The central fact of the demographic history of early North America is rapid growth. Both Canada and the white population of the English colonies experienced increases of 2½ percent per year during the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century rates, beginning from a low base and more influenced by immigration, were even higher. In contrast, the expansion of population in early modern Europe rarely exceeded 1 percent per annum over an extended period. Since Franklin and Malthus, interpretations of early American demography have centered on the high fertility associated with near universal marriage for women at a low average age. The extremely youthful population, high dependency ratio, and one of the largest mean census family sizes ever recorded all follow from the high level of fertility.

The study of mortality rates and trends in the United States before 1860 has been rather unsystematic to date. Most scholars have been content to estimate the mortality rate at some point in time and only a few serious efforts have been made to ascertain the long-term trends in mortality. Particularly lacking are efforts to relate estimates of mortality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to those of the nineteenth century. In addition, the few studies that have attempted to discuss long-term trends in American mortality have been forced to rely on estimates of mortality gathered from different sources and based on different techniques of analysis. Unfortunately, almost no efforts have been made to estimate possible biases introduced when comparing mortality data from different types of records.

France has been well characterized by Raymond Aron, following de Tocqueville, as Immuable et changeante. Nowhere does variability (across space) combine more strongly with stability (in time) than in the economy of rural France in the nineteenth century. Judging again by titles, we must give higher marks to the author of The Eternal Order of the Fields than to the man who argued that Capitalism and Agriculture were growing ever closer, to the advantage of the former.

Well before the beginning of machine industry, many regions of Europe became increasingly industrialized in the sense that a growing proportion of their labor potential was allocated to industry. Yet, that type of industry—the traditionally organized, principally rural handicrafts—barely fits the image one has of a modernizing economy. There is, however, cognitive value as well as didactic advantage in thinking of the growth of “pre-industrial industry” as part and parcel of the process of “industrialization” or, rather, as a first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper.