Mortality change has traditionally been considered a necessary prerequisite to any long-term reduction in fertility. In Frank Notestein's original statement of the demographic transition theory, societies went from high to low levels of fertility and mortality by means of a path in which mortality declined first and was followed at a shorter or longer lag by fertility. Subsequently Abdel Omran outlined a number of scenarios of demographic transition, all of which reflected simultaneous or prior declines of mortality as a major factor stimulating fertility reduction. While Omran's view of the epidemiological transition goes on to emphasize many other aspects of mortality decline, his view of it as an agent for fertility decline is similar to Notestein's.

This understanding of the mortality–fertility synergy is based on two very general conceptions of historical reality which both Omran and Notestein share with many people working in the field of historical demography. For one, there has never been a society known to historians in which fertility was high and mortality low, or mortality high and fertility low, except in moments of epidemic or economic or political stress, for relatively brief periods of time, or among very specific historic sub-populations. Normally mortality and fertility have ended up adjusting to each other more or less efficiently so as to ensure moderate rates of population growth. Moreover, high levels of fertility and mortality invariably were replaced by moderate ones during the demographic transition. Secondly, one of the reasons that the demographic transition holds such an allure for most historians is that it was a period of history in which societal traditions appear to have succumbed to the weight of rational choices made by families in order to ensure their best welfare in the face of changing circumstances. The initial instigator of the change, one would reasonably suspect, had to have been a decline in mortality with increasing numbers of children surviving beyond infancy. Faced with this reality, families made the decision to give individual choice priority over social norms and ended up curtailing their fertility. The entire context of social, economic and cultural modernization contributed to people's willingness to adopt new strategies when faced with new realities, but intuitively the point of departure would seem to have been incipient mortality transformation.

In his pioneering and now classic 1953 study, Nationalism and social communication, Karl Deutsch laid out a social science agenda for the study of national consciousness in contemporary and historic populations. Central to this agenda was communication, and central to communication was language: ‘If we knew how to compare and measure the ability of groups and cultures to transmit information, we might gain a better understanding of their behaviour and capacities.’ At that time historians were not paying attention to social scientists, as neither historical demography nor social science history had yet been born, and Deutsch's call remained unanswered. It took the study of the secular decline of fertility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to raise the question again for the European past. When Susan Cotts Watkins concluded that ‘those people who spoke a common language appeared to behave in similar ways with respect to reproduction, but they behaved quite differently from those with whom they could not communicate’, she offered one answer to Deutsch's inquiry about social communication and social behaviour. Apparently the spread of linguistic uniformity in populations living within long-established boundaries helped to disseminate information about controlling marital fertility. Throughout Europe, or more precisely Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, variation in fertility within nations declined and variation between nations rose.

From a different vantage point, historical questions about the process of individuation among European language communities, nationalities, and national cultures, and about communication between and within them, are inevitably questions about borders and borderlands. Nowhere is this more true than in Eastern Europe where, for the past two hundred years, few peoples remained untouched by changing borders. Official borders were alternately drawn around them and through them, separating fragments of language communities from each other, only to reunite them later and to separate them again later still. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sense of nationality, most often language-centred, became increasingly stronger, bringing with it the emergence of identifiable ‘national cultures’, entities within which, presumably, a single national language dominated and made the flow of information easier than in the past.

For most people in pre-industrial Sweden, the occupation of being a servant was not a lifetime job but a temporary one at which they tried their hand for a limited period during their lives. The Western European marriage pattern with its late age at marriage meant that most individuals spent about 10–15 years preparing for adulthood: saving up, being trained and seeking a partner for life. During this phase of their lives they worked as servants, changed employer frequently and therefore migrated.

Until the late eighteenth century the social structure in the Swedish countryside was quite homogeneous. The nobility possessed large estates which formed an important source of employment. These were, however, few in number, and the dominant social groups were peasants, freeholders (skattebönder) and tenants on crown or noble land (kronobönder, frälsebönder), as well as servants in peasant households or on the estates. There were, of course, people with other occupations, but they did not constitute large social groups. Thus, servants formed a special social category, but, as I mentioned, very few people belonged to the category for life. Let us contrast this homogeneous picture with the diversified social structure in the late nineteenth century.

It has been more than thirty years since E. A. Wrigley demonstrated, in a still-famous article, that the technique of ‘family reconstitution’, as developed in France by Louis Henry and before then applied only to French parishes and elite groups, could be used in English historical demography. Although English parish registers seldom supply nearly as much detail as found in some French ones, and many registers are incomplete owing to an interruption of registration during the Civil War – or after 1789, 1769, or even 1729 – some English parishes were discovered whose registers allow adequate identification of the participants in all demographic events. Furthermore, English parish registers have one advantage over the French: they often started in the mid-sixteenth century (not the early seventeenth).

The parish Wrigley chose to illustrate the alluring prospects for English historical demographers, as is well known, was Colyton in Devonshire. His article, however, was not merely a programmatic one setting forth the possible benefits – and costs – of family reconstitution. He had also made an unexpected discovery: that there may well have been family limitation in England (as the title of his article proclaimed) or, more specifically, in Colyton in the period from 1647 to 1719.

English population history from family reconstitution 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997) is an impressive volume. This ambitious study represents the culmination of a quarter-century of laborious research by four of the most accomplished practitioners of English historical demography, E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen, and R. S. Schofield. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming; the book contains 121 tables and 73 graphs, and it weighs in at almost 2½ pounds. The study is a landmark in the field of pre-industrial population history. It contributes important new evidence on long-run trends in fertility, mortality, and marriage behaviour. Even more exciting than the refinement of the aggregate results contained in previous work by the Cambridge Group, however, is the new kinds of analyses made possible by the existence of microdata. The book marshals an array of innovative methods to address a remarkable assortment of demographic issues. The authors address dozens of topics previously hidden from view, ranging from an ingenious analysis of the relative mortality of monozygotic and dyzygotic twins, to an important investigation of lifetime fecundity, to an exhaustive analysis of the seasonality of mortality.