Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, L:4 (Frühling, 2020), 495–515.
Das 50. Jahr: Sonderaufsatz 8
E. Anthony Wrigley
The Interplay of Demographic, Economic, Und
Social History The wealth of source material for various
aspects of the demographic, wirtschaftlich, and social history of England
over the past half millennium makes it possible to describe, zum Beispiel-
reichlich, urban growth and related changes in occupational structure,
or changes in county population densities and their concomitants,
often in considerable detail. Jedoch, although description may be
feasible, explanation often presents problems. It is normally the case
that a number of factors are involved, and determining their relative
importance often presents severe difficulties and results in arbitrary
decisions. In many sciences, if a similar problem is faced, controlled
experiments can sometimes overcome it. The nature of historical in-
formation rules out comparable procedures. Zum Beispiel, one of the
most striking changes taking place in England in the early modern
period was the rapid increase in the proportion of the population
living in towns with a matching rise in agricultural productivity to
supply town dwellers with the necessities of life. It is reasonable to
assume that the urban growth that occurred would have been re-
duced if agricultural productivity had risen more slowly, aber es ist
not possible to test this assumption to establish, Zum Beispiel, the scale
of the impact on urban growth if gross cereal yields had risen by a half
zwischen 1600 Und 1800 rather than doubling.
This difficulty has often attracted attention in the past. Mathias
expressed his disquiet on this issue firmly:
A very deep-seated instinct exists to look for a pervasive single-
cause explanation for historical phenomena (preferably one which
E. Anthony Wrigley is co-founder of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and
Social Structure and a long-time member of the JIH’s Board of Editors. He is the author of
The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial
Revolution (New York, 2016); Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (New York, 2010);
“Reconsidering the Industrial Revolution: England and Wales,” Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre
Geschichte, XLIX (2018).
© 2020 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology und The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01483
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| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
no one else has yet thought of ) in terms of which to seek to explain
alles. In most cases, this easy assumption is surely misguided
in principle and impossible to employ operationally, at least when
one is dealing with such a deep-seated and widespread historical
phenomenon like the industrial revolution or the Renaissance.
To search for a single-cause explanation for the industrial revolu-
tion is to pose a false analogy with a simple equation governing
chemical change.
Ähnlich, Hartwell noted, “It is fair to say that the historians,
in their detailed analyses, have suggested many ‘causal factors,’ yet
nearly all have sought ‘a main cause’ and have elevated one vari-
able, explicitly or implicitly, to the role chief cause.”1
An alternative to using a causal framework when seeking to
provide an explanation rather than simply a description of change
in the past is to make use of the concept of positive and negative
Rückmeldung. This approach avoids some of the problems associated
with explaining within a framework of causation. One of the
problems associated with using a causative framework is that it im-
plies a causal sequence: If A caused B, it must have preceded it.
The interlinkage between two phenomena may be clear but the
chronological sequence difficult to establish.
Since history is concerned with change over time, an addi-
tional advantage in using a feedback framework is that, as a result
of a period of positive feedback between two variables, the nature
of their relationship may ultimately provoke a switch from positive
to negative feedback between them. In der Tat, there is a sense in
which this sequence was a fundamental characteristic of all organic
economies. Zum Beispiel, urban growth provided a stimulus to
farmers to increase their output. A rise in urban demand was
matched by a commensurate increase in the output of food and
the raw materials of industry, thus facilitating further urban
Wachstum. For a time, increasing agricultural output might permit
a fall in the unit cost of agricultural production, as when it resulted
in a reduction in the percentage of arable land left fallow each year
accompanied by increasing growth of leguminous crops, better
1 Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Revolution: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914
(New York, 1983; orig. Kneipe. 1969), 7; Ronald M. Hartwell, “The Causes of the Industrial
Revolution: An Essay in Methodology," im gleichen (Hrsg.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution
in England (London, 1967), 56.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 497
fodder for draught animals, and a wide variety of other improve-
gen. Jedoch, for reasons set out clearly and convincingly by
the classical economists, intrinsic to the nature of periods of
growth in organic economies was that positive feedback must at
some point give way to negative feedback. Each advancing step
made the next step harder to take, first reducing the speed of
growth and later halting or reversing it.
This article presents several instances of feedback patterns in-
volving demographic, wirtschaftlich, and social change in early mod-
ern England that are visible in urban history and in the operation
of the preventive check. Negative feedback was a fundamental
characteristic of all organic economies, and there is a sense in
which the key feature of the gradual transformation of the English
economy between the reigns of Elizabeth and Victoria, often
termed the “industrial revolution,” was the escape from the con-
straints inherent to the nature of all organic economies. The writ-
ings of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus regarding the character
of an organic economy deserve attention in this regard since they
described it with authority.
ORGANIC ECONOMIES The classical economists were in agreement
that three elements were involved in all forms of production—
capital, Arbeit, and land. In principle, the supply of capital and labor
might rise as required in response to increasing demand, aber die
area of land could not be increased. The area of farmland could
be extended by bringing into cultivation land of inferior quality,
or a larger output might be secured from the more intensive use of
existing farm land. Jedoch, in both cases, as pressure on the land
erhöht, unit costs of production were bound to increase at some
stage, thereby also reducing returns both to capital and labor.
