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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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