation from economic history.  Here is Hillary on Twitter.