Negative feedback would replace positive feedback and the period
of growth would be replaced by stagnation or decline. Smith sum-
marized his analysis as follows:
In a country which had acquired that full complement of riches
which the nature of its soil and climate, and its situation with
respect to other countries, allowed it to acquire; which could,
daher, advance no further, and which was not going backwards,
both the wages of labour and the profits of stock would probably be
very low. In a country fully peopled in proportion to what either its
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498
| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
territory could maintain or its stock employ, the competition for
employment would necessarily be so great as to reduce the wages
of labour to what was barely sufficient to keep up the number of
labourers, Und, the country being already fully peopled, the number
could never be augmented.2
As Smith viewed the problem, breaking free from the con-
straints that limited growth possibilities in all organic economies
was out of the question, and it is an intriguing irony of the his-
tory of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that his
analysis remained orthodoxy during the decades in which it was
once orthodox to consider that the industrial revolution took
Ort. Three-quarters of a century after the publication of Smith’s
Wealth of Nations, Mill, a heavyweight figure in the intellectual
world of his day, published his Principles of Political Economy, Re-
hearsing the same argument that Smith had propounded with only
minor reservations.3
Demography played a central role in ruling out the possibility
of anything other than a very low standard of living for the mass of
the population. As Smith noted,
Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the
means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond
Es. But in civilized society it is only among the inferior ranks of peo-
ple that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further
multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other
way than by destroying a great part of the children which their
fruitful marriages produce.4
In 1798, twenty-two years after the publication of the Wealth of
Nationen, Malthus published his Essay on Population. He expressed the
problem of the enduring poverty of the mass of the population in
mathematical terms, suggesting that a population would increase in
2 Adam Smith (Hrsg. Edwin Cannan), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nationen (London, 1961; orig. Kneipe. 1776), ICH, 106.
3 As Mill wrote, “The materials of manufacture being all drawn from the land, and many of
them from agriculture, which supplies in particular the entire material of clothing: the general
law of production from the land, the law of diminishing return, must in the last resort be
applicable to manufacturing as well as to agricultural history” ( John Stuart Mill [Hrsg. John
M. Robson], Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy
[Toronto, 1965; orig. Kneipe. 1848], ICH, 182).
4
Schmied, Wealth of Nations, ICH, 89.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 499
number geometrically as long as the economy was capable of sup-
porting the resulting increase in population. Jedoch, the fact that
output could rise only arithmetically, at best, implied that whatever
the initial size of a population, the nature of the two types of in-
crease was such that in the course of time, population would rise
more rapidly than production, and living standards would be forced
down to bare subsistence. This he termed the positive check. Mortal-
ity would rise to match the fertility level, and a large proportion of
the population would live close to the edge of the Malthusian
precipice at living standards that at times would be miserably low.
Malthus and Smith were in agreement that the positive check was
the means by which population and production were kept in
balance. thus leaving the bulk of the population unavoidably con-
strained to a standard of living not greatly above bare subsistence.
Both authors, Jedoch, were well aware that periods of relative
prosperity might persist for a time until the negative feedback
generated by increasing pressure on the land as production rose
depressed living standards and forced the population closer to the
Malthusian precipice.5
Three years after the publication of the Essay on Population,
the first census was taken, directed by John Rickman. Zusätzlich
to a count of population totals, Rickman arranged for the collec-
tion of totals of baptisms and burials during the preceding century
to be published as part of the census. These totals made it clear that
the population had risen substantially during the eighteenth cen-
tury and so had the rate of growth during its last few decades. Das
development was at odds with Malthus’ “model” of population
trends in a long-settled country, and subsequent censuses taken
during his lifetime left no room for doubt about the exceptionally
high rate of population growth taking place in England. Malthus
never managed to reconcile these data with his original simple
Modell, but he became much better informed about population
trends elsewhere in the world. and in due course, he elaborated
his model in ways that gave it greater flexibility.
One of Malthus’ changes is of particular interest in relation
to English history in the early modern period. The arresting of
population growth as productive capacity failed to rise as fast as
5 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), in Wrigley
and David Souden (Hrsg.), The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (London, 1986), 8 v.
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| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
population could not only result from rising mortality alone but
also from a combination of an increasing death rate and a falling
fertility rate. Malthus termed the latter the preventive check. Wo
the preventive check was in place, population growth might re-
main at a level that prevented the standard of living from declin-
ing to bare subsistence following a period of growth. In Malthus’
Wörter,
From high real wages, or the power of commanding a large portion
of the necessaries of life, two very different results may follow; eins,
that of a rapid increase in population, in which case the high wages
are chiefly spent on the maintenance of large and frequent families;
und der andere, that of a decided improvement in the modes of
subsistence, and the conveniences and comforts enjoyed, without
a proportionate acceleration in the rate of increase.6
THE PREVENTIVE CHECK The writings of two influential scholars
caused attention to be focused increasingly on the nature of the
preventive check well before there was any substantial body of
data reflecting its operation. Hajnal focused attention on the pre-
ventive check in a remarkable essay published half a century ago
about European marriage patterns. At the time of his writing, In
the early 1960s, only a limited amount of scattered information
about European nuptiality in earlier centuries was available; Dämmerung
was cautious in reviewing such estimates as were available to him.
