English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837
Abstract
English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 is the most important single contribution to English historical demography since Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. It represents the culmination of work carried out at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the past quarter-century. This work demonstrates the value of the technique of family reconstitution as a means of obtaining accurate and detailed information about fertility, morality, and nuptiality in the past. Indeed, more is now known about many aspects of English demography in the parish register period than about the post-1837 period when the Registrar-General collected and published information. Using data from 26 parishes, the authors show clearly that their results are representative not only of the demographic situation of the parishes from which the data were drawn, but also of the country as a whole. Some very surprising features of the behaviour of past populations are brought to light for the first time.
... O efeito da Peste Negra sobre a trajetória de renda em regiões da Europa com diferentes estruturas institucionais e características populacionais é um debate clássico em história econômica (North, 1973;Pamuk, 2007). Segundo Allen, o século XV marca o fim do período em que trabalhadores na Europa tinham padrões de vida semelhantes (Allen, 2009, p. 40 (Wrigley;Davies;Oeppen;Schofield, 1997, p. 141). Existem diversas explicações para essas diferenças, como questões religiosas, mas a literatura de história econômica argumenta que esse padrão foi "essencialmente uma adaptação institucional a uma situação de oportunidades de emprego em rápida expansão e remuneração relativamente alta no século após a Peste Negra" (De Moor; Van Zanden, 2010, p. 3, tradução minha). ...
... O efeito da Peste Negra sobre a trajetória de renda em regiões da Europa com diferentes estruturas institucionais e características populacionais é um debate clássico em história econômica (North, 1973;Pamuk, 2007). Segundo Allen, o século XV marca o fim do período em que trabalhadores na Europa tinham padrões de vida semelhantes (Allen, 2009, p. 40 (Wrigley;Davies;Oeppen;Schofield, 1997, p. 141). Existem diversas explicações para essas diferenças, como questões religiosas, mas a literatura de história econômica argumenta que esse padrão foi "essencialmente uma adaptação institucional a uma situação de oportunidades de emprego em rápida expansão e remuneração relativamente alta no século após a Peste Negra" (De Moor; Van Zanden, 2010, p. 3, tradução minha). ...
... O efeito da Peste Negra sobre a trajetória de renda em regiões da Europa com diferentes estruturas institucionais e características populacionais é um debate clássico em história econômica (North, 1973;Pamuk, 2007). Segundo Allen, o século XV marca o fim do período em que trabalhadores na Europa tinham padrões de vida semelhantes (Allen, 2009, p. 40 (Wrigley;Davies;Oeppen;Schofield, 1997, p. 141). Existem diversas explicações para essas diferenças, como questões religiosas, mas a literatura de história econômica argumenta que esse padrão foi "essencialmente uma adaptação institucional a uma situação de oportunidades de emprego em rápida expansão e remuneração relativamente alta no século após a Peste Negra" (De Moor; Van Zanden, 2010, p. 3, tradução minha). ...
A Revolução Industrial britânica é possivelmente o tópico mais estudado em história econômica. A relevância dentro da disciplina não surpreende, dado que a Revolução Industrial é o principal marco para o início da era moderna. A partir do início do século XIX, diversas sociedades começaram a apresentar um crescimento sustentado, deixando para trás um período de escassez de recursos que limitava o aumento contínuo do padrão de vida da população. Naturalmente, inúmeros questionamentos surgem com uma mudança tão significativa na história global. Por que na Inglaterra? Por que durante o final do século 18? O que ocorreu foi mesmo uma revolução, ou é apenas a percepção que temos ao olhar o passado de forma fragmentada? As respostas para essas perguntas mudaram radicalmente nas últimas décadas, estimulando um grande debate empírico e teórico. Esse artigo busca apresentar uma síntese do debate a partir das três interpretações mais influentes desse período: instituições, preços de fatores e capital humano.
