The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureNews
See also: Earlier news
See our events section for forthcoming and recent events.
# New mortality and migration data in PopulationsPast.org
13th March, 2026
PopulationsPast.org now has cause- and age-specific mortality rates, and age- and sex-specific net migration rates! This extension of PopulationsPast.org - an online interactive atlas of Victorian and Edwardian population produced by Campop at the Department of Geography - adds new dimensions to the existing demographic and socio-economic data.
The new data allows detailed exploration of the geography of mortality and movement in late 19th and early 20th century England, Wales, and Scotland.
# Call for Papers: conference on historical and modern sanitary programmes
24th February, 2026
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) interventions – the long view. Cambridge, 15-16 June 2026.
This conference invites papers that address WaSH interventions in comparative and/or historical contexts, using epidemiological, genomic, evolutionary, historical and other approaches.
# Workshop announcement: An informal introduction to formal demography
16th December, 2025
Applications are invited for a forthcoming workshop (23-27 March 2026) sponsored by The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop) and the British Society for Population Studies (BSPS). This week-long mini-course will take place at Cambridge University, and will focus on formal demographic models and methods. Application deadline: 19 January 2026.
# Census Summer School
26th November, 2025
Applications are open for a two-week Summer School on 'Micro-Census Insights into Historical Households, Mortality and Fertility', to be held at University of Cambridge from 6-17 July 2026. The course is hosted by Campop and co-organised with the European Society of Historical Demography (ESHD) and COST-Action GREATLEAP. Application deadline: 2 February 2026.
# Cambridge historian Emily Chung finds Friedrich Engels ‘took creative liberties’ with descriptions of class divides in Manchester
21st October, 2025
Campop PhD student Emily Chung has her research spotlighted in The Guardian. By mapping digitised census data, Emily has shown that Engels' blistering depictions of segregation in industrial Manchester - often taken by historians at face value - may in fact have been exaggerated. Emily's research is also featured in a Campop blog post.
# Emma Diduch receives Roger Schofield Award
16th September, 2025
Congratulations to Campop PhD student Emma Diduch, who received the Roger Schofield Award for the best paper presented by a young demographer at the European Society of Historical Demography Conference in Bologna. The paper was titled 'Work, Marriage, and Motherhood in Derbyshire: Event History Analysis of Women's Employment and Fertility Histories, 1881-1911', and uses a split-population (cure) model to analyse parity progression ratios and median birth intervals, comparing the occupations of both husband and wife.
# 60 things you didn't know...
7th August, 2025
Campop has completed its run of 60 blog posts in a year to celebrate its 60th anniversary. We've covered a wide variety of topics surrounding family, marriage, work, and death from the middle ages to the present, which will remain available to read on the Campop website. And watch out for further (more occasional) posts to be published in the same place!
# Campop student Ying Dai wins international prize
7th August, 2025
Congratulations to Ying Dai, who has won the International Economic History Association's prize for the best Ph.D. thesis on C20th and C21st economic history, globally, over the last three years. Ying's thesis, entitled 'The occupational structure of the Yangtze Valley in the twentieth century', illuminates the macro structures in economic development with data using jiapu, Chinese genealogies.
# Who do you think you are?
13th May, 2025
Dr Alexander Wakelam appeared on a recent episode of the long running BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? He shared with actor Layton Williams details of the lives of his ancestors, and spoke about the realities of entrepreneurship in Victorian London. Alex's long-standing research into debt imprisonment began when he was a PhD student at Campop. He is now a Research Associate.
# A comparison of income inequality in the Roman and Chinese Han empires
8th April, 2025
Michele Bolla, Guido Alfani and Walter Scheidel have a new Open Access article published in Nature Communications. They introduce a new methodology to measure income inequality at the provincial level in ancient economies. They find that the Han Empire and the Roman Empire differed substantially in the relationship between centre and periphery, and the treatment of local elites. They also argue that higher inequality increased the potential for political instability and the collapse of empires.