Romola Davenport
In 2007 the United Nations announced an historic milestone: the world had become decisively urban, with half the global population living in towns and cities. This represented a dramatic reversal of historic norms, when 80-90 percent of people worked and lived in the countryside. And this unprecedented shift from rural to urban areas shows no sign of abating – indeed, the UN predicts that all future population growth will be urban.
Paul Warde
On 30th September 2024, Britain used coal to generate electricity for the very last time. The age of coal as a source of power – both economic and political – is over. The speaker of the House of Lords traditionally sits on a sack of wool, an ancient representation of England’s trading wealth. In the 1860s, when Britons embarked on a brief but heated debate over whether they were running out of fossil fuels, it was commented that he should really sit on a bag of coal.
Everyone knows that the Industrial Revolution was based on coal. Everyone now knows the environmental consequences we have reaped from making a world from fossil fuels. Yet why have fossil fuels been so important? To understand this, we need to go back to the world that came before – the world that the historian Tony Wrigley called ‘the organic economy’.
Richard Smith
Today those aged 60 and over make up slightly more than 1 in 5 of the UK population. It is tempting to believe that in the distant past, because there were fewer older people, they enjoyed a greater cachet. But how far is this view born out in the English case by the findings of historical demography? Is it correct to regard age structures over the deeper past as unvarying through time?
Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett, Hanna Jaadla
It is generally accepted that the context of marriage was seen as the proper place for childbearing in historic Britain, and levels of non-marital fertility, or ‘illegitimacy’, were relatively low. Depictions in literature suggest that unmarried mothers were predominantly servant girls ‘taken advantage of’ by their unscrupulous employers or, as was the case for the eponymous Tess of the D’Urbervilles, their sons. Even some historians espouse this view.
But was this really the case? And what do levels and patterns of unmarried motherhood tell us about sexual activity outside marriage? This blog describes what demography can tell us about who was having sex before marriage in the past, who ended up as unmarried mothers, and how these were likely viewed by society.
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