... This relationship was highly stable over many centuries, and we know the later elites did no better at securing heirs (Gobbi and Gõni 2021). Therefore, the securing of male heirs was a common issue for these societies due to (1) half of children being female and (2) the high mortality rate during this era meant approximately one-third of children died before adulthood (Wrigley et al. 1997). ...
This paper uses Japanese village censuses, 1637–1872, to measure inequality in landownership. Surprisingly, inequality was low and stable, unlike in Europe, where it was high and increasing. To explain this, I study inter-generational land transmissions. I find that Japanese households without sons adopted male heirs, thereby keeping lands in the family. In contrast, elite English male lines failed 20–30 percent of the time as adoptions were uncommon, leading to a highly unequal redistribution of their lands. Finally, the institutional differences in adoption had roots in fourth-century church policy, and this may partially explain why Europe was more unequal by 1800.
... Data are also from Reid (2020). 14 Regarding historical context, Wrigley and Schofield (1997) estimate that women's age at first marriage was around 26 in the early 18th century. Marrying at this late age shortened a woman's fertile years by about ten years, serving as an effective means of contraception. ...
This paper explores the transformative impact of railways on fertility in industrializing England and Wales. Using panel data with fixed effects and time-varying controls (N = 2,110), I find that at the local level fertility is around 3% higher in places that are connected to the railroad network than in unconnected units. To address endogeneity, I use an instrumental variable based on a network of least-cost paths. Results are robust to a range of specifications, including models in levels, differences, Coarsened Exact Matching estimation, Conley standard errors, and a range of placebo tests based on alternative means of transport.
... The broad conclusion that we draw in relation to the deterioration in health outcomes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century is that alongside the deleterious impacts of urbanization, rural life expectancy and mortality were also negatively affected in this period by the ideologically-driven restructuring of the Old Poor Law and the cuts to welfare support that this entailed. In particular, the findings identify this as a contributory cause of the major demographic change, to which both Woods and Wrigley drew attention: the significant deterioration in ECMR, relative to IMR, which appeared to occur in the late 1830s and 1840s, not only in urbanising populations but also in rural places (Wrigley et al. 1997). ...
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 ECMR and 2-4 per cent falls in rural expectation of life at birth as a result of the spending cuts imposed by the Poor Law Amendment Act. These results help to explain the weak performance of mid-nineteenth century life expectancy measures during a period of rising real wages but falling welfare expenditure.
... In many respects, the scientific relevance for the development of historical population databases rests on the shoulders of giants who championed quantitative history and the history of the ordinary person. This includes members of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, & Schofield, 1997), the Annales School with its advocacy of social history (Séguy, 2016), and the proponents of the life course perspective arguing for the plasticity of human development and the role of history (Kok, 2007). With these intellectual foundations as bedrock, technological advances proved to be a catalyst for accelerating the insights of quantitative history by digitizing archival records and through record linking methodologies that reveal the diversity of human life courses. ...
In recent years the development of historical databases reconstructing the lives of large populations accelerated. These considerable investments of time and money have greatly expanded possibilities for new research in history, demography, sociology, economics, and other disciplines. This special issue describes the content and design of 23 important historical databases. Authors were given the freedom to discuss a range of practical and technical decisions from evaluating archival sources to crowdsourcing data entry. The most common issue is nominative record linkage, but we find different choices between semi-automatic and fully automatic linkage techniques and various approaches for connecting diverse sources. Some databases describe special problems, like linking Chinese names, handwritten text recognition or the construction of a release in IDS-format. Other databases offer detailed descriptions of sources or discuss prospects for including new datasets.
Objectives
A number of studies have examined changes in mortality and health during industrialization in both the United States and Western Europe; however, most of this work has focused on urban communities. Despite theories regarding differences between rural and urban patterns of mortality at this time, few analyses of data from rural communities have been done. Our goal is to examine trends in mortality, c . 1850–1880, for a rural county in central New York State at a time when farming, the economic base of this county, was becoming commercialized and industrialization was impacting the wider region.