He did, Jedoch, provide an eye-catching table that left no room
for doubt about nuptiality patterns in Western Europe deserving
further attention. He contrasted marriage patterns in Western
and Eastern Europe by selecting two countries on either side of
his famous imaginary line from Leningrad to Trieste. He captured
the extent of the contrast by recording the percentages of men and
women who were single in three age groups—twenty to twenty-
vier, fünfundzwanzig bis neunundzwanzig, and forty-five to forty-nine.
The countries that he chose—Belgium and Sweden on one side
and Bulgaria and Serbia on the other—were typical of Western
and Eastern Europe generally (siehe Tabelle 1).
6 Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, in Wrigley and Souden (Hrsg.), Funktioniert (London,
1986), V, 183.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 501
Tisch 1 Representative Percentages of Unmarried Men and Women in
Western and Eastern Europe, 1900
MEN
25–29
56
21
20–24
89
54
WOMEN
45–49
20–24
25–29
45–49
15
3
76
20
47
3
18
1
West European
East European
SOURCE John Hajnal, „Europäische Ehemuster in der Perspektive,“ in David V. Glass and
David E.C. Eversley (Hrsg.), Bevölkerung in der Geschichte (London, 1965), 101 (Tisch 1).
Tisch 1, which records the average percentages of men and
women who were single for each pair of countries, shows dramatic
differences. It suggests that in countries where the fertility of married
couples is largely uncontrolled, and social convention results in
women marrying late in life and a significant proportion of them re-
maining single, overall fertility rates will be substantially lower than in
countries where most women marry early in life and few remain single.
The data in the table underline the potential significance of the preven-
tive check in giving rise to a more favorable balance between popula-
tion and production in countries where women married late or not at
alle. Hajnal noted “a widespread conviction among eighteenth-
century authors that European conditions were fundamentally different
not only in marriage, birth and death rates, but above all in standards of
living, from those obtaining elsewhere in the world.” He stressed that
he was essentially re-expressing an issue that Malthus had explored:
“The main theme of this paper is not new. It is one of the main topics
of Malthus’ Essay and indeed explicit in its very structure.” Hajnal’s
essay provided a powerful stimulus to use new methods, wie zum Beispiel
Familienneugründung, to improve knowledge of the demography
of European communities in the early modern period.7
Peter Laslett set a new foundation for work on two aspects of
English demographic and social history—the predominant family
form and the level of mobility in the population. His work enforced
major changes in previous assumptions about household structures
and population mobility—that the increasing prevalence of the nu-
clear family was linked to urban growth, that extended families were
still widely present in early modern rural England, and that most
John Dawn, „Europäische Ehemuster in der Perspektive,“ in David V. Glass und David
7
E. C. Eversley (Hrsg.), Bevölkerung in der Geschichte (London, 1965), 131, 130.
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| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
individuals in rural England continued to live in the parish where
they had been born. Laslett’s analysis of successive listings of the in-
habitants of Clayworth and Cogenhoe in the seventeenth century
showed that the nuclear family was the standard family unit. The pre-
vailing convention was that in any one household there should not
be more than one married couple. He wrote that the new evidence
makes it possible to put forward a general thesis about the structure
of English society in Stuart times, and in earlier times as well. Es
suggests that the nuclear independent family, das ist, man, Gattin,
and children living apart from relatives, was the accepted familial
unit. It suggests, daher, that the more generally accepted im-
pression that the independent nuclear family (now given the name
simple family household) came into existence with industrialization is
not in fact justifiable for England.8
Laslett’s findings suggested that a young couple contemplating
marriage knew that they would have to establish a new household
rather than join an existing one. This convention meant that both
the average age at marriage and the proportion of each generation
that remained single was likely to be influenced by the prevailing
economic situation and its prospects. Laslett’s analyses also showed
that in the later seventeenth century, only a minority of each new
generation died in the same parish in which they had been born.
By this date, yeomen and husbandmen in much of rural England
had been replaced by farmers and laborers. In earlier times, attach-
ment of a family to its plot may well have been stronger, aber die
land was now farmed with an eye turned more toward taking ad-
vantage of market opportunities than sustaining a peasant family.9
The operation of the preventive check is central to the under-
standing of the population history of England in the early modern
Zeitraum. The English population increased rapidly between 1551 Und
1801, rising from 3.07 Zu 8.67 Million, almost a threefold rise dur-
ing a period when the populations of four other big continental
countries—France, Deutschland, Italien, and Spain—rose slowly, by about
a half. Jedoch, the rate of increase of the English population
8 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (New York, 1977), 61.
9 As Laslett wrote about Clayworth, “Nothing previously known about settled, ländlich, traditional
populations prepares us for the turnover figure which can be worked out by comparing the names
of those present in 1676 with the names of those present in 1688” (Laslett, Family Life, 65).
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| 503
E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
fluctuated markedly over time. Between 1551 Und 1651, it rose
aus 3.07 Zu 5.31 million with an average annual increase of
0.55 Prozent. For eighty years thereafter, the population was vir-
tually stationary; In 1731, the total stood at 5.41 Million. Growth
then resumed; In 1801, the population total climbed to 8.67 mil-
lion, before accelerating further to 16.73 million in 1851, almost
doubling in half a century. The annual growth rates in these
two periods were 0.68 Und 1.32 Prozent; the latter figure was
higher than in any other comparable period in English history.
