Mortality, Marriage and Population Growth in England, 1550-1850

In this short book, Razzell presents the case for autonomous shifts in mortality as the key driving force in moving England from a population of marginally more than 2 million in 1500 to one of 16.5 million in 1851. He is skeptical of the use of parish registers for historical demographic research, at least in the manner employed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and by those who have adopted its methodologies to study this enormous body of data relating to baptisms, marriages, and burials. He, unlike the Cambridge Group, is confident that changes in fertility were of limited significance in driving demographic growth. In one of the longest sections of the book, he purports to show that after the almost-universal marriage of women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a decline in marital incidence left increasing proportions of women unmarried by the nineteenth century.The book concludes with a brief discussion of how a surplus workforce created by autonomous mortality change enabled the emergence of a capitalist economy based on cheap labor. Furthermore, Razzell argues that this model of demographic change, which emerged first in England, has been recurrent in large parts of the world; mortality declines arising from autonomous medical changes enabled a population growth that also facilitated the growth of global capitalism through the exploitation of demographically generated labor surpluses.After an initial chapter in which Razzell attempts to demonstrate the unreliability of parish registers for the generation of demographic data, there follow two chapters dealing specifically with infant and early childhood and adult mortality. To construct a measure of infant mortality, Razzell takes pains to account for the death of children who shared a forename with a sibling but had no burial record of their own. Razzell is confident that this strategy is a powerful means of correcting defective burial registrations. He estimates infant mortality to have fallen slightly in the early seventeenth century before rising to a peak by 1740 and then declining through the last two decades of the eighteenth and first two decades of the nineteenth century. The trend that he creates for early-childhood mortality is less clear-cut, but it retains remarkable stability at 105 to 107 deaths per 1,000 from c. 1660 to c. 1780 before displaying a modest drop.What is remarkable, and not noted by Razzell, is that the Cambridge Group’s estimates of the same demographic parameters follow a strikingly similar chronological course. The worsening of infant mortality during the first four decades of the eighteenth century, and its fall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, are features common to both bodies of research. However, whenever comparisons can be drawn, the supposedly inferior registers and methods of the Cambridge Group—afflicted, according to Razzell, by missing deaths—generate higher levels of infant and childhood mortality than Razzell’s methodology can detect for most periods.Razzell avoids use of burial registers per se to estimate adult mortality. He prefers to employ evidence relating to fathers being present when daughters married or when sons were apprenticed to derive an alternative indicator of mortality risks among adults. He gleans from this evidence a substantial reduction in adult mortality during the eighteenth century, but this improvement for adults occurred earlier in that century than it did for the youngest age groups. Again, the work of the Cambridge Group replicates this finding about life expectancy, using completely different evidence and methods. The Cambridge Group also drew attention to a rise in adult life expectancy starting in the early eighteenth century, when varying mortality levels and trends across all age groups render the conventional use of model lifetables problematical. Razzell and the Cambridge Group appear to be in basic agreement about the course of mortality change during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Razzell’s findings diverge most starkly from the Cambridge Group’s in Chapter 4. He dismisses the evidence relating to their marriage-age estimates, which proposes a substantial fall in age at first marriage, principally because it relies on a reconstitutable minority of couples whose immobility makes them unrepresentative. He favors instead a variety of approaches based on marriage licenses; residential listings that report women by marital status; registers that give the marital status of women at burial; and, especially, documents that recorded the marital status of female witnesses in church courts by age. Razzell argues that his data point to a 200-to-250-year trend of decreasing marital incidence, culminating in more than 10 percent of women never marrying by the mid-nineteenth century. He barely considers the issues surrounding the data in all of these sources, such as the accuracy with which marital status was recorded in early listings, particularly for women older than forty-five; the possible bias against single women acting as deponents in church courts; or the representativeness of the women who wed by acquiring a relatively expensive marriage license.Razzell largely ignores the burgeoning literature that discusses the biases in parish- register-based analysis of marriage age. In fact, his limited engagement with historiography is a feature of the book in general; Razzell buttresses a good deal of his argument solely by reference to his own publications. To take just one example, he cites none of the many articles in the journal Local Population Studies—a primary outlet for much of England’s demographic history derived from parish registers—that he did not write himself. As a result, readers will be hard-pressed to gain a sense of the relevant scholarly debates.In emphasizing the autonomy of mortality change, Razzell makes some useful points about the absence of major class differences in mortality before the nineteenth century. Yet he seems oddly reluctant to discuss the role played by human agency in it—not least regarding the decrease in smallpox fatalities during the late eighteenth century, a theme that occupied much of his earlier research. Likewise, he evinces little desire to note the striking demographic changes associated with England’s urbanization and population mobility, which were not matched elsewhere in Europe. England’s urban sector, represented by settlements of 5,000 or more, rose from 8 percent to 28 percent of the total population between 1600 and 1800.Furthermore, in his brief discussion of economic change, which he views as largely downstream of demography in the causal accounting, Razzell acknowledges none of the considerable changes that occurred in occupational structure during the seventeenth century. From 1600 to 1700, the primary sector declined from nearly two-thirds of the male labor force to less than 50 percent, while the secondary sector rose from 28 percent to 42 percent of the male working population. All of the aforementioned and remarkably precocious developments of this period unfolded against the backdrop of demographic stagnation or slight decline. The resulting man-made environmental changes and their implications for exposure to, and retention of, infectious disease render highly problematical any analysis that privileges the autonomy of disease and its associated mortality above all else, with only limited roles allocated to human agency

Capitalism · Demographic change · Demographic economics · Developed country · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Fertility · Historical demography · Marital status · Political science · Population · Population growth · Sociology · Workforce · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law

• Consigning the Twentieth Century to History

  Charles S Maier•The American Historical Review•2000

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