The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureNews
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# Award for Emily Chung
17th September, 2024
Congratulations to Campop PhD student Emily Chung, who has been awarded the Student Prize for Pre-1900 Topics at the 2024 European Association of Urban Historians Conference in Ostrava. Emily is currently writing up a short version of her conference paper for the Campop blog.
# 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages
11th July, 2024
Launching on World Population Day (and also, by coincidence, our 60th anniversary): a new blog from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure busts some of the biggest myths about life in England from the Middle Ages to today. New blog posts challenge common assumptions about everything, from sex before marriage to migration and the health/wealth gap.
# Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) launch
19th June, 2024
The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) is a collection of individual-level census data for Great Britain covering the period 1851 to 1921. The underlying raw census data have been enhanced through the creation of multiple coded and standardised derived variables which have been specially designed to facilitate comparative analyses over time.
By making available to academic researchers detailed information about everyone resident in the country, collected at decennial censuses from 1851 to 1921, the I-CeM data collection – one of the largest of its kind in the world – has transformed the landscape for research work in the economic, social, and demographic history of this country during a period of profound change in the wake of the industrial revolution.
# A multi-criteria simulation of European coastal shipping routes in the ‘age of sail’
29th May, 2024
Alexis D. Litvine, Joseph Lewis, and Arthur W. Starzec, have a new article in the publication Nature. It introduces a new method to model sailing routes before the age of steam, based on real-world sailing conditions. Using a broad range of historical meteorological data, it offers monthly routing predictions for historical shipping corridors, and tests them against historical evidence.
# New publication: Built-up areas of nineteenth-century Britain
15th May, 2024
"Built-up areas of nineteenth-century Britain: An integrated methodology for extracting high-resolution urban footprints from historical maps" has been published in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.
Using both "off the shelf" remote sensing software, machine learning, and computational algorithms, this article details a new methodology to extract building and urban footprints from historical maps. The developed methods can now be applied to other maps and regions to provide useful quantitative data for analysing long-term urban development. The code and data created are made available with the article.
# Open call to help map out London history
25th April, 2024
A new easy-to-use website designed with the University of Cambridge has been launched to help place fire insurance policies from 1700s to 1865 onto a digital map. After more than two years of digitisation – covering around 550,000 policy entries – this vast resource is now helping to build a clearer picture of how London looked hundreds of years ago. "This project is both important from a heritage perspective and a scientific one", said project lead and Campop senior researcher Dr Alexis Litvine.
# Launch of Economies Past website
5th April, 2024
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has launched a new interactive website www.economiespast.org which allows user to map occupational structure from 1600-1911 and 2011.
# RGS podcast with Prof Alice Reid
8th March, 2024
The Royal Geographical Society has published a podcast featuring Professor Alice Reid, who talks about how fertility, mortality and health affected changes in the UK's population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The RGS have also produced associated teaching materials for Key Stage 4.
# Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London
22nd February, 2024
A new article by Amy Erickson, 'Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London' is published in Business History 66:1 (2024), on open access.
It starts from the business cards of individual women, and traces them over their lifespan. At this social level, marriage appears to have had no impact on women's business careers, and widows maintained proprietorship of the joint enterprises they had run with their husbands for decades after their sons' majority.
# Award for Ying Dai
7th November, 2023
We are very pleased to announce that Ying Dai, a research associate at Campop, has been awarded the Narada Foundation Best Research Paper on Quantitative History 2nd prize. Ying's paper was selected from among the fifty speakers at the 9th International Symposium on Quantitative History in Shanghai in July 2023.