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Rural Industrialization and Population Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Wolfram Fischer
Wolfram Fischer
Affiliation:
Free University of Berlin
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Extract

Amongst the many problems economic historians have been studying recently in the context of industrialization, the interaction of rural industrialization and population change in a period preceding and accompanying the Industrial Revolution proper is one of the most exciting and promising ones. It is exciting because it enables us to shed light on one of the crucial questions in the whole complex of industrialization: why did some regions industrialize early and successfully and others did not? It is promising because here is a field where the employment of new methods and assiduous labor can lead to fairly exact results. Perhaps this is a point where finally a breakthrough may be accomplished which cuts the vicious circle in which much of the debate about the role of population change in the Industrial Revolution was caught for so long. Was it a precondition or a consequence, or both, and if either, in what respect?

Type
Rural Social Structures
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , March 1973 , pp. 158 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

Paper, delivered at a seminar for faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto, on January 28, 1972, and at a seminar at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University on January 31,1972.1 am grateful to the participants of those seminars for their helpful comments; particularly to Professor Edward Shorter of Toronto, who drew my attention to some additional literature.

1 The term is Franklin Mendels'. See his unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1969: Industrialization and Population Pressure in Eighteenth Century Flanders, and his contribution to the 1971 meeting of the Economic History Association:Google Scholar‘Proto-Industrialization; The First Phase of the Industrialization Process’, Journal of Economic History (March 1972), 241–61.Google Scholar It was taken up by R., and Tilly, C., ‘Agenda for European Economic History in the 1970's’, Journal of Economic History (March, 1971), pp. 184–98.Google Scholar

Redlich, F. and Freudenberger, H. suggested a similar term—protofactory—in their ‘The Industrial Development of Europe: Reality, Symbols, Images’, Kyklos, vol. 17 (1964), pp. 372–403.Google Scholar

Kollmann, W. has used the corresponding German term, Vorindustrialisierung, at several occasions. He relates it, however, mainly to the first half of the nineteenth century, which is for Central Europe usually known as the phase of Early Industrialization; while Mendels, the Tillys, and Freudenberger/Redlich refer mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Google Scholar

2 For a general discussion of the structure of early modern European industry, see Sella, D.European Industries, 1500–1700, The Fontana Economic History of Europe (ed. Cipolla, C. M.), vol. 2, section 5 (London, 1970).Google Scholar

3 Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (Toronto and New York 1969), pp. 138 ff.Google Scholar

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5 Wrigley, E. A., op. cit., p. 68.Google Scholar

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9 Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (Toronto and New York, 1969),Google Scholar especially Chapter 4: ‘Society and Economy in Pre-Industrial Populations’, pp. 108–43.Google Scholar

10 This was witnessed, inter alia, by Arthur Young who in 1770 wrote in his Northern Tour: ‘It is employment that creates population … Provide new employment and new hands will inevitably follow.’ Young, A., Northern Tour, Chapter IV, 411 ff.,Google Scholar cited by Chambers, J. D., ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. 5 (1953). pp. 319–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Reprinted in Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C. (eds), Population in History, Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), p. 326.Google Scholar

11 This ‘law’ is stated by many demographers. See, inter alia, Mackenroth, G., Bevölkerungslehre (Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 1953).CrossRefGoogle ScholarOhlin, P. G., The Positive and the Preventive Check, a Study of the Rate of Growth of Preindustrial Population (Ph.D.thesis, Harvard, 1955).Google Scholar

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14 Chambers, J. D., op. cit., in footnote 12, p. 329, where he states that in nine Nottinghamshire parishes the proportion of extra-parochial marriages was 10.8 per cent between 1670 and 1700, but 26 per cent between 1770 and 1800.Google Scholar

15 An example is provided by Heitz, G., Ländliche Leinenproduktion in Sachsen (1470–1555), Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Schriften des Instituts für Geschichte, Reihe II: Landesgeschichte, Band 4 (Berlin, 1961), pp. 28–41.Google Scholar

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19 See his book cited in footnote 6.

20 Deprez, P., ‘The Demographic Development of Flanders in the Eighteenth Century’, Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C. (eds.), op. cit., pp. 608–30.Google Scholar

21 See footnote 12.

22 Deprez, P., op. cit., p. 622.Google Scholar

23 Shorter, E., ‘Women's Liberation, Birth Control and Fertility in European History’, unpublished paper, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, December, 1971.Google Scholar

24 Deprez, P., op. cit., p. 628;Google Scholarvan Bath, B. H. Slicher, Een Samenleving onder Spanning (Assen, 1957), 59, 125;Google ScholarRoessingh, H. K., Hislorisch-demografish oderzoek (The Hague, 1959), pp. 13 f.Google Scholar

25 For the following, see: Mendels, F., ‘Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 32, no.l (03 1972), particularly 249–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But see David Landes' reservation as to this line of argument in ‘comments on Papers by Hohenberg, Mendels, and Mazzaoui’, ibid., p. 288.

26 For bibliographies of the more recent literature in English and French, see: Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (New York and Toronto, 1969), pp. 243–49;Google ScholarHollingsworth, T. H., Historical Demography (Ithaca, N. Y. 1969), pp. 391–421. The essays by Shorter, Knodel, etc., cited in footnotes 13 and 23 include also references to nowadays seldom used German demographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Google Scholar

27 See the review article by Mendels, F. F., ‘Recent Research in European Historical Demography’, American Historical Review, vol. 75, no. 4 (04, 1970), pp. 1065–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar