Alice Reid & Romola Davenport
The world’s population has exploded since the 18th century, from perhaps 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today. The usual story is that this extraordinary growth was caused by dramatic falls in mortality. But research at Campop has shown that, at least in England, fertility has actually played a larger role than mortality in regulating population growth.
Romola Davenport
‘Malthusianism’ is widely used to describe the belief that (1) human populations grow faster than the resources on which they depend, and (2) that the main way in which population is prevented from outstripping resources is by the ‘positive check’ of mortality, resulting in the most extreme circumstances in ‘Malthusian crises’ (famine and war).
Simon Szreter
Where sexuality is concerned, the lengthy reign of Queen Victorian (1837-1901) is generally considered to have been a strait-laced and repressed era. Commercial sex was legal but a clandestine matter that both the authorities and the male clients tried to keep out of sight. Men, it was considered, had a strong natural urge for sex which it was normal and healthy for them to indulge. ‘Respectable’ women, by contrast supposedly tolerated but did not actually enjoy their husbands’ regular impositions on them. Married women supposedly valued the process principally for the motherhood that resulted from it, which gave them their status and raison d’etre in the highly gendered world of ‘separate spheres’, where men worked and respectable women were confined to the domestic environment.
What is quite definitely true about not only the Victorian 19th century but an almost equivalent period of 63 years in the 20th century, too, is that public discussion of the sex act and of sexuality was so frowned upon that there is little direct researchable evidence on popular attitudes and practices for historians to work with.
Emma Diduch
In the autumn of 1896, the employees of the Strutt cotton spinning mills in Belper lined up wearing their Sunday best for a series of photographs marking the firm’s upcoming merger into the English Sewing Cotton Company. The images which survive in the Derbyshire Record Office offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of ordinary working people – there are friends holding hands, children scowling into the camera, a row of three sisters in matching dresses – and they also spark questions about work in the Strutt Mills and the community surrounding the factory. Did these workers make good wages and have long careers in the mill? Were these children sent to work at a young age to help support their families? Would these young women soon leave the factory to get married?
Hannaliis Jaadla, Alice Reid, & Eilidh Garrett
Concerns about low and declining fertility are common in the media and feature in public discussions around much of Europe and South East Asia. The size of the future work force and the sustainability of pension systems in years to come both depend on the number of children born today. In England and Wales, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, and 2023 was the first year in nearly half a century – and only the second in the last 250 years – when there were fewer births than deaths.
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.
Alice Reid & Jim Oeppen
Looking backwards in time gives a mistaken impression that family sizes in the past were larger than they actually were. This blog explains why this happens, and explores the differences between the picture of the past painted by genealogies and the past as it actually was.
Alice Reid
Today most of the world’s population lives in places where, on average, women have fewer than two children over their lifetime, but this level of childbearing is a relatively recent phenomenon.
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