Simon Szreter

• University of Cambridge

After reviewing evidence on long-run national trends in inequality since the 1320s and the history of ideas and measures of inequality, the focus is on the history of institutions which have influenced the trends in inequality. Here, the major surprise for many will be to learn that a progressively funded universal social security, health and welfa...

What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle—the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at...

We estimate the impact of reductions in poor law expenditure following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act on rural life expectancy and mortality rates. We find that a 10 per cent decrease in poor law expenditure is associated with roughly a 1.5-2.0 per cent increase in early childhood mortality (ECMR). Our estimates imply 8-10 per cent increases in EC...

Is universal basic income (UBI) a policy idea whose time has come? Recent historical scholarship now enables us to comprehend the twentieth century evolution of this and similar ideas. UBI is intriguing in having vociferous backers drawn both from the libertarian right—such as, notably, Milton Friedman in the form of his negative income tax proposa...

It has been conventional to locate the origins of public health in early efforts to combat epidemics and to regulate the sanitary environment accompanying urban life and to trace its history in the gradual evolution of such measures in relation to politics, administrative practices, public laws, and medical science’s changing aetiology. Such an his...

This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is constructed, providing an indicator of over 20 per cent syphilitic infection. The p...

From contraception to cloning and pregnancy to populations, reproduction presents urgent challenges today. This field-defining history synthesizes a vast amount of scholarship to take the long view. Spanning from antiquity to the present day, the book focuses on the Mediterranean, western Europe, North America and their empires. It combines history...

This article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by D...

Barnes and Guinnane's 'Rejoinder' repeats their previous argument that the professional model of fertility decline produces statistical results which they see as impressive. They continue to ignore the evidence presented in part II of Fertility, class and gender, summarized in my reply to their original article, that the design of the model is both...

The 1911 censuses of the British Isles included questions directed at currently married women, relating to the number of children they had borne in that marriage, the number of those children who were still alive and the number who had died. With the help of the demographic techniques of indirect estimation, the answers to such questions can be mad...

Recent public policy in the UK has been dominated by a discourse which asserts that public expenditure on universal health coverage and welfare is a burden on the productive economy and unaffordable in what has been deemed a time of austerity. There is a widely held assumption that universal welfare provision, as offered by most modern welfare stat...

Demography has developed since the seventeenth century as a core set of analytical techniques for evaluating observed change in population aggregates in relation to the varying processes of mortality, fertility, and migration. It has been dependent on the apparatus of nation-states to generate its essential data of population age- and sex-structure...

In 2012 Barnes and Guinnane published a revised statistical analysis of the critical evaluation of the official 1911 social class model of fertility decline that was presented in chapter 6 of Szreter's Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (FCG). They argue that the official model of five ranked social classes is, after all, a satisfact...

It is proposed that the concept of communication communities can provide a theoretical formulation of the distinctive form of population which is most relevant for studies of Britain's fertility decline, c.1860-1940. Communication communities enable micro and macro, synchronic and diachronic, qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis to be bro...

Public fears of widespread venereal disease led in 1913 to the appointment of The Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (RCVD). In 1916 its Final Report offered only a single cautious and somewhat imprecise summary statement about the likely prevalence of venereal diseases in England and Wales. Although the significance of contemporary attitudes to...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key arguments and subjects discussed in the book, but it undertakes this review by means of a close investigation of the place of registration in contemporary scholarship. It explores the meaning of the term registration, and then examines the concept in existing social science theory, tracking...

This book is a comparative investigation of different regional histories of registration - a feature of societies common across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, but poorly understood in contemporary social science. Identity recognition of individuals by the groups they are born into or wish to affiliate themselves with has been a ubiquitous phenomen...

In this article, we examine the experience of History 8c Policy, (www.his- toryandpolicy.org), an organisation set up a decade ago in Britain to enable insights from academic historians to inform policymaking processes. We firstly address the manner in which historians can contribute to 'evidence-based' policymaking, both as providers of historical...

There are a very considerable number of purposes that identity registration systems can serve. Legitimate users of such systems play many roles and perform many functions in utilizing such systems: some individuals wishing to bequeath or inherit property, others seeking to validate their rights to various welfare entitlements or simply use their cr...

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter reexamines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by s...

'There is nothing new about the notion of a Big Society. This book combines historical scholarship, international research and grassroots experience to shine a critical spotlight on the rhetoric behind the coalition government's big idea.' - Bill Jordan, University of Plymouth, UK. © Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter 2012. All rights reserved.

»Theorien und Heuristiken: Mit welcher Herangehensweise sollte man historische Geburtenrückgänge untersuchen?«. This paper argues that a move away from a unifying but teleological framework for studying fertility declines can only been intellectually emancipating and is a necessary precondition for scientific advance. The study of change in human r...

Historical demographic evidence is presented to show that social class inequalities and health differentials have had a long relationship with place, both in terms of local residential environments and the regional distribution of the working and middle classes. The last two centuries have seen the demographic 'rise of the North' and an associated...

This article presents an exploration of qualitative evidence on the relationship between birth control and abstinence from an oral history project, which interviewed middle and working-class English men and women, who had married between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. Among the working classes the assumption that men were responsible for birth...

