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).
Alice Reid
A previous blog charted trends in non-marital conceptions and births in England from 1550 to the present. It argued that although many couples engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, in most cases when a woman fell pregnant she and her partner married swiftly, so that the majority of extra-marital conceptions were born within marriage. Not all pregnant women were able to marry however, giving rise to extra-marital births, or ‘illegitimate’ children.
Alice Reid
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died on 8th September 2022. Aged 96, her death certificate gave her cause of death as simply ‘Old Age’. It’s undeniable that she was old when she died, but how common is old age as a cause of death now and in the past, and what can the history of death from old age tell us?
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
It is not unreasonable to believe that childbirth in the past was terribly dangerous. This view is common among popular history blogs and even some academic articles. Several internet sources, when discussing maternal mortality, state that in medieval or early modern times, as many as one in three women died during their childbearing years.
© 2025 University of Cambridge
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure