The surprising geography of smallpox in England before vaccination: a conundrum resolved

A new paper by CAMPOP members, Romola Davenport, Max Satchell and Leigh Shaw-Taylor, demonstrates a strong north-south divide in the impact of smallpox in Britain before vaccination. Mining c. 7 million burial records for evidence of smallpox deaths, the study established that smallpox was an endemic childhood disease in northern Britain, but remained a relatively rare epidemic disease affecting adults as well as children in southern England. This was an unexpected finding, because compared to most of Britain southern England was relatively densely settled and economically developed with good transport connections, factors expected to promote disease circulation.

The study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, provided evidence that very local public health initiatives in southern England, especially in the form of isolation of sufferers in pest houses, and later mass immunisation, were the main factors in establishing the north-south pattern. This study demonstrates the surprising efficacy of uncoordinated and small-scale interventions to control the most lethal disease of eighteenth century Europe.

New interactive website, PopulationsPast.org, now live!

PopulationsPast.org, a new online interactive Atlas of Victorian and Edwardian Population, is now live!

Explore regional and local variations in a range of demographic and household indicators and how these changed between 1851 and 1911, zoom in to focus on particular areas, compare two maps side-by-side, and download the underlying data much of which has been calculated from individual level census data. More resources will be added over the coming months.

Created by a team led by Dr Alice Reid of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop) at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, with help from colleagues at the Universities of Essex and Leicester and funding from the ESRC and the Isaac Newton Trust. The site coding was implemented by Geography's own Webmaster.

Inaugural meeting of ENCHPOPGOS network

The inaugural meeting of the ENCHPOPGOS network will take place on 25th to 27th September at Robinson College, Cambridge. ENCHPOPGOS, the European Network for the Comparative History of Population Geography and Occupational Structure, brings together scholars from all over Europe who are or plan to work on similar projects and are committed to working in a commensurable and common framework over the period 1500-1914 to create datasets not merely of national occupational structures but scalable datasets at the local and regional levels.

The network is co-ordinated by Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Director of CAMPOP, and Dr Alexis Litvine.

Sebastian Keibek wins new researcher's prize at the Economic History Society Conference

Congratulations to Sebastian Keibek, a PhD student at CAMPOP, who was joint winner of the new researcher's prize at the Economic History Society 2016 Annual Conference, held on 1-3 April at Robinson College, Cambridge. The title of Sebastian's paper was: 'The regional and national male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1600-1820'.

Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History

The Ellen McArthur lectures in economic history, to be held at the Law Faculty at 5pm on 23rd & 24th February and 1st & 2nd March 2016, will be given by Professor Jane Humphries, University of Oxford.

Women from all times and regions will be seen about their daily lives, at work and at home, in these 4 lectures. New sources will be used to reconstruct and analyze their many productive contributions to their families and communities. Snapshots in time and micro studies underpin a more general account which can then be related to the grand narratives of British economic history. Jane Humphries will argue that we need to acknowledge the productive activities of women and children to build not only a more complete but a more correct economic history.