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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 2 of 2

Population and Nutrition
  • An Essay on European Demographic History
  • Massimo Livi-Bacci
  • Translated by Tania Croft-Murray, Carl Ipsen
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 January 1991
  • From the time of Malthus, the insufficient supply of food resources has been considered the main constraint of population growth and the main factor in the high mortality prevailing in pre-industrial times. In this essay, the mechanisms of biological, social and cultural nature linking subsistence, mortality and population and determining its short and long term cycles are discussed. The author's analysis examines the existing evidence from the century of the Great Plague to the industrial revolution, interpreting the scanty quantitative information concerning caloric budgets and food supply, prices and wages, changes in body height and epidemiological history, demographic behaviours of the rich and of the poor. The emerging picture sheds doubts on the existence of a long term interrelation between subsistence of nutritional levels and mortality, showing that the level of the latter was determined more by the epidemiological cycles than by the nutritional level of the population.

Fate and Fortune in Rural China
  • Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774–1873
  • James Z. Lee, Cameron D. Campbell
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    28 February 1997
  • Fate and Fortune in Rural China is a major contribution to the study of both the social and population history of late traditional China, and that of historical demography in general. Lee and Campbell use the example of Liaoning to demonstrate the interaction between demographic and other social pressures, and to illustrate graphically the nature of social mobility and social organization in rural China over the course of the century from 1774–1873. Their conclusion - that social norms, rooted in ideology, determined demographic performance - is supported by a mass of hitherto inaccessible primary data. The authors show how the Chinese state articulated two different principles of social hierarchy, heredity and ability, through two different social organizations: households and banners. These different boundary conditions, each the explicit creation of the state, gave rise to contrasting demographic behaviour.

Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century
  • Jeremy Boulton
  • Published online:
    19 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1987
  • This book is a pioneering social and economic study of a London suburban parish in the seventeenth century, which sheds new light on the important but relatively neglected topic of London's social history. Chapters on demography, social and occupational structure, topography, population turnover and residential mobility, and neighbourly relations, lead to a discussion of the involvement of the inhabitants of the district in local government and church ceremonial. Throughout, social and economic features of the neighbourhood are compared to those found elsewhere in London, and in other towns and cities, in early modern England. The book will therefore be of interest to all concerned with the behaviour of the town dweller in the past, and will serve as a springboard for further historical studies of urban society.

Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle
  • Edited by Richard M. Smith
  • Published online:
    19 October 2009
    Print publication:
    14 February 1985
  • These essays in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle present detailed case studies from English rural communities over the period 1250–1850, these essays reveal that much land was transferred between living persons who were related neither by blood nor by marriage and that kin were often not the only members of work groups or assistance networks in the countryside. Although the focus is on the strata of English society below the landed aristocracy and the urban merchant elites, the preoccupation with those holding land whether under freehold or customary or copyhold tenure is tempered by essays that investigate the economic problems in the lifecycles of the property less or those unable through, for example, illness or age to work and manage their property.

Men at Work
  • Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–1750
  • Donald Woodward
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    02 March 1995
  • This study redresses the North and South imbalance of much work on economic and social history by focusing on the lives and economic impact of the building trade in the major urban centres of the North during the early modern period. The period 1450–1750 witnessed substantial changes in England: to the size of national population, the range of industry practised, the commodity structure and patterns of overseas trade; in agricultural techniques; and in the proportion of population tied to the soil. Using many hitherto unworked sources from local archives, the author challenges many prevailing orthodoxies. He addresses conditions of work in the building trades, levels of remuneration, the characteristics of the life cycles of male and female workers, gender differences in work, and relationships with employers.

