Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time

This innovative study of the patriarchy belies the accepted notion of the father figure as tyrannical and exploitative.

This book 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.

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.

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, Schurer 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 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.

This 1990 study of a hilltop town on the Castilian Meseta analyses its socio-economic structures in the context of the urbanisation of rural Spain, and shows how the history of the town is paradigmatic of the social, economic and demographic changes in urban areas of the Mediterranean basin.

These essays are concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines an understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. Annals of the Labouring Poor, first published in 1985, won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize for that year.

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.

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. The fundamental conclusion is that social norms, rooted in ideology, determined demographic performance.

In analysing the population of a country over several centuries, the authors qualify, confirm or overturn traditional assumptions and marshal a mass of statistical material into a series of clear, lucid arguments about past patterns of demographic behaviour and their relationship to economic trends.

This is a study of rural social structure in the county of Essex between 1350 and 1500.

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.

This collection of essays on land transfer presents detailed case studies from English rural communities over the period 1250-1850. The focus is on the strata of English society below the landed aristocracy and the urban merchant elites.

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.