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  3. Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time

This series exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary work and includes books on topics such as family, kinship and neighbourhood; welfare provision and social control; work and leisure; migration; urban growth; and legal structures and procedures, as well as more familiar matters. It demonstrates that, for example, anthropology and economics have become as close intellectual neighbours to history as have political philosophy and biography.

  • General Editors: Richard Smith, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Jan De Vries, University of California, Berkeley, Paul Johnson, London School of Economics and Political Science, Keith Wrightson, Yale University, Connecticut

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35 results in Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time

Page 1 of 2

The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100
  • Europe, America, and the Third World
  • Robert William Fogel
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 May 2004
  • Nobel laureate Robert Fogel's compelling study, first published in 2004, examines health, nutrition and technology over the last three centuries and beyond. Throughout most of human history, chronic malnutrition has been the norm. During the past three centuries, however, a synergy between improvements in productive technology and in human physiology has enabled humans to more than double their average longevity and to increase their average body size by over 50 per cent. Larger, healthier humans have contributed to the acceleration of economic growth and technological change, resulting in reduced economic inequality, declining hours of work and a corresponding increase in leisure time. Increased longevity has also brought increased demand for health care. Professor Fogel argues that health care should be viewed as the growth industry of the twenty-first century and systems of financing it should be reformed. His book will be essential reading for all those interested in economics, demography, history and health care policy.

Annals of the Labouring Poor
  • Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900
  • K. D. M. Snell
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    02 May 1985
  • This collection of inter-connected essays is concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines a sensitive understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. It is based on an impressive range of sources, and its particular significance arises from the pioneering use made of a largely neglected archival source - settlement records - to address questions of central importance in English social and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levels of employment, wage rates, poor relief, the sexual division of labour, the social consequences of enclosure, the decline of farm service and traditional apprenticeship, and th equality of family life are amongst the issues discussed in a profound re-assessment of a perennial problem: the standard of living (in its widest sense) of the labouring poor during the period of industrialisation. The author's conclusions challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy, and his extensive use of literary and attitudinal material is closely integrated with the quantitative restatement of an interpretation that owes much to the older tradition of the Hammonds' Village Labourer.

Family and Social Change
  • The Household as a Process in an Industrializing Community
  • Angelique Janssens
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    21 October 1993
  • This book is a quantitative study into the influence of the process of industrialisation on the nature and strength of family relationships in a Dutch community between 1850 and 1920. The study makes use of the unique and unusually rich source of Dutch population registers, which enables the author to trace the history of individual households. The study closely relates aspects of family and household with the social processes characteristic of an industrialising society, such as increasing rates of social and geographical mobility and the shift of production from the home into the factory. Results reveal a striking continuity in the strength of nineteenth-century family relations despite the gradual but profound process of social change surrounding these families. Changes in behavioural patterns did occur, however, under the influence of changes in demographic rates, regional geographical mobility systems and local developments in the housing market. Nevertheless, these changes cannot be taken as a weakening of family relationships.

Death and the Metropolis
  • Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670–1830
  • John Landers
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    08 July 1993
  • Death and the Metropolis offers a powerful analysis of demographic patterns in London over the 'long eighteenth century', concentrating on mortality but also including data on marital fertility, population structure and migration. The study is based on a variety of sources including weekly and annual Bills of Mortality, parish registers and Quaker vital registers, and employs the techniques of family reconstitution and aggregative analysis. The data are analysed within the framework of a structural model of mortality change comprising the proximate determinants of exposure to, and resistance against, infectious agents on the the part of populations. Within this framework a model is established describing the specific demographic and epidemiological characteristics of early modern metropolitan centres. The evidence indicates that mortality in London was much higher than in other settlements in England for most of the period, but declined steeply in the later eighteenth century. This apparently reflected changes in exposure to infections.