Upland Communities
  • Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century
  • Pier Paolo Viazzo
  • Published online:
    13 October 2009
    Print publication:
    16 February 1989
  • This book follows the social, economic and demographic transformations of the Alpine area from the late Middle Ages. Its aim is to reassess the image of the upland community which emerges from the work of historians, geographers and social anthropologists. The book therefore deals at length with such problems as the causes and consequences of emigration and patterns of marriage and inheritance in favouring or hampering the adjustments of local populations to changing economic or ecological circumstances, and tackles the vexed question of the relative importance of cultural and environmental factors in shaping family forms and community structures. Although its foundation lies in a long period of anthropological fieldwork conducted in an Alpine community, Upland Communities relies on the methods and conceptual tools of historical demography. Combined with a long-term historical perspective, its broad comparative approach unveils an unexpected diversity in regional and spatial demographic patterns and questions a number of deep-rooted but ultimately misleading notions concerning mountain society and its alleged backwardness in the past.

Industry in the Countryside
  • Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century
  • Michael Zell
  • Published online:
    13 October 2009
    Print publication:
    24 March 1994
  • Industry in the Countryside is a wide-ranging and readable study of the nature of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution. It examines the widely-debated theory of 'proto-industrialisation', drawing on data from the Kentish Weald - an area which was already a centre of cottage industry in the Tudor era and was also the earliest rural manufacturing region to 'de-industrialise'. The book analyses the Wealden textile industry from its workforce to its industrialists and emphasises the ubiquity of dual employment among textile workers. It explores the local context of cottage industry, investigating the pattern of landholding and inheritance, the local farming regime, and the demographic background to rural industrialisation. Zell outlines what type of local economy became the site of this so-called 'proto-industry' and shows the impact of cottage industry on the people of such regions. He concludes by asking, is there anything in the 'proto-industrialisation' model?

A Community Transformed
  • The Manor and Liberty of Havering-atte-Bower 1500–1620
  • Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
  • Published online:
    11 October 2009
    Print publication:
    26 September 1991
  • A Community Transformed traces the restructuring of Havering between 1500 and 1620 through detailed analysis of demographic patterns, the economy, religion, social and cultural forms, and local administration and law. McIntosh's study, the most complex and richly drawn portrait of any English community in this period, goes beyond local history in illuminating the transition from medieval to early modem life. A Community Transformed is the sequel to Professor McIntosh's acclaimed work Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500, published by Cambridge in 1986.

A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840
  • Ann Kussmaul
  • Published online:
    08 October 2009
    Print publication:
    29 June 1990
  • In rural England prior to the Industrial Revolution people generally married when they were not busy with work. Parish registers of marriage therefore form an important and innovative source for the study of economic change in this period. Dr Kussmaul employs marriage dates to identify three main patterns of work and risk (arable, pastoral and rural industrial) and more importantly to show the long-term changes in economic activities across 542 English parishes from the beginning of national marriage registration in 1538. No single historical landscape emerges. Instead A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 maps the changes in economic orientation from arable through regional specialization to rural industrialization and explores how these changes had implications for the extent of population growth in the early modern period. Dr Kussmaul's study presents a view of early modern English economic history from a unique standpoint.

Friends in Life and Death
  • British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition
  • Richard T. Vann, David Eversley
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 February 1992
  • In Friends in Life and Death two distinguished historians join forces to exploit the exceptional riches offered by the records of British and Irish Quakers for the student of social, demographic, and familial change during the period 1650–1900. Professor Vann and Eversley have analysed the experiences of more than 8,000 Quaker families, involving over 30,000 individuals, to produce an unparalleled study of patterns of child-bearing, marriage, and death among a major religious grouping. The authors, wherever possible, compare the Quakers in the British Isles with the contemporary population of Britain and Ireland as a whole, as well as with those of France, Québec, and the American colonies.

A Rural Society after the Black Death
  • Essex 1350–1525
  • L. R. Poos
  • Published online:
    14 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 September 1991
  • A Rural Society after the Black Death is a study of rural social structure in the English county of Essex between 1350 and 1500. It seeks to understand how, in the population collapse after the Black Death (1348–1349), a particular economic environment affected ordinary people's lives in the areas of migration, marriage and employment, and also contributed to patterns of religious nonconformity, agrarian riots and unrest, and even rural housing. The period under scrutiny is often seen as a transitional era between 'medieval' and 'early-modern' England, but in the light of recent advances in English historical demography, this study suggests that there was more continuity than change in some critically important aspects of social structure in the region in question. Among the most important contributions of the book are its use of an unprecedentedly wide range of original manuscript records (estate and manorial records, taxation and criminal-court records, royal tenurial records, and the records of church courts, wills etc.) and its application of current quantitative and comparative demographic methods.

