Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:27:23.957Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Population

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2009

Frank McArdle
Affiliation:
Hewitt Associates
Get access

Summary

When Professor E. J. Hobsbawm set forth his theory of the ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century, he reached almost at the outset for one of the most telling indices of a society's vitality, namely, the size of its population and its capacity to sustain population growth. He found that ‘the scattered figures for European population suggest, at worst an actual decline, at best a level or slightly rising plateau between the mounting slopes of the population curve in the later sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.’

Even within the small world of the village of Altopascio, population was a dynamic element that changed its course in response to both economic and natural forces, and in turn imposed alterations within the fabric of the community as a whole. Fortunately a good many records have survived that enable us to calculate the village population, along with its short-term fluctuations in size and long-term modifications of demographic behavior. The picture that emerges from all these data is consistent with the demographic trends outlined by Professor Hobsbawm as evidence for a general European crisis. At Altopascio, over the entire period from 1551 to 1784, the secular trend in absolute size of population divides into a long period of growth through 1647, then an abrupt decline, followed by more than a century of cyclical fluctuations around a static level.

Type
Chapter
Information
Altopascio
A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587-1784
, pp. 41 - 65
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Population
  • Frank McArdle
  • Book: Altopascio
  • Online publication: 25 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511561221.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Population
  • Frank McArdle
  • Book: Altopascio
  • Online publication: 25 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511561221.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Population
  • Frank McArdle
  • Book: Altopascio
  • Online publication: 25 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511561221.003
Available formats
×