Height, Health and History
  • Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980
  • Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, Annabel Gregory
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    25 October 1990
  • In historical accounts of the circumstances of ordinary people's lives, nutrition has been the great unknown. Nearly impossible to measure or assess directly, it has nonetheless been held responsible for the declining mortality rates of the nineteenth century as well as being a major factor in the gap in living standards, morbidity and mortality between rich and poor. The measurement of height is a means of the direct assessment of nutritional status. This important and innovative study uses a wealth of military and philanthropic data to establish the changing heights of Britons during the period of industrialization, and thus establishes an important dimension to the long-standing controversy about living standards during the Industrial Revolution. Sophisticated quantitative analysis enables the authors to present some striking conclusions about the actual physical status of the British people during a period of profound social and economic upheaval, and Height, Health and History will provide an invigorating statistical edge to many debates about the history of the human body itself.

Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society
  • Edited by John Walter, Roger Schofield
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    29 June 1989
  • Although Western societies cannot escape from images of famine in the present world, their direct experience of widespread hunger has receded into the past. England was one of the very first countries to escape from the shadow of famine; in this volume a team of distinguished economic, social and demographic historians analyses why. Focusing on England (whose experience is contrasted with France), the contributions combine detailed local studies of individual communities, broader analyses of the impact of hunger and disease, and methodological discussion to explore the effects of crisis mortality on early modern societies.

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837
  • E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield
  • Published online:
    07 September 2010
    Print publication:
    24 July 1997
  • English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 is the most important single contribution to English historical demography since Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. It represents the culmination of work carried out at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the past quarter-century. This work demonstrates the value of the technique of family reconstitution as a means of obtaining accurate and detailed information about fertility, morality, and nuptiality in the past. Indeed, more is now known about many aspects of English demography in the parish register period than about the post-1837 period when the Registrar-General collected and published information. Using data from 26 parishes, the authors show clearly that their results are representative not only of the demographic situation of the parishes from which the data were drawn, but also of the country as a whole. Some very surprising features of the behaviour of past populations are brought to light for the first time.

Demographic Behavior in the Past
  • A Study of Fourteen German Village Populations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
  • John E. Knodel
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    16 June 1988
  • This book provides a detailed examination of the demographic behavior of families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a sample of fourteen villages in five different regions of Germany. It is based on the reconstituted family histories of vital events (births, deaths and marriages) compiled by genealogies for the entire populations of these villages. The book applies the type of micro-level analysis possible with family reconstitution data for the crucial period leading to and encompassing the early stages of the demographic transition, including the initial onset of the decline of fertility to low modern levels. The analysis explores many aspects of demographic behavior which have been largely ignored by previous macro-level investigations of the demographic transition. These include infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, marriage, marital dissolution, bridal pregnancy and illegitimacy. The core of the study, however, deals with marital reproduction, examining the modernization of reproductive behavior in terms of the transition from a situation of natural fertility to one characterized by pervasive family limitation.

Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940
  • Simon Szreter
  • Published online:
    16 February 2010
    Print publication:
    11 January 1996
  • This book offers an original interpretation of the history of falling fertilities in Britain between 1860 and 1940. It integrates the approaches of the social sciences and of demographic, feminist, and labour history with intellectual, social, and political history. It exposes the conceptual and statistical inadequacies of the orthodox picture of a national, unitary class-differential fertility decline, and presents an entirely new analysis of the famous 1911 fertility census of England and Wales. Surprising and important findings emerge concerning the principal methods of birth control: births were spaced from early on in marriage; and sexual abstinence by married couples was a far more significant practice than previously imagined. The author presents a new general approach to the study of fertility change, raising central issues concerning the relationship between history and social science.

The Demography of Roman Egypt
  • Roger S. Bagnall, Bruce W. Frier
  • Foreword by Ansley J. Coale
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    16 June 1994
  • The traditional demographic regime of ancient Greece and Rome is almost entirely unknown; but our best chance for understanding its characteristics is provided by the three hundred census returns that survive on papyri from Roman Egypt. These returns, which date from the first three centuries AD, list the members of ordinary households living in the Nile valley: not only family members, but lodgers and slaves. The Demography of Roman Egypt has a complete and accurate catalogue of all demographically relevant information contained in the returns. On the basis of this catalogue, the authors use modern demographic methods and models to reconstruct the patterns of mortality, marriage, fertility and migration that are likely to have prevailed in Roman Egypt. They recreate a more or less typical Mediterranean population as it survived and prospered nearly two millennia ago.

