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New Light on the History of Urban Populations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Karl F. Helleiner
Karl F. Helleiner
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Historical demography is indeed what Father Mols calls it, a “science des confines” (Vol. I, Introduction, p. xvi), a discipline which is doomed to cultivate the boulder-strewn and not easily accessible borderlands between half a dozen fields of learning. In a territory such as this the first clearings are of necessity a matter of small-scale enterprise; that is to say, local research predominates. But this has been proceeding on a broad front; the difficulties encountered have not been great enough to discourage the pioneers. Indeed, the amount of labor expended on local or regional investigations into problems of historical demography beggars description: antiquaries and genealogists, statisticians and students of medical history, sociologists and economic historians have combed thousands of records and accumulated mountains of quantitative as well as symptomatic evidence regarding past populations.

Type
Review Article and Notes
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 56 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1958

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References

1 Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1937, 1939. I understand that Margherita Piazzolla-Beloch, daughter of the late Karl Julius Beloch, is taking steps toward publication of the manuscript of Vol. III, which is in her possession.

2 3d ed., Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1943.

3 A quick sample has revealed only a few omissions, none of them very serious. Among them, Habakkuk's, H. J. recent article “English Population in the Eighteenth Century,” in the Economic History Review, 2d ser., VI (1953)Google Scholar, might be mentioned, together with another study which, while it started as a purely local piece of research, has led to results of general interest to the demographic historian: Woehlkens, Erich, Pest und Ruhr im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert [Schriften des Niedersächsischen Heimatbundes E.V., Neue Folge, XXVI] (Hanover, 1954).Google Scholar The late Mackenroth's, GerhardBevölkerungslehre (Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer, 1953)Google Scholar also deserves to be listed, for all the carping criticism Corrado Gini has seen fit to bestow upon it.

4 Sometimes authorities were inspired by a genuine demographic interest. A document drawn up as early as 1456 at Bologna states in so many words that church registers ought to be kept “ut facilius incrementum … populi huius civitatis percipi possit” (I, 164, n. 1).

5 Older burial registers, in particular, are known to be far from complete. See II, 306 ff.

6 “Nous n'en savons rien et nous n'en pouvons rien savoir.” Sée, Henri, “Peut-on évaluer la population de l'ancienne France?” Revue d'économie politique, XXXVIII (1924), 651.Google Scholar

7 An article by Olbricht, Konrad, “Die Vergrosstādterung des Abendlandes zu Beginn des Dreissigjährigen Krieges,” Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, LXXXV (1939)Google Scholar, might be added to the literature on this subject quoted by the author.

8 If the word “big” is taken in a relative and functional sense, a fair number of Grosstādte must be admitted to have existed as early as the thirteenth century. What we have in mind, however, when speaking of the emergence of the big city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a change in the scale that Father Mols refers to when he writes, “Chaque climat historique se caractérise par une échelle différente de dimensions urbaines” (II, 39).

9 Zimmerische Chronik. (ed. Karl August Barack; 2d, ed. rev.; Freiburg i.B. and Tubingen, 1881–82), II, 425; IV, 10. Schnabel, Johann Gottfried, Der im Irrgarten der Liebe herumtaumclnde Cavalier (ed. Ernst, Paul; Munich: Georg Müller, 1907), pp. 288 f.Google Scholar; 474 ff. (1st ed., 1746).

10 Meuvret, Jean, “Les crises de subsistance et la démographie de la France d'Ancien Régime,” Population, I (1946), 643 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See, for instance, Canard, J., “Les mouvements de population à Saint-Romain d'Urfé de 1612 à 1946,” Bulletin de la Diana, XXIX (1945), 118 ff.Google Scholar, esp. p. 121; Goubert, Pierre, “En Beauvaisis: problèmes démographiques du XVIIe siècle,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, VII (1952), 453 ff.Google Scholar; idem., “Une richesse historique en cours d'exploitation,” ibid. IX (1954), 83ff., esp. 91 ff.; Ruwet, J., “Crises démographiques: problèmes économiques ou crises morales? Le pays de Liège sous l'Ancien Régime,” Population, IX (1954), 451 ff.Google Scholar, esp. 473. Similar observations concerning Iceland and the Scandinavian countries were made by Gille, H., “The Demographic History of the Northern European Countries in the Eighteenth Century,” Population Studies, III (1949–1950), 3 ff., esp. 20 ff. and 53.Google Scholar