Many features of this three-century period call for comment,
but one especially should attract attention. We can track the
changes in fertility and mortality throughout the period and use
the changes in the net reproduction rate and expectation of life
at birth (eo) between successive periods, in conjunction with
model life tables, to estimate the relative importance of changes
in fertility and mortality in altering growth rates. Hindurch
the three centuries, and in each of the sub-periods within it,
changes in fertility were twice as important as changes in mortality
in determining the increases and decreases in the growth rate. Fur-
thermore, the changes in nuptiality that accounted for most of the
changes in fertility level were the result of rises and falls in the
mean age at marriage and changes in the proportion of men and
women who remained single. The decisions about marriage made
by individual men and women were the prime reason for the no-
table rises and falls in the population growth rate. To express the
point provocatively, the major changes in the population growth
rate were largely due to personal decision.10
URBAN GROWTH One of the most striking features of the rapid
population increase in early modern England, which far outstripped
growth in most of continental Europe, is that the difference be-
tween English and continental growth rates was almost entirely
due to urban growth. The non-urban populations in England and
on the continent rose at similar rates (siehe Tabelle 2).
10 The total population for the four continental countries combined rose from 51.8 Zu 79.8
Million, a rise of 54%. Germany was the fastest growing and Spain the slowest, but the differences
were modest. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Masse., 1984), 36–37
(Tisch 3.6). For the English totals, see Wrigley, Robert S. Davies. James E. Oeppen, and Roger
S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (New York, 1997),
614–615 (Table A9.1).
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| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
Tisch 2 Urban and Non-Urban Growth in England and Continental Europe,
1600–1800
ENGLAND
CONTINENTAL EUROPE
POPULATION TOTALS (MILLIONS)
URBAN
NON-URBAN
TOTAL
URBAN
NON-URBAN
TOTAL
0.34
0.85
2.38
3.82
4.36
6.29
4.16
5.21
8.67
7.7
8.0
12.4
62.0
62.3
92.1
69.7
70.3
104.5
POPULATIONS AS PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL
URBAN
8.2
16.3
27.5
NON-URBAN
91.8
83.7
72.5
TOTAL
URBAN
100.0
100.0
100.0
11.0
11.4
11.9
NON-URBAN
89.0
88.6
88.1
TOTAL
100.0
100.0
100.0
1600
1700
1800
1600
1700
1800
PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN POPULATION TOTALS
1600/1700
1700/1800
1600/1800
URBAN
150
180
600
NON-URBAN
14
44
65
TOTAL
URBAN
25
66
108
4
55
61
NON-URBAN
0
48
49
TOTAL
1
49
50
NOTES The definition of urban herein encompasses towns with 5,000 or more inhabitants. Europa
consists of all the countries listed in Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge,
Masse., 1984), apart from the British Isles and the Netherlands. The Netherlands is excluded because
of its rapid urban growth in the seventeenth century, anticipating England’s later urban expansion.
Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Masse., 1984), 36–37
SOURCES
(Tisch 3.6); Wrigley, “Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent
in the Early Modern Period," im gleichen, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Tradi-
tional Society (New York, 1987), 170 (Tisch 7.4); idem et al., English Population History from
Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (New York, 1997), 614–615 (Table A9.1).
In 1600, the urban percentage in England was lower than that
in continental Europe, but whereas the continental figure was al-
most unchanged between 1600 Und 1800, the English percentage
more than tripled. Although the overall increase was large, es war
far from uniform, as is evident in Table 3. The ten historic regional
Zentren, which were among the largest towns in 1600, simply kept
pace with the national growth rate over the next two centuries.
The English population rose by 108 percent and the regional cen-
ters by 110 Prozent. In the seventeenth century, London alone
accounted for almost three-quarters of the urban population growth
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 505
Tisch 3 Urban Populations: England, London, and Other Towns with 5,000
or More Inhabitants
England
London
Other urban populations
(5,000 or more inhabitants)
Total urban
Ten historic regional centers
1600
4,160
200
135
335
73
1700
5,210
575
275
850
107
1750
5,920
675
540
1,215
126
URBAN POPULATIONS AS PERCENTAGES OF NATIONAL TOTAL
London
Other urban
Total urban
4.75
3.25
8.00
11.0
5.25
16.25
11.50
9.00
20.50
1800
8,670
960
1,421
2,380
153
11.00
16.50
27.50
NOTES The ten historic regional centers are Norwich, York, Salisbury, Chester, Worcester,
Exeter, Cambridge, Coventry, Shrewsbury, and Gloucester. The percentages are expressed to
the nearest quarter-percent.
SOURCES Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (New York,
1997), 614–615 (Table A9.1); idem, “Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the
Continent in the Early Modern Period,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XV (1985),162
(Tisch 7.2), 166 (Tisch 7.3).
in the country as a whole, becoming the largest city in Europe. Im
following century, Jedoch, it behaved like the regional centers, ris-
ing in parallel with the national population rise. Urban growth in the
eighteenth century reflected the dynamic expansion of towns in the
north and midlands that benefited from the increasing concentration
of industrial activity in or near coalfields. In 1801, Manchester was the
second-largest city in England, followed by Liverpool and Birming-
ham; the combined total for these three cities was more than ten
times as large in 1801 as it had been 100 years earlier.
The dramatic increase in the urban sector in the early modern
period is indirect evidence of the advances achieved in agricultural
productivity. The country remained self-sufficient in temperate
foodstuffs until the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
Between 1600 Und 1831, the population increased from 4.16 Zu
13.25 Million, more than tripling. Over the same period, the male
agricultural labor force rose from 665,000 Zu 973,000, an increase of
46 Prozent. The contrast between the scale of growth in these two
measures leaves no doubt that output per head of the agricultural
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506
| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
labor force increased substantially during the period, roughly dou-
bling. The positive feedback between urban growth and agricultural
productivity did not falter.11
A feature of urban growth in early modern England that
facilitated the continuation of this positive feedback was an early
instance of escape from one of the normal bonds found within an
organic economy. Towns needed fuel no less than food. Providing
fuel wood for an urban population involved securing the annual
growth of trees from approximately half as large an acreage as was
needed to supply their food needs. As an example of the scale of
benefit that flowed from a combination of rising agricultural productiv-
ity and the substitution of coal for wood as a source of heat energy,
consider the change in the size of London’s “urban footprint” on the
land between 1600 Und 1800. The calculation is based on the assump-
tion that in 1600, London was still dependent on wood as a fuel
wohingegen, in reality, it was already deriving most of its fuel from the
Tyneside coal mines. Making this assumption, Jedoch, shows the lib-
erating effects of gaining access to a massive stock of energy rather than
being limited by an annual flow produced by plant photosynthesis.
In 1600, London’s population was c. 200,000. The grain out-
put from about 1,000 square miles of arable land was needed to
meet the capital’s cereal and beer consumption, and an additional
500 square miles of forest was needed to warm its houses and cook
its food. London’s urban footprint would therefore have been c.
1,500 square miles. Gross cereal yield per acre doubled between c.
1600 und C. 1800, and the net yield more than tripled. Von 1800, Die
population of the capital had almost quintupled to c. 960,000, Und
its footprint would have risen to 7,200 square miles if grain yields
per acre had remained the same and wood was still its fuel. Wie-
immer, since net grain yields had risen substantially, and coal had re-
placed wood as a source of heat energy, London’s footprint was
nur 1,700 square miles, a modest increase from its size two cen-
turies earlier. Since controlled experiments are not possible with
11 Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester. 1979), 37;
Sebastian Keibek, “The Male Occupational Structure of England and Wales, 1600–1850,”
unveröffentlicht. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Cambridge, 2016), 152 (Tisch 18). The information in the table
relates to England and Wales, but Keibek kindly produced totals for England only for this
Veröffentlichung. Census of 1831, Enumeration Abstract, II, 832-3, PP 1833, XXXVI–XXXVII;
Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an
Industrial Revolution (New York, 2016), 60–61.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 507
historical data, it is not possible to determine how greatly urban
growth in England would have been restricted if wood had re-
mained the fuel used by town dwellers, but the effect of the
change of fuel was substantial, increasing in parallel with popula-
tion growth. The increasing use of coal to meet a widening range
of heat energy needs is an example of the slow relaxation of the
bonds that had always resulted in the conversion of positive into
negative feedback in organic economies.12
The history of urban growth in England illustrates the way in
which positive feedback between urban expansion and agricultural
improvement was sustained in a manner that was normally im-
possible in an organic economy. The contrast with continental
Europa, excluding the Netherlands, was marked. Average grain
yields per acre on the continent were at the same level c. 1800
und C. 1600, and coal had yet to make any considerable contribu-
tion to urban fuel needs. The proportion of town dwellers at the
end of the two-century period was also unchanged, C. 11 Prozent
of the total population.13
MORTALITY Another respect in which English experience dif-
fered from that in most of continental Europe during the early
modern period was the impact of harvest failure on the commu-
nity. The last time when a poor harvest and consequent rise in the
price of bread caused a widespread increase in the death rate in
England was 1596/7. A century later, when cereal prices in much
of Western Europe rose sharply, death rates followed suit. Re-
garding the mortality crisis in the Beauvaisis in 1693/4, Goubert
remarked, “L’identité de la crise céréalière et de la crise démogra-
pique est absolue” (the cereal crisis and the demographic crisis are
one and the same). Much of Scotland, especially Aberdeenshire,
also suffered a crisis mortality in the later 1690s, notably in 1697
Und 1699 following bad harvests. In England, the price of wheat
was also high in 1690s, notably from 1695 Zu 1697, but the death
rate did not rise. Bad harvests continued to be accompanied by
death surges in much of continental Europe during the eighteenth
century and even, as in Finland, im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Aber
12 For fuller details about the change in the urban footprint of both London and the whole
urban sector during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Wrigley, Path to Sustained
Growth. 51–64.
13
Ebenda., 175 (Tisch 9.1).
