historical demography

The study of the size and structure of past populations and of the historical relationship between demographic, economic, and social changes. Measuring the demographic characteristics of populations prior to the advent of the census and national vital registration presents a major challenge since available data are often fragmentary. It is necessary to draw on a range of sources, such as ecclesiastical registers, bills of mortality, wills, tombstones, military records, property lists, and so forth, and painstakingly reconstruct a demographic picture of the period.

Attempts to measure the demographic characteristics of past populations predate the second half of the twentieth century. However historical demography emerged as a distinctive branch of demography in the post-war period, and was associated with the development of new techniques for studying historical populations, particularly the method of family reconstitution pioneered by Louis Henry of the French Institut d'Études Démographiques in the 1950s. Henry used parish registers, first of the Genevan bourgeoisie and then of the peasantry in Crulai in Normandy, to reconstruct the demographic experiences of families in these communities. His approach to family reconstitution involves taking a particular marriage pair and tracing information about their birth, their parents, the marriage, their own childbearing, and their deaths, a procedure repeated for each family in turn.

In the United Kingdom, E. A. Wrigley employed the same techniques to study families in Colyton in Devon, using parish registers covering the period 1538-1837. His influential article on’Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England’ (English History Review, 1966) argued that birth control was widespread and that families were able to respond to social and economic pressures by delaying childbearing and restricting family size. Together with Peter Laslett, he established the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which since 1964 has served as the focal point for historical demography in Britain. Work from groups such as this has done much to challenge established views about family and household life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Laslett's work in particular set new and formidably high standards for the use of quantitative historical materials in analyses of the Western family (see The World we Have Lost. 1965; Household and Family in Past Time. 1972; and Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations, 1977). However, it should be noted that his rediscovery of the nuclear family as the norm in pre-industrial England has since been challenged by several critics (both sociologists and historians), who have argued that the existence of small households as a unit of residential organization, and small (that is nuclear) families as a framework of meaning for everyday life are not necessarily one and the same thing. See also social demography.