The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureNews
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# Launch of Economies Past website
5th April, 2024
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has launched a new interactive website www.economiespast.org which allows user to map occupational structure from 1600-1911 and 2011.
# RGS podcast with Prof Alice Reid
8th March, 2024
The Royal Geographical Society has published a podcast featuring Professor Alice Reid, who talks about how fertility, mortality and health affected changes in the UK's population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The RGS have also produced associated teaching materials for Key Stage 4.
# Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London
22nd February, 2024
A new article by Amy Erickson, 'Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London' is published in Business History 66:1 (2024), on open access.
It starts from the business cards of individual women, and traces them over their lifespan. At this social level, marriage appears to have had no impact on women's business careers, and widows maintained proprietorship of the joint enterprises they had run with their husbands for decades after their sons' majority.
# Award for Ying Dai
7th November, 2023
We are very pleased to announce that Ying Dai, a research associate at Campop, has been awarded the Narada Foundation Best Research Paper on Quantitative History 2nd prize. Ying's paper was selected from among the fifty speakers at the 9th International Symposium on Quantitative History in Shanghai in July 2023.
# Professor Sir Tony Wrigley FBA (17 Aug 1931 – 25 Feb 2022)
16th March, 2022
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Professor Sir Tony Wrigley.
A leading scholar in a number of different social science disciplines and President of the British Academy, his first academic post was in the Geography Department and in 1964 he founded, with Peter Laslett, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and transformed knowledge of British population in the pre-industrial era. He remained actively involved in Campop throughout his career and into his retirement, and we will miss his gentle presence at coffee and his kindly encouragement as well as his considerable intellectual contributions.
A full obituary is available.
# Dr Alice Reid elected President of the British Society for Population Studies
30th September, 2021
Congratulations to Dr Alice Reid who has been elected President of the
British Society for Population Studies.
# The enduring geography of mortality and its social causes
7th July, 2021
"If you had a map of Covid's biggest effects now and a map of child deaths in 1850, they look remarkably similar" said Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer of England and Wales, recently. The BBC interviewed Alice Reid and used data from Populations Past, her interactive website on Victorian and Edwardian population, for a news article on the endurance of patterns in mortality and its social causes.
# Did industrialisation really raise mortality rates in English cities?
24th June, 2021
And why is this question so difficult to answer? A new paper by Romola Davenport, published in a special issue on health and industrialisation in the International Journal of Paleopathology, provides a succinct summary of the state of historical knowledge about urban mortality patterns during the Industrial Revolution and highlights where collaborations between archaeologists and historians are vital to new understanding.
# Census 2021 public engagement podcasts
19th March, 2021
Alice Reid and Sophy Arulanantham from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure have teamed up with Year 8s from South Wales to co-produce census-related public engagement material. Check out our podcasts in which year 8s interview census experts. This public engagement project is funded by the AHRC and ESRC in conjunction with The National Archives and the Office for National Statistics.
# Engaging the public in the Census 2021
26th February, 2021
Dr Alice Reid and colleagues have been awarded one of 15 projects by the AHRC/ESRC to engage the public in Census 2021. This project will inform KS3 students about the relevance of the Census, provide insight into being a data-driven social scientist and enhance the school curriculum. Using Census returns from the early nineteenth century to the present day, students from South Wales state schools will co-produce school resources that explore aspects of Census taking and Census data.