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508
| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
England remained free from severe suffering in the wake of harvest
failure.14
Many factors helped to limit the impact of harvest failure on
English parishes. Zum Beispiel, the practice of the preventive check
may have contributed by arresting population growth at a level
that kept the mass of the population at a distance from the
Malthusian precipice. Malthus, Jedoch, suggested another factor
that may also have been significant. After an extensive tour of
Scandinavia during the late 1790s, he returned home to find that
a sharp increase in the price of bread in 1799 because a poor har-
vest was causing widespread alarm. Malthus argued, paradoxically,
that the high price was a reassuring sign because it showed that the
transfer of support to poor families by the poor law magistrates had
enabled them to continue to buy bread. The increase in the de-
mand for bread resulting from this redistribution of purchasing
power caused its price to rise higher than would otherwise have
been the case. Malthus recalled that in western Sweden the rise
in the price of rye, the bread grain of the region, had been less
marked than in England because the poor lacked the means to
buy rye bread. The scale of the demand for bread was limited as
ein Ergebnis. Unable to secure bread, poor families were reduced to
eating the inner bark of fir trees and powdered sorrel, molded into
a shape resembling rye bread.15
Mortality levels in England appear to have been generally
lower than on the continent. In France, zwischen 1740 Und
1789, life expectancy at birth fluctuated between twenty-five
and twenty-nine years. During the same decades in England, Es
fluctuated between thirty-five and thirty-nine years. In Italy, als
late as the mid-nineteenth century, life expectancy at birth aver-
aged thirty-three years. Low mortality brought significant benefits.
14 Wrigley und Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: Eine Rekonstruktion
(London, 1981). 510–518 (Table A2.4); Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis (Paris,
1960), ICH, 52; Michael W. Flinn (Hrsg.), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the
1930S (New York, 1977), 172; R. E. Tyson, “Famine in Aberdeenshire 1695–99: The Anat-
omy of a Crisis,” in David Stevenson (Hrsg.), From Lairdes to Louns: Country and Burgh life in
Aberdeen, 1600–1800 (Aberdeen, 1986), 32–51; Brian R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics
(New York, 1988), 752–755 (Tisch 16); Wrigley und Schofield, Bevölkerungsgeschichte Englands,
511–518 (Table A2.4); Kari Pitkänen, “The Patterns of Mortality during the Great Finnish
Famine in the 1860s,” Acta Demographica (1992), 81–101.
15 Malthus, An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions, in Wrigley and
Souden (Hrsg.), Funktioniert, VII, 5–6.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 509
Where infant and child mortality rates are high, the proportion of
each birth cohort that survives to enter the workforce in their
teens will be lower than where fewer children die young. The re-
turn on resources invested in rearing children will also be lower in
the first situation than in the second. A comparatively modest level
of mortality relieved early modern English society of the burden of
supporting many children whose early death meant that they
would never enter the workforce.16
Mortality levels were also a critical factor in determining how
far urban expansion could continue. When the urban death rate
was substantially higher than the urban birth rate, a constant flow
of in-migrants was necessary simply to avoid a shrinkage in the size
of the urban sector. Whether this was possible depended on the
relative level of the birth and death rates in rural areas. An urban
birth rate of 30 pro 1,000 and a death rate 40 pro 1,000 with rural
birth and death rates at 30 Und 27.5 pro 1,000 would have caused
the overall population to decline if more than one-fifth of the
population lived in towns (ignoring the possibility of immigration
from other countries). One of the notable features of English pop-
ulation history is that during the eighteenth century, urban death
rates declined to the point at which part of the continued rise in
the urban percentage was due to local increase in the towns them-
sich selbst. In London, burials continued to outnumber baptisms in the
first half of the eighteenth century. But the tide then turned, Und
there was local natural increase. The fact that by the mid-nineteenth
Jahrhundert, more than half the population of England was living in
towns could not have occurred if urban mortality had remained
as high as it had been in early modern England.17
THE DEPENDENCY RATIO The feedback between the demo-
graphic characteristics of a community and many features of its
economic and social structure repays close attention, als, for exam-
Bitte, in measuring living standards. The complexities involved in
attempting to measure the level and trend of living standards are
16 Yves Blayo, „Sterblichkeit in Frankreich 1740 bis 1829“, Bevölkerung, XXX (1975), 141
(Tables 15 Und 16); Wrigley et al., English Population History, 614–615 (Table A9.1); Paolo
Malanima, L’Economia Italiana: dalla Crescita Medieval all Crescita Contemporanea (Bologna,
2002), 54 (Tisch 2.5).
17
(New York, 1993).
John Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London 1670–1819
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510
| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
endlos. The issue is commonly approached by basing the calcula-
tion on male wage levels in a variety of occupations and facilitating
comparison over time by correcting the wage data with a cost of
living index derived from the price of a basket of consumables.
The limitations of this approach are well known. Employment,
Zum Beispiel, was often not continuous. But there are also more fun-
damental weaknesses. Perhaps a more serious limitation is that the
household is a more appropriate unit of reference than the individ-
ual. It is indicative of this that the censuses of 1811 Und 1821 dealt
with occupational structure by asking the question, “What number
of families are chiefly employed in or maintained by agriculture?