Changing Family Size in England and Wales
  • Place, Class and Demography, 1891–1911
  • Eilidh Garrett, Alice Reid, Kevin Schürer, Simon Szreter
  • Published online:
    05 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 July 2001
  • This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included in the 1911 'fertility' census, they consider the interactions between the social, economic and physical environments in which people lived and their family-building experience and behaviour. Techniques and approaches based in demography, history and geography enable the authors to re-examine the declines in infant mortality and marital fertility which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparisons are drawn within and between white-collar, agricultural and industrial communities, and the analyses, conducted at both local and national level, lead to conclusions which challenge both contemporary and current orthodoxies.

Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England
  • Mary J. Dobson
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1997
  • This 1997 book provides a penetrating account of death and disease in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Using a wide range of sources for the south-east of England, the author highlights the tremendous variation in levels of mortality across geographical contours and across two centuries. She explores the epidemiological causes and consequences of these mortality variations, and offers the reader a fascinating insight into the way patients and practitioners perceived, understood and reacted to the multitude of fevers, poxes and plagues in past times. She examines, in particular, the significance of malaria in English demographic history, and provides a detailed account of the history of this once endemic disease. This broad-ranging and stimulating study will be of interest to historical demographers, medical historians, geographers and epidemiologists.

The Decline of Life
  • Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Susannah R. Ottaway
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    02 February 2004
  • The Decline of Life is an ambitious and absorbing study of old age in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on a wealth of sources - literature, correspondence, poor house and workhouse documents and diaries - Susannah Ottaway considers a wide range of experiences and expectations of age in the period, and demonstrates that the central concern of ageing individuals was to continue to live as independently as possible into their last days. Ageing men and women stayed closely connected to their families and communities, in relationships characterized by mutual support and reciprocal obligations. Despite these aspects of continuity, however, older individuals' ability to maintain their autonomy, and the nature of the support available to them once they did fall into necessity declined significantly in the last decades of the century. As a result, old age was increasingly marginalized. Historical demographers, historical gerontologists, sociologists, social historians and women's historians will find this book essential reading.

Migration in a Mature Economy
  • Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales 1861–1900
  • Dudley Baines
  • Published online:
    24 November 2009
    Print publication:
    09 January 1986
  • In this study Mr Baines has devised a method of estimating the county of birth of all permanent emigrants from England and Wales in the last four decades of the nineteenth century - some 2.3 million people. He has related the rate and timing of migration to the social and economic characteristics of the counties, which has provided answers to many of the outstanding questions in the history of English emigration, including, for example, the idea of an 'Atlantic Economy' and the extent to which Welsh migration was distinct from or integrated into the English pattern. Briefly, the book concludes that the emigrants did not, in the main, come from 'peripheral' parts of the country. Probably one half of the emigrants had known no environment other than a large town. It is likely that English and Welsh emigrants were more likely to return than emigrants from any European country. Most of the emigrants seem to have been well-informed about the costs and benefits of moving - most probably from the experience of previous emigrants. English emigration could not therefore have been a simple flight from poverty, but was rather based on a well considered decision to leave home, although not necessarily for ever.

Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600
  • Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    22 January 1998
  • In this important study, Professor McIntosh argues against the suggestion that social regulation was a distinctive feature of the decades around 1600, resulting from Puritanism. Instead, through an examination of 255 village and small-town communities distributed throughout England, Professor McIntosh demonstrates that concern with wrongdoing mounted gradually between 1370 and 1600. In an attempt to maintain good order and enforce ethical conduct, local leaders prosecuted people who slandered or quarrelled with their neighbours, engaged in sexual misdeeds, operated unruly alehouses, or refused to work. Professor McIntosh also explores who the offenders were as well as the factors that led to misbehaviour and shaped responses to it. More generally, Professor McIntosh sheds light on the transition from medieval to early modern patterns and succeeds here in opening up little-known sources and new research methods.

Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family
  • Richard P. Saller
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    10 November 1994
  • The figure of the Roman father has traditionally provided the pattern of patriarchy in European thought. This book shows how the social realities and cultural representations diverged from this paradigm. Demographic analysis and computer simulation demonstrate that before adulthood most Romans lost their fathers by death. Close reading of Latin texts reveals Roman fathers as devoted and loving and not harsh exploitative masters of slaves. The demographic and cultural contexts deepen our understanding of how the patrimony was transmitted.

Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity
  • Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800
  • R. A. Houston
  • Published online:
    11 November 2009
    Print publication:
    05 December 1985
  • Scottish education and literacy have achieved a legendary status. A campaign promoted by church and state between 1560 and 1696 is said to have produced the most literate population in the early modern world. This book sets out to test this belief by comparing the ability to read and write in Scotland with northern England in particular and with Europe and North America in general. It combines extensive statistical analysis with qualitative and theoretical discussion to produce an important argument about the significance of literacy and education for the individual and society of relevance not just to the Scottish experience but to a far broader social and geographical area.

Worlds within Worlds
  • Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London
  • Steve Rappaport
  • Published online:
    11 November 2009
    Print publication:
    18 May 1989
  • The enormous growth of London during the early modern period brought with it major social problems, yet, as Steve Rappaport demonstrates in this innovative study, Tudor London was essentially a stable society, subject to stress but never seriously threatened by widespread popular unrest or other forms of instability. Professor Rappaport looks once again at the nature, causes, and effects of the principal threats to the capital's stability in the sixteenth century - the threefold increase in population, the economic impact of such demographic expansion, the substantial rise in prices and the inequitable distribution of wealth and power - and concludes that historians have hitherto exaggerated the severity of such problems and over-simplified their effects. Professor Rappaport's researches suggest that the institutional superstructure of the capital was more adaptable, its small social organisations more resilient, and opportunities for social mobility far greater than many historians have acknowledged. Worlds Within Worlds combines sophisticated quantitative analysis with vivid empirical detail, and mounts a major challenge to much current thinking about urban life in early modern Britain.

Dictating Demography
  • The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy
  • Carl Ipsen
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    17 October 1996
  • Mussolini believed that numbers were the key to strength. Between 1922 and 1945 the Fascists attempted to translate that belief into policy by introducing a structured programme to increase the population in Italy. This included campaigns to increase the birth rate, the establishment of demographic colonies, and a battle against urbanisation. This book is a detailed examination of the demographic policy of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Based on archival research, it shows how the Fascists used statistics to mould public opinion, as well as to form policy, and demonstrates the ways in which population theory at the time both reflected and informed policy. Carl Ipsen argues that Mussolini's demographic policy can tell us a great deal about the contradictory nature of Fascism itself, and describes the Fascist efforts to mould the Italian population as one of the most telling examples of the failed attempt to create a totalitarian Fascist utopia.

State Corporatism and Proto-Industry
  • The Württemberg Black Forest, 1580–1797
  • Sheilagh C. Ogilvie
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    03 July 1997
  • State Corporatism and Proto-Industry focuses on an industrial countryside in south-west Germany, where a dense worsted industry dominated the rural economy from 1580 to 1800. This is an example of 'proto-industry', the dense, export-oriented rural manufacturing which arose throughout Europe before factory industrialization. But although the Württemberg worsted industry possessed all the features of a classic proto-industry, closer scrutiny throws doubt on basic assumptions about European proto-industrialization. In this book, Sheilagh Ogilvie shows that proto-industries did not break down traditional society. Instead, corporate institutions such as guilds, merchant companies, village communities and manorial systems retained enormous power. This was a result of 'state corporatism': the expanding early modern state granted privileges to favoured groups in return for fiscal and regulatory co-operation. As Ogilvie shows, these corporate privileges profoundly constrained both individual decisions and economic development.

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