Materials and Methods
Using census mortality records from Madison County, NY (1850–1880), we examine trends in hazards of death, survivorship, and cause of death. In order to contribute a rural perspective to this area of study, we examine trends from the mortality records at several scales: town‐specific, groups of towns based on population density, and the county as a whole.
Results
Our results suggest that the hazards of death decreased and survivorship increased at the county level across this 30‐year period. In general, the rates of communicable diseases decreased and the rates of non‐communicable diseases increased. Individual towns had variable outcomes, and higher population density towns had better apparent outcomes than those with medium and lower densities.
Conclusions
Overall, mortality patterns changed noticeably during this period. These changes were likely at least partially a result of changing economic conditions, but may also have been affected by socio‐spatial factors and access to healthcare, both of which continue to impact rural communities today.
We estimate productivity growth in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. Our estimates account for these Malthusian dynamics. We find that productivity growth was zero prior to 1600. Productivity growth began in 1600—almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the onset of productivity growth preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of 17th century England. We estimate productivity growth of 2% per decade between 1600 and 1800, increasing to 5% per decade between 1810 and 1860. Much of the increase in output growth during the Industrial Revolution is explained by structural change—the falling importance of land in production—rather than faster productivity growth. Stagnant real wages in the 18th and early 19th centuries—“Engel’s Pause”—is explained by rapid population growth putting downward pressure on real wages. Yet, feedback from population growth to real wages is sufficiently weak to permit sustained deviations from the “iron law of wages” prior to the Industrial Revolution.
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality and population dynamics, emphasizing individuals’ decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting better health technology. Expanded use of this technology reduces the cost of adoption and confers a dynamic externality by increasing the future number of individuals who use the technology. Our model generates a diffusion curve whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction. The model explains historical trends in mortality rates and life expectancies at various ages and population dynamics in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based solely on income, ours is consistent with the observed disconnect between mortality and income. Unlike Beckerian theories of fertility, ours accounts for the observed acceleration in population.
Human fetuses at term are large relative to the dimensions of the maternal birth canal, implying that their birth can be associated with difficulties. The tight passage through the human birth canal can lead to devastating outcomes if birth becomes obstructed, including maternal and fetal death. Although macaques have to accommodate similarly large fetuses, relative to their maternal birth canals, it was not known whether macaque mothers face birth difficulties similar to humans. Based on 27 y of demographic data from a semi-free-ranging, closely monitored population of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), we found no birth-associated mortality in macaques. This differs from the situation in many human populations. We suggest three nonmutually exclusive hypotheses to explain these observations. i) The macaque fetal skull is similarly flexible as the human fetal skull. ii) The macaque pelvis and connective tissue show greater flexibility during birth. iii) The interplay between macaque pelvic shape and birth dynamics is smoother and incurs fewer complications than in humans.
Objectives
The present paper highlights the potential of osteological data for answering demographic questions through the development and application of a Bayesian approach incorporating age estimations of adults.
Materials and methods
The metropolis of London is a rewarding study region for such an approach due to the large number of cemeteries, with thousands of individuals, spanning a period from 1100 AD to the mid‐19th century, that have been excavated and published in the past two decades. Furthermore, London has a rich tradition of early written records on mortality that can be used for comparison purposes. In order to gain comparable results from the different source categories, we use a Bayesian framework in which the Gompertz distribution features centrally.
Results
Our intensive simulations show that the Bayesian approach performs better than maximum likelihood estimation or ordinary least squares in terms of recovering the original age distribution parameters. They also show how strongly population growth affects mortality patterns. The osteological data suggests that during medieval times and the Early Modern period, the modal age‐at‐death of the general population of London remained more or less constant and hovered around 30 years, and that only monks showed a higher modal age, of about 45 years. However, from the 17th century onwards, life expectancy of adults increased markedly.
Discussion
Our comparison of written sources and osteological data demonstrates their general comparability and highlights the much higher mortality among adults in London than in the rest of England and Wales. We conclude that Bayesian modeling has great potential for recovering true mortality patterns from osteological data.