The History and Policy network at www.historyandpolicy.org is an initiative designed to make relevant aspects of historians' research accessible to those involved in deliberating over public policy. Originally founded as a website in 2002, it is now a growing network of professional historians who are assisted by a full-time external relations offi...

This chapter explores oral history evidence as a basis to discuss how the gendered politics of domestic authority were perceived as central to the contested meanings of love in marriage among both middle- and working-classes during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The oral history evidence comes from a set of interviews conducted by the...

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that ‘institutions matter’ for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that ‘history matters’, since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise that historians (and not only economic historians) might...

The history of infant mortality in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain is a continuing intellectual problem that fascinates. Remaining stubbornly high at 150 deaths per 1,000 births until 1901 despite declines in death rates at most older ages since 1870, suddenly the infant mortality rate embarked on a headlong decline throughout the twentieth ce...

Good public-health decisionmaking is dependent on reliable and timely statistics on births and deaths (including the medical causes of death). All high-income countries, without exception, have national civil registration systems that record these events and generate regular, frequent, and timely vital statistics. By contrast, these statistics are...

Vital statistics generated through civil registration systems are the major source of continuous monitoring of births and deaths over time. The usefulness of vital statistics depends on their quality. In the second paper in this Series we propose a comprehensive and practical framework for assessment of the quality of vital statistics. With use of...

Most people in Africa and Asia are born and die without leaving a trace in any legal record or official statistic. Absence of reliable data for births, deaths, and causes of death are at the root of this scandal of invisibility, which renders most of the world's poor as unseen, uncountable, and hence uncounted. This situation has arisen because, in...

Identity registration at birth is a UN proclaimed human right. However, it is not available in many of the world’s poorer countries today. A national system of identity registration dates from 1538 in England and was used by individual citizens to verify their property and inheritance rights and by local communities to verify social security claims...

Throughout history and prehistory trade and economic growth have always entailed serious population health challenges. The post-war orthodoxies of demographic and epidemiological transition theory and the Washington consensus have each encouraged the view that industrialization necessarily changes all this and that modern forms of rapid economic gr...

Three perspectives on the efficacy of social capital have been explored in the public health literature. A "social support" perspective argues that informal networks are central to objective and subjective welfare; an "inequality" thesis posits that widening economic disparities have eroded citizens' sense of social justice and inclusion, which in...

Throughout its history as a social science discipline, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying population problems. An important outcome of this is that demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from their embeddedness in d...

Throughout its history as a social science discipline, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying population problems. An important outcome of this is that demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from their embeddedness in d...

New findings from an oral-history research project investigating sexuality, marriage, and birth control among working-class couples born in the first quarter of the twentieth century run contrary to the family-planning and marriageguidance manuals of the period, as well to demographers' and historians' assumptions. These couples tended to prefer tr...

Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of traditional methods of birth controlsuch as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinencethroughout the peri...

The origin of the population health approach is an historic debate over the relationship between economic growth and human health. In Britain and France, the Industrial Revolution disrupted population health and stimulated pioneering epidemiological studies, informing the early preventive public health movement. A century-long process of political...

This article provides empirically based estimates for life expectancy at birth in the largest British cities in the nineteenth century. This evidence reflects the experience of women and children as well as men. It indicates that mortality levels in Britain's industrializing cities deteriorated substantially during the second quarter of the ninetee...

Thomas McKeown was a rhetorically powerful critic, from the inside, of the medical profession's mid-20th-century love affair with curative and scientific medicine. He emphasized instead the importance of economic growth, rising living standards, and improved nutrition as the primary sources of most historical improvements in the health of developed...

Cet article developpe une perspective historique des determinants du capital social aux Etats-Unis, en s'appuyant sur les travaux de Robert Putnam et de Michael Woolcock. En particulier, il reintroduit l'Etat, le pouvoir, la politique et l'ideologie dans la formation historique du capital social

C. Bledsoe, S. Lerner y J. Guyer (eds.). Fertility and the Male Life Cycle in the Era of Fertility Decline, Oxford, Oxford University Press/lUSSP International Studies in Demography, 2000.

Over the long term, the processes of rapid economic growth seem to be strongly correlated with improvements in the prosperity and health of a society. Hence derives the commonplace notion that economic growth results in development. This essay argues that, contrary to this widely held opinion, economic growth entails critical challenges and threats...

The idea of ‘social capital’ is increasingly influencing international, national, and local policy making and work within the social sciences. This book provides an overview of ‘social capital’ together with critical discussion of its application in a wide variety of fields.However, its rapid rise to prominence has not been matched by proper scruti...

Robert Woods and Nicola Shelton, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. 165pp. 47 maps. 51 figures. 5 tables. 2 appendices. Bibliography. Index. £30.00 hbk; £15.00 pbk. - - Volume 27 Issue 1 - Simon Szreter

This article offers a radical reinterpretation of the chronology of control over reproduction in England's history. It argues that, as a result of post-World War II policy preoccupations, there has been too narrow a focus in the literature on the significance of reductions in marital fertility. In England's case this is conventionally dated to have...