How many by trade, manufacture or handicraft?” Focusing on
the household brings into consideration the earnings and expenses
of all those living together there rather than just those of the house-
hold head. It is also a reminder that many productive acts did not
involve a payment. The housewife’s actions when preparing a meal
marked the completion of a production process that began when a
plowman prepared the ground for planting a crop.18
Any attempt to measure living standards may also benefit from at-
tention to the potential importance of the dependency ratio. A full ex-
ploration of this issue is beyond the scope of this article, but an
illustration is relatively simple. Assume that children in the age group
from zero to fourteen years were dependent and that the bulk of their
support derived from adults in the age group twenty-five to forty-four.
In England from 1651 Zu 1700, 30 percent of the population was in the
age group zero to fourteen; the comparable figure for the age group
twenty-five to forty-four was 28.3 Prozent. Aus 1801 Zu 1850, the cor-
responding percentages were 37.6 Und 25.1. The ratio of dependents to
adults in the earlier period was 106.0; the ratio of 149.8 in the latter pe-
riod is 41 percent higher. In the early nineteenth century, households
carried a heavier burden in this regard than did those in the later
seventeenth century. The level of the burden becomes clear if
the calculation of living standards is based on the household.
THE MINDSET OF A POPULATION The surge of urban growth in
early modern England was closely linked to many other changes
18 As Smith remarked, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; und das
interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for pro-
moting that of the consumer” (Schmied, Wealth of Nations, II, 179).
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| 511
E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
in the economy—such as the rise in agricultural productivity and
improvement to transport facilities—but its effect on the mindset
of the rural population may have been the most significant of all
the changes in train. In the sixteenth century, much land was still
cultivated by men whose prime concern was meeting the needs of
their families rather than increasing market sales. Zum Beispiel,
Hoskins noted that in the Tudor period, despite its closeness to
the town of Leicester, “the picture drawn is essentially one of a
subsistence economy: only here and there did a Wigston farmer
march in the vanguard towards the eighteenth century: nearly
all his fellows trod an older and familiar path, their farming as
medieval as the houses most of them still lived in, living in a true
peasant economy with only small surpluses to dispose of in good
years.”19
The replacement of the yeoman and peasant by the farmer
and farm laborer was given momentum unintentionally by the ac-
tions of a Tudor monarch, Henry VIII. The dissolution of the
monasteries by the Crown transferred ownership of wide tracts
of farmland into royal hands, but within a few years, the Crown’s
financial difficulties led to the sale of approximately one-quarter of
England’s farmland to men whose mentality and aims generally
were not those of a peasant. These developments gave impetus
to the expansion of an institutional framework that came to typify
the people involved in English agriculture for the next two
centuries—landowners, farmers, and laborers. The potential signif-
icance of this change is suggested by an observation often made in
discussions about peasant agriculture in Asia during the decades
immediately following World War II. Because of the values at-
tached to the link between the peasant family as a unit and its
farmland, no member of the family appeared to be under pressure
to leave the holding until the average level of output of the heads of
family approached bare subsistence. In Western capitalist econo-
mies, Jedoch, no worker would be retained on a farm if his or
her product contributed less than he or she was paid in wages. Der
19 William G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire
Village (London, 1957), 175, 176. Clay generalized Hoskins’ description of Wigston Magna:
“English society in the early sixteenth century consisted largely of peasant farmers, whose
propensity to consume goods manufactured outside their own homesteads was low, Und
who anyway received little of their income in the form of money” (Christopher G. A. Clay,
Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 [New York, 1984], II, 4).
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| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
marginal rather than the average product was decisive in this regard.
When reviewing the disadvantages of attempting to maximize
output from the land regardless of its effects on living standards,
Malthus noted that this danger was averted in a market economy
wherever individuals focused on maximizing their incomes:
Upon the principle of private property, which it may be fairly pre-
sumed will always prevail in society, it could never happen. With a
view to the individual interest, either of a landlord or farmer, NEIN
labourer can ever be employed on the soil, who does not produce
more than the value of his wages; and if these wages be not on an
average sufficient to maintain a wife, and rear two children to the
age of marriage, it is evident that both the population and produce
must come to a stand.”20
England became a country in which the bulk of the farm
workforce depended chiefly on a wage as a reward for their efforts
rather than on raising food for their families on their holdings.
Market-oriented farmers decided the size of the workforce on
the land, and peasant holdings ceased to be the norm. In his poem
of bitter regret over the changes transforming England, “The
Deserted Village,” Goldsmith portrayed the new situation and
its woeful character:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more:
His blest companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.21
20 Clay estimated, “If estates granted away to courtiers and royal servants in the mid six-
teenth century are also included, vielleicht 25 per cent of the land of England had passed from
royal into private hands by 1642” (Clay, Economic Expansion, II, 263). Malthus, An Essay on the
Principle of Population (London, 1826), in Wrigley and Souden (Hrsg.), Funktioniert, III, 405.
21 Oliver Goldsmith (Hrsg. Louise Pound), The Deserted Village (Boston, 1907; orig. Kneipe.
1770).
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 513
There were major regional differences in the timing and nature
of the move from “peasant” to “capitalist” farming. Shaw-Taylor
threw much light on this question recently by using information
von dem 1851 census to establish the relative importance of capitalist
farming in different parts of the country: “Agrarian capitalism was
more important than family farming everywhere. In the south-east,
broadly defined, agrarian capitalism was utterly dominant and was
practised on a relatively large scale while family farming was almost
insignificant. But across a broad swathe of northern England family
farming survived in strength and in parts of the north-west came close
to rivalling capitalist farming in importance.” For earlier periods, Die
available evidence is less complete, but Shaw-Taylor was confident
that in the early eighteenth century, a broadly similar pattern existed.