This chapter is motivated by two of the growth facts stated in Chapter 1.
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 the dawn of the previous century—as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. In doing so, we retrace the historical processes through which the evolving public health movement gradually helped crystallise a scientific understanding of the social causes of excess mortality. We map the dominant ideology of the public sphere at the time, chart the shifting roles of the state, and retrace the historical origins and emergence of ‘public health’ as a distinctive category of state policy and public discourse. We situate the public health movement in this historical configuration and identify the cracks in the existing ideological and administrative edifice through which this movement was able to articulate a novel approach to population health—one that spotlights the political economy of social inequality. We relate this historical sequence to the rise of industrial capitalism, the social fractures that it spawned, and the organised counter‐movements that it necessitated.
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
By bridging the boundaries between social and biological sciences, the volume stresses the importance of a unified understanding of both in order to grasp past and current demographic patterns. Demographic traits, and traits related to demographic outcomes, including fertility and mortality rates, marriage, parental care, menopause, and cooperative behavior are subject to evolutionary processes. Bringing an understanding of evolution into demography therefore incorporates valuable insights into this field; just as knowledge of demography is key to understanding evolutionary processes. By asking questions about old patterns from a new perspective, the volume—composed of contributions from established and early-career academics—demonstrates that a combination of social science research and evolutionary theory offers holistic understandings and approaches that benefit both fields.
Human Evolutionary Demography introduces an emerging field in an accessible style. It is suitable for graduate courses in demography, as well as upper-level undergraduates. Its range of research is sure to be of interest to academics working on demographic topics (anthropologists, sociologists, demographers), natural scientists working on evolutionary processes, and disciplines which cross-cut natural and social science, such as evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and evolutionary medicine. As an accessible introduction, it should interest readers whether or not they are currently familiar with human evolutionary demography.
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
By bridging the boundaries between social and biological sciences, the volume stresses the importance of a unified understanding of both in order to grasp past and current demographic patterns. Demographic traits, and traits related to demographic outcomes, including fertility and mortality rates, marriage, parental care, menopause, and cooperative behavior are subject to evolutionary processes. Bringing an understanding of evolution into demography therefore incorporates valuable insights into this field; just as knowledge of demography is key to understanding evolutionary processes. By asking questions about old patterns from a new perspective, the volume—composed of contributions from established and early-career academics—demonstrates that a combination of social science research and evolutionary theory offers holistic understandings and approaches that benefit both fields.
Human Evolutionary Demography introduces an emerging field in an accessible style. It is suitable for graduate courses in demography, as well as upper-level undergraduates. Its range of research is sure to be of interest to academics working on demographic topics (anthropologists, sociologists, demographers), natural scientists working on evolutionary processes, and disciplines which cross-cut natural and social science, such as evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and evolutionary medicine. As an accessible introduction, it should interest readers whether or not they are currently familiar with human evolutionary demography.
The first country to industrialize – England – ostensibly did so without expanding investment in the basic education of its workforce. The empirical evidence underpinning this argument for England rests largely on signature rates at marriage. These are not a perfect indication of educational achievement, particularly as many children never learned to write. More problematically, I argue signatures are likely to have systematically underestimated human capital in industrial districts. In place of signature data, I propose age heaping, a measure widely understood as a proxy for numeracy but shown here to be closely related to both reading and writing abilities. In contrast to signatures, this measure suggests that ‘deskilling’ industrialization induced human capital accumulation. I argue that this occurred not because human capital was directly productive, but rather because schools provided a valuable signal. Sunday school attendance signalled low leisure‐preference among child workers and were popularly attended in industrial districts. Further, such schools taught children to read but not write, which they considered inappropriate for the Sabbath, accounting for the discrepancy between these two measures of human capital.
