The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureNews archive
(Listed most recent first.)
# New philanthropic funding for Campop
17th October, 2024
A research project, New Frontiers in Demographic History, led by Simon Szreter and Kevin Schurer, has been supported by a generous donation from Mr Fu Shan. This project will undertake research utilising the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM), a digitised database of UK censuses 1851-1921.
# 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.
# 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.
# 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.
# Did industrialisation really raise mortality rates in English cities?
24th June, 2021
And why is this question so difficult to answer? A new paper by Romola Davenport, published in a special issue on health and industrialisation in the International Journal of Paleopathology, provides a succinct summary of the state of historical knowledge about urban mortality patterns during the Industrial Revolution and highlights where collaborations between archaeologists and historians are vital to new understanding.
# (When) are you going to have children?
3rd December, 2020
An article in the new issue of the Cambridge University research magazine, Horizons, explores decisions about if and when to have children, considering what influences come into play and how these have changed over time. The article brings together research from across the University, featuring Campop member Dr Alice Reid.
# Height and health in late eighteenth-century England
1st October, 2020
A new paper by CamPop members Hanna Jaadla, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Romola Davenport, published Online Early in Population Studies, analyses a very unusual sample of representative data on adult male heights, recorded in militia ballot lists in the county of Dorset in the years 1798 and 1799.
The paper confirms the tall stature of English men relative to other European populations in this period, and reports evidence of a positive social gradient in height. However the gradient was small, and labourers were on average only 2 cm shorter than farmers and gentlemen.
# Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions
28th September, 2020
A new paper has been published on the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions by George Alter, Jim Oeppen and Gill Newton. English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology.
The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality.
To expand their availability, the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. The paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data.
# COVID-19 related information
18th May, 2020
The history of mortality, infectious diseases and long-term improvements to life expectancy is the focus of a major Wellcome funded project led by Richard Smith and Romola Davenport. Davenport and co-authors have recently published papers on: smallpox, the early history of public health from an evolutionary perspective and mortality and urbanisation.
Leigh Shaw-Taylor has published a beginners' guide to the history of disease, epidemics and long-term improvements to mortality in a special issue of Economic History Review. This is one of three free-to-download special issues on the history of disease published by leading journals on the subject.
Chris Briggs, Romola Davenport, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Samantha Williams have contributed to podcasts in Chris Clark's History of Now series.
# The geography of smallpox in England before vaccination: A conundrum resolved
6th April, 2020
Quarantine and isolation measures against plague are well known, but similar more local measures were used in eighteenth century England against endemic smallpox, with success in southern but not northern England. Romola Davenport and co-authors at CAMPOP explore this in a recent article published in Social Science & Medicine.
# The early history of public health from an evolutionary perspective
6th April, 2020
Attempts to curb COVID-19 draw on long-established preventive measures, in the absence of vaccines or cures. These measures were surprisingly effective against some of the most lethal diseases. Romola Davenport and Richard Smith explore the history and evolution of public health in a recent article.
# Urbanisation and mortality in Britain, c.1800-50
3rd April, 2020
A new paper by CAMPOP member Romola Davenport has been published in the Economic History Review (online early). The paper addresses the question of whether mortality worsened specifically in industrial and manufacturing towns in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in England.
Using comparative data for British, European, and American cities and selected rural populations, the study finds good evidence for widespread increases in mortality in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. However this phenomenon was evident in rural as well as urban populations, and so it is unlikely to represent a simple trade-off between health and wealth during industrialisation. The paper suggests that documented changes in scarlet fever virulence may have contributed to the rise and subsequent fall of mortality.
# LPSS Roger Schofield Memorial Conference postponed due to COVID-19 outbreak
12th March, 2020
Unfortunately, due to the uncertainties surrounding the developing COVID-19 outbreak, the LPSS Committee have taken the difficