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Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change: A Thesis and some Possible African Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Gavin Kitching
Affiliation:
Polytechnic of North London

Extract

This article examines the possible relevance to Africa of the recent contribution to the history of industrialization in western Europe made by a group of historians of the family using statistical demographic techniques, especially ‘family reconstitntion’, developed by Peter Laslett at Cambridge. It is suggested that in particular the work of David Levine on eighteenth-century England yields a hypothesis about a link between ‘proto-industrialization’ and increased population growth which may be applicable, in a suitably modified form, to black Africa.

The article focuses particularly on the mechanism of widened income opportunities for young people lowering the age of marriage. Levine concentrates especially on the lowering of the marriage age of women causing enhanced fertility per wife. The modified form of the hypothesis suggested for black Africa would focus more on the reduction of the age of marriage for men and on the transition from polygyny to monogamy, the latter especially producing increased fertility per individual wife.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

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11 Ibid. 26–30.

12 Ibid. appendix: Table 5.12.

13 Ibid. 93, 112–13, 124–5.

14 Ibid. 6–7, 20, 94–5.

15 Ibid. 6.

16 Ibid. 90.

17 Ibid. 95.

18 Ibid. 11.

19 Ibid. 84–7; for data on the differences between the demographic behaviour of framework knitters and other occupational groups within Shepshed.

20 Ibid. 12–13, 18–20, 51–2 and 58–67.

21 Ibid. 116–26.

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47 See for example Van Zwanenberg, R. M. A. with King, Anne, An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800–1970 (London, 1975), 712CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also the review essay by Caldwell, J. C. (‘Major questions in African demographic history’) in the Proceedings of a Seminar on African Historical Demography (University of Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, 1977), esp. 1516.Google Scholar

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