In this chapter, Grinin et al. provide an analysis of the demographic development of humankind in its close relationship with technological development, including the trends of the twenty-first century. The analysis of the demographic component, the demographic dimension of the historical process, has not been sufficiently researched. Meanwhile, it is an extremely important aspect that can not only explain essential parts of the development, but also provide a basis for explaining current processes and forecasting our futures. Grinin et al. consider the dynamics of the correlation between the major technological breakthroughs in history—the Agrarian, Industrial and Cybernetic Revolutions (discussed in Chap. 2)—and the major demographic transformations in the historical process. A special place is given to the analysis of the demographic transition in the context of the demographic transformations of the last seven to eight decades. This allows them to reveal the essential features of modern demographic processes, the role of the societal aging process, which will increasingly influence the life of society. Grinin et al. also make predictions about future demographic transformations associated with the development of the societal aging process and the formation of a new type of population reproduction up to the end of this century.
Zusammenfassung
Hintergrund
Familienrekonstitutionen und Familienstammbäume genealogischer Online-Plattformen sind 2 mögliche Datenquellen für die Untersuchung der Sterblichkeit in einer Zeit, als noch keine amtlichen Sterbetafeln verfügbar waren. Der vorliegende Artikel diskutiert anhand zweier Beispiele, der Familienrekonstitution aus Imhof und dem auf geni.com beruhenden Datensatz FamiLinx , die geschätzten Verläufe der Lebenserwartung im Deutschen Reich mit einem Fokus auf die geschlechtsspezifische differenzielle Mortalität.
Methoden
Mithilfe der Individualdaten aus der Familienrekonstitution und aus den Online-Genealogien werden die geschlechtsspezifischen Sterbetafeln geschätzt. Aus ihnen wird die bedingte Lebenserwartung ermittelt und die entsprechende geschlechtsspezifische differenzielle Mortalität abgeleitet und mit den amtlichen Sterbetafeln für die Jahre 1871–1910 abgeglichen. Der Beitrag der einzelnen Altersklassen zur differenziellen Sterblichkeit wird mit dem Stepwise Replacement Algorithm bestimmt.
Ergebnisse
Die Ergebnisse der Familienrekonstitution überschätzen die Lebenserwartung nach 1871 weniger stark als die FamiLinx-Schätzungen. Die geringere Sterblichkeit der Frauen in der amtlichen Statistik wird von beiden Quellen nicht abgebildet. Im Gegensatz zur amtlichen Statistik ist die geschätzte Lebenserwartung der Männer höher als die der Frauen. Diese verzerrte geschlechtsspezifische Abbildung der Mortalitätsraten geht insbesondere auf die Altersklassen von 15 bis 45 Jahren zurück.
Diskussion
Der Notability Bias , der patriarchische Ansatz in der Erstellung von Familienstammbäumen und die Müttersterblichkeit sind mögliche Ursachen für diese Beobachtungen in FamiLinx. In der Familienrekonstitution ist die mit der Mobilität einhergehende Zensierung ein Erklärungsansatz.
[ENG] In the article, I discuss the seasonality of marriages, conceptions and first conceptions in early modern communities from the territory of present-day Poland. I looked for the influence of the Catholic liturgical calendar there. The source basis was the data published so far in the literature. The analysis shows that church restrictions forced the faithful to marry in the months immediately before Lent and Advent. This resulted in an increase in post-marital sexual activity during the period when abstinence was recommended. This conclusion weakens the notion that the Catholic Church controlled the daily lives of early modern Polish inhabitants.
[PL] W artykule omówiono sezonowość małżeństw, poczęć i pierwszych poczęć w społecznościach nowożytnych z terenu obecnej Polski. Poszukiwano w niej wpływu katolickiego kalendarza liturgicznego. Podstawę źródłową stanowiły dane opublikowane dotychczas w literaturze. Z analizy wynika, że restrykcje kościelne zmuszały wiernych do zawierania małżeństw w miesiącach bezpośrednio przed Wielkim Postem i adwentem. Skutkowało to wzrostem poślubnej aktywności seksualnej w okresie, w którym zalecana była wstrzemięźliwość. Wniosek ten osłabia przekonanie o kontrolowaniu przez kościół katolicki życia codziennego mieszkańców nowożytnej Polski.