He concluded that in southern and eastern England, “the decisive
shift to agrarian capitalism took place before 1700.”22
England, at one time a nation of “satisficers,” was becoming a
nation of “maximizers.” Farm laborers as well as farmers gradually
became market-oriented. Being wage-paid rather than producing
much of what they needed for themselves, as their peasant ances-
tors had done, inevitably had this effect because their household
food needs were increasingly met by purchase rather than by
working a peasant plot. Among other changes, the shift to wage
labor probably also made farm workers more willing to attempt to
improve their lot by migrating to towns where wages were higher.
The changing mindset of the rural population also owed much
to the increasing contact between London and the rest of the coun-
versuchen. There had long been such contact. Rappaport’s study of
sixteenth-century London included data relating to young men com-
ing to London to take apprenticeships. Aus 1551 Zu 1553, 1,055 ap-
prentices who had arrived in the capital from elsewhere were
enrolled as citizens. Of these, 24.5 percent were from the six north-
ernmost counties (Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland,
Durham, Yorkshire, and Lancashire), all of them traveling more than
150 miles to reach London. Yet in 1600, the first date for which
county population estimates are available, the population of the six
counties was 823,000, nur 19.8 percent of the national total.23
22 Leigh Shaw-Taylor, “The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism and the Decline of Family Farm-
ing in England,” Economic History Review, LXV (2012), 57, 58.
23
(New York, 1989), 77–79.
Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London
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514
| E . A N T H O N Y WR I G L E Y
The notes made by Gough about his fellow parishioners leave
no doubt that visiting London, even from places many miles from
the capital, and spending time there, was a commonplace in the
seventeenth century. Gough lived in Myddle, a village near
Shrewsbury about 160 miles from London. His Observations, writ-
ten in 1701/2, describe the lives and activities of the inhabitants of
the village in the later decades of the seventeenth century. Hey,
the editor of his main writings, was struck by the importance that
Gough attached to contact with London for the men and women
in Myddle:
[Gough] frequently mentions London in passing as if it were com-
monplace that his neighbours should have been there. Men and
women from all sections of his community went to the capital in
search of fortune or excitement or to escape from trouble at home.
Most of them kept in contact with their families, and further infor-
mation about events in London and other parts of the country fil-
tered back to Myddle through “the Gazet” and “our News letters.”
The ebb and flow of people to and from London meant that
the number of men and women who had had experience of life in
London was a substantial fraction of the population of the rest of
England. It is little wonder that in seeking to specify London’s func-
tion in the national economy, Earle referred to Defoe’s remark that
London was “a heart which circulated England’s blood.”24
Another development that steadily reduced the contrast be-
tween what was available to consumers in London and in the
countryside was the increasing ubiquity of village shops. Village
shops strengthened country dwellers’ awareness of the many
“comforts” and “luxuries” available to consumers. The reduction
in the differences between the rural and urban populations in this
regard encouraged country dwellers to secure a larger monetary
Einkommen. In their wide-ranging survey of the importance of village
shops in acquainting rural populations with the goods available for
purchase, Stobart and Bailey laid special emphasis on three aspects
of their presence in a steadily rising proportion of English villages:
Erste, rural consumers were “directly linked into global systems of
24 Richard Gough (Hrsg. D. Hey), The History of Myddle (London, 1983), 19; Peter Earle, Der
Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730
(London, 1989), 18.
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| 515
E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
supply.” Second, village shops “went far beyond supplying simply
the basic and everyday needs of rural dwellers.” Third, they “fa-
cilitated access to an expanding world of goods—and were thus
instrumental in shifting patterns of rural consumption.” The mind-
set of dwellers in the countryside differed less and less from the
mindset of city dwellers.25
It is when moving from description to explanation that the value
of taking into account the feedback between a variety of aspects of
demographic, wirtschaftlich, and social history becomes apparent. Für
Beispiel, it is often straightforward to describe the demographic
history of a town, county, or country by assembling information
about births, Todesfälle, Ehen, and migratory movement and con-
verting the raw data into rates using the relevant measurement
Techniken. But if one then seeks to explain the change over time
in the levels of fertility, Mortalität, nuptiality, and migration, Das
will involve taking into account the economic and social changes
of the same era and the feedback between them. A decline in the
average age of female marriage may reflect, in part, a demographic
ändern, such as the sex ratio in the relevant age groups, but it may
also indicate an improvement in the level of real incomes, or a
modification in the conventions influencing marriage decisions.
The feedback between the variables involved may be either pos-
itive or negative, and their relative importance difficult to demon-
strate conclusively, but approaching the task of explanation using a
feedback framework can often prove illuminating. In part, von
course, this approach is simply using a new vocabulary to describe
methods that have always been employed, but there are advantages
to using this framework, not least bearing in mind the different
implications of positive and negative feedback.
Jon Stobart and Lucy Bailey, “Retail Revolution and the Village Shop, c.1660–1860,”
25
Economic History Review, LXXI (2018), 398.
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