London in the Age of Industrialisation
  • Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700–1850
  • L. D. Schwarz
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 October 1992
  • This book is the first full-length analysis of the London working population and the effects of the industrial revolution in London to appear for over sixty years. Prior to the mid nineteenth century London may not have experienced the direct effects of the industrial revolution to any great extent, but the indirect effects were felt strongly. L. D. Schwarz disagrees with the view that 'the industrial revolution was a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere', and seeks to judge the effect of industrialisation on what was the country's largest manufacturing city. Its size and role as national capital meant that London was in certain important respects unique, but it was nonetheless susceptible to many of the wider economic transformations that occurred during the period 1700–1850, and Dr Schwarz offers a detailed analysis of the changes to the economy and social structure of London that these wrought. He analyses middle-class wealth, the incomes of the working classes, living standards (defined very broadly to include the impact of the seasons and of the trade cycle), the fall in the death rate, the changing nature of the labour force in general and of artisans in particular, money wages and perquisites and the economic role of women.

The Demography of Victorian England and Wales
  • Robert Woods
  • Published online:
    07 August 2009
    Print publication:
    05 October 2000
  • The Demography of Victorian England and Wales uses the full range of nineteenth-century civil registration material to describe in detail for the first time the changing population history of England and Wales between 1837 and 1914. Its principal focus is the great demographic revolution which occurred during those years, especially the secular decline of fertility and the origins of the modern rise in life expectancy. But Robert Woods also considers the variable quality of the Victorian registration system; the changing role of what Robert Malthus termed the preventive check; variations in occupational mortality and the development of the twentieth-century class mortality gradient; and the effects of urbanisation associated with the significance of distinctive disease environments. The volume also illustrates the fundamental importance of geographical variations between urban and rural areas. This invaluable reference tool is lavishly illustrated with numerous tables, figures and maps, many of which are reproduced in full colour.

Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany
  • Paul Warde
  • Published online:
    24 July 2009
    Print publication:
    29 June 2006
  • This is an innovative analysis of the agrarian world and growth of government in early modern Germany through the medium of pre-industrial society's most basic material resource, wood. Paul Warde offers a regional study of south-west Germany from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, demonstrating the stability of the economy and social structure through periods of demographic pressure, warfare and epidemic. He casts light on the nature of 'wood shortages' and societal response to environmental challenge, and shows how institutional responses largely based on preventing local conflict were poor at adapting to optimise the management of resources. Warde further argues for the inadequacy of models that oppose the 'market' to a 'natural economy' in understanding economic behaviour. This is a major contribution to debates about the sustainability of peasant society in early modern Europe, and to the growth of ecological approaches to history and historical geography.

Transforming English Rural Society
  • The Verneys and the Claydons, 1600–1820
  • John Broad
  • Published online:
    03 July 2009
    Print publication:
    22 April 2004
  • Between 1540 and 1920 the English elite transformed the countryside and landscape by building up landed estates which were concentrated around their country houses. John Broad's study of the Verney family of Middle Claydon in Buckinghamshire demonstrates two sides of that process. Charting the family's rise to wealth impelled by a strong dynastic imperative, Broad shows how the Verneys sought out heiress marriages to expand wealth and income. In parallel, he shows how the family managed its estates to maximize income and transformed three local village communities, creating a pattern of 'open' and 'closed' villages familiar to nineteenth-century commentators. Based on the formidable Verney family archive with its abundant correspondence, this book also examines the world of poor relief, farming families as well as strategies for estate expansion and social enhancement. It will appeal to anyone interested in the English countryside as a dynamic force in social and economic history.

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