In Western Europe, the Early Modern Period is characterized by the rise of tenderness in romantic relationships and the emergence of companionate marriage. Despite a long research tradition, the origins of these social changes remain elusive. In this paper, we build on recent advances in behavioral sciences, showing that romantic emotional investment, which is more culturally variable than sexual attraction, enhances the cohesion of long-term relationships and increases investment in children. Importantly, this long-term strategy is considered especially advantageous when living standards are high. Here, we investigate the relationship between living standards, the emotional components of love expressed in fiction work, and behavioral outcomes related to pair bonding, such as nuptial and fertility rates. We developed natural language processing measures of “emotional investment” (tenderness) and “attraction” (passion) and computed romantic love in English plays (N = 847) as a ratio between the two. We found that living standards generally predicted and temporally preceded variations of romantic love in the Early Modern Period. Furthermore, romantic love preceded an increase in nuptial rates and a decrease in births per marriage. This suggests that increasing living standards in the Early Modern Period may have contributed to the emergence of modern romantic culture.
This review uses Malthus’ model of the preindustrial economy to structure the cliometric literature on the interaction of European population with the economy. Increases in wages raise population, and higher population drives down wages. Positive and preventive checks determine long-run population and wages. The Black Death was a positive check, eliminating a large proportion of the population across medieval Europe and temporarily boosting wages. England largely eliminated positive checks (such as famine) by the mid-seventeenth century.
The economy was already on the path to sustained economic growth, despite average real wages not rising until after 1800. In eighteenth-century Sweden however, higher food grain prices raised mortality. A major preventive check was the
female late age at marriage and high celibacy rate after 1500 or earlier in Western and Southern Europe. This arrangement provided a floor to living standards by restricting fertility and encouraging physical and human capital accumulation and
therefore technical progress. Lower mortality rates were achieved in the west than in the east of Europe and were associated with lower fertility across the continent. Even so, population expanded most rapidly in the western, more dynamic European economies, so fertility restriction alone was not obviously the trigger
for economic growth. French marital fertility control began at the end of the eighteenth century, yet French living standards were not the highest in Europe. Other European populations increased rapidly for perhaps a century before fertility fell, under pressure from rising child costs including the greater opportunity
cost of time spent bringing up children. Interactions between the economy and migration, mainly focused on the long nineteenth century, have been modeled with cliometric structures related to those of natural increase and the economy. European wages were driven up by emigration from Europe and reduced in the economies receiving immigrants.
This paper studies the marital fertility—broadly defined as the ratio of live births to married women—of five Chinese lineages since the 17th century, mainly in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The results demonstrate a unique pattern of Chinese marital fertility by exploiting new genealogical data and studying more than 50,000 individuals from five lineages. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the marital fertility rates in the period were moderate. On the other hand, in line with the classic ideas, this paper finds no clear indication of two fertility controls within marriages, parity‐dependent early stopping and longer spacing.
Objectives:
The second epidemiological transition describes a shift in predominant causes of death from infectious to degenerative (non-communicable) diseases associated with the demographic transition from high to low levels of mortality and fertility. In England, the epidemiological transition followed the Industrial Revolution, but there is little reliable historical data on cause of death beforehand. Because of the association between the demographic and epidemiological transitions, skeletal data can potentially be used to examine demographic trends as a proxy for the latter. This study uses skeletal data to examine differences in survivorship in London, England in the decades preceding and following initial industrialization and the second epidemiological transition.
Materials and methods:
We use data (from n = 924 adults) from London cemeteries (New Churchyard, New Bunhill Fields, St. Bride's Lower Churchyard, and St. Bride's Church Fleet Street) in use prior to and during industrialization (c. 1569-1853 CE). We assess associations between estimated adult age at death and time period (pre-industrial vs. industrial) using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis.
Results:
We find evidence of significantly lower adult survivorship prior to industrialization (c. 1569-1669 and 1670-1739 CE) compared to the industrial period (c. 1740-1853 CE) (p < 0.001).
Discussion:
Our results are consistent with historical evidence that, in London, survivorship was improving in the later 18th century, prior to the recognized beginning of the second epidemiological transition. These findings support the use of skeletal demographic data to examine the context of the second epidemiological transition in past populations.
This paper contributes to the debate on the evolution of living standards in preindustrial England. It emphasizes the need to depart from the approach of focusing only on the time paths of observables, like income per capita and population size, in order to assess the validity of Malthusian predictions. It first constructs a Malthusian model and then develops a robust algorithm for identifying the latent forces that have shaped aggregate outcomes in the preindustrial era. The analysis suggests the existence of two distinct Malthusian regimes in preindustrial England: a survival-driven regime, where mortality is the main latent force in economic-demographic interactions, and a later technology-driven regime that emerges after the mid-fifteenth century and is characterized by both population and productivity growth but stable mortality and long-run stagnation in per capita income. The paper discusses the role of various historical accidents (e.g., the Black Death, the discovery of the New World, the English Reformation) in triggering the emergence of the technology-driven regime, and it also highlights some mediating mechanisms through which subsequent productivity growth may have been sustained. The existence of long-run stagnation in income per capita in England through the mid-seventeenth century, despite the technological dynamism of the early modern period, is consistent with the predictions of Unified Growth Theory.
This paper provides an overview of women's engagement with Stoic ethics in early modern England (c. 1600–1700). It builds on recent literature in the field by demonstrating that there is a positive gender‐inclusive narrative to be told about Stoic philosophy in this time—one that incorporates women's specific concerns and responds to women's lived experiences. To support this claim, we take an interdisciplinary approach and examine several different genres of women's writing in the period, including letters, poems, plays, educational texts, and moral essays. In these writings, we argue, a distinctive conception of Stoic therapy emerges. Women embrace well‐known aspects of the Stoic philosophy—such as living in agreement with nature, the importance of self‐government, and the ideal of freedom from the passions—but they also allow room for the cultivation of eupatheiai or life‐affirmative feelings, such as feelings of respect, affection, and good will toward other people.
While there is strong evidence that maternal smallpox infection can cause foetal loss, it is not clear whether smallpox infections were a demographically important cause of stillbirths historically. In this paper, we use parish-level data from the Swedish Tabellverket data set for 1780–1839 to test the effect of smallpox on stillbirths quantitatively, analysing periods before and after the introduction of vaccination in 1802. We find that smallpox infection was not a major cause of stillbirths before 1820, because most women contracted smallpox as children and were therefore not susceptible during pregnancy. We do find a small, statistically significant effect of smallpox on stillbirths from 1820 to 1839, when waning immunity from vaccination put a greater share of pregnant women at risk of contracting smallpox. However, the reduced prevalence of smallpox in this period limited its impact on stillbirths. Thus, smallpox was not an important driver of historical stillbirth trends.
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000).
This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.
Malthus predicted that fertility rises with income and that people regulate fertility via regulating marriage. However, evidence on the Malthusian equilibrium has been mostly confined to Europe and East Asia. We employ Egypt's population censuses of 1848 and 1868 to provide the first evidence on the preindustrial Malthusian dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. At the aggregate level, we document rural Egyptian women having a high fertility rate that is close to the Western European level, combined with low age at marriage and low celibacy rate, that are closer to the East Asian levels. This resulted in a uniquely high fertility regime that was probably offset by the high child mortality. Next, we provide individual‐level evidence on the positive correlation between fertility and income (occupation). We find that the higher fertility of rural white‐collar men is attributed to their marriage behaviour, and not to marital fertility. Specifically, white‐collar men's higher polygyny explains 45 per cent of their fertility advantage, whereas their higher marriage rate and lower wife's age at marriage explains 55 per cent. Therefore, polygyny was an additional factor that led to a steeper income–fertility curve than in Western Europe by enabling the rural middle class to out‐breed the poor.
The standardisation of English spelling that resulted from the advent of printing is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of English. This pioneering book explores new avenues of investigation into spelling development by looking at the Early Modern English period, when irregular features across graphemes became standardised. It traces the development of the English spelling system through a number of 'competing' standards, raising questions about the meaning of 'standardisation'. It introduces a new model for the analysis of large-scale graphemic developments from a diachronic perspective, and provides a new empirical method geared specifically to the study of spelling standardisation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The method is applied to four interconnected case studies, focusing on the standardisation of positional spellings, i and y, etymological spelling and vowel diacritic spelling. This book is essential reading for researchers of writing systems and the history of English.
Objective
this research seeks to investigate the impact the industrial revolution had on the population of England.
Materials
Pre-existing skeletal data from 1154 pre-Industrial (1066–1700 CE) and 4157 industrial (1700–1905) skeletons from 21 cemeteries (N = 5411).
Methods
Context number, sex, age-at-death, stature and presence/absence of selected pathological conditions were collated. The data were compared using chi square, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, t-tests and logistic regression (α = 0.01).
Results
There was a statistically significant increase in cribra orbitalia, periosteal reactions, rib lesions, fractures, rickets, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, enamel hypoplasia, dental caries and periapical lesions in the industrial period. Osteomyelitis decreased from the pre-industrial to industrial period.
Conclusion
Our results confirm the industrial revolution had a significant negative impact on human health, however the prevalence of TB, treponemal disease, maxillary sinusitis, osteomalacia, scurvy, gout and DISH did not change, suggesting these diseases were not impacted by the change in environmental conditions.
Significance
This is the largest study of health in the industrial revolution that includes non-adults and adults and considers age-at-death alongside disease status to date. This data supports the hypothesis that the rise of industry was associated with a significant decline in general health, but not an increase in all pathological conditions.
In the space of one generation major changes have begun to take place in the field of human reproduction. A rapid increase in the control of fertility and the understanding and treatment of sexual health issues have been accompanied by an emerging threat to reproductive function linked to increasing environmental pollution and dramatic changes in lifestyle. Organised around four key themes, this book provides a valuable review of some of the most important recent findings in human reproductive ecology. Major topics include the impact of the environment on reproduction, the role of physical activity and energetics in regulating reproduction, sexual maturation and ovulation assessment and demographic, health and family planning issues. Both theoretical and practical issues are covered, including the evolution and importance of the menopause and the various statistical methods by which researchers can analyse characteristics of the menstrual cycle in field studies.
In the space of one generation major changes have begun to take place in the field of human reproduction. A rapid increase in the control of fertility and the understanding and treatment of sexual health issues have been accompanied by an emerging threat to reproductive function linked to increasing environmental pollution and dramatic changes in lifestyle. Organised around four key themes, this book provides a valuable review of some of the most important recent findings in human reproductive ecology. Major topics include the impact of the environment on reproduction, the role of physical activity and energetics in regulating reproduction, sexual maturation and ovulation assessment and demographic, health and family planning issues. Both theoretical and practical issues are covered, including the evolution and importance of the menopause and the various statistical methods by which researchers can analyse characteristics of the menstrual cycle in field studies.
In the space of one generation major changes have begun to take place in the field of human reproduction. A rapid increase in the control of fertility and the understanding and treatment of sexual health issues have been accompanied by an emerging threat to reproductive function linked to increasing environmental pollution and dramatic changes in lifestyle. Organised around four key themes, this book provides a valuable review of some of the most important recent findings in human reproductive ecology. Major topics include the impact of the environment on reproduction, the role of physical activity and energetics in regulating reproduction, sexual maturation and ovulation assessment and demographic, health and family planning issues. Both theoretical and practical issues are covered, including the evolution and importance of the menopause and the various statistical methods by which researchers can analyse characteristics of the menstrual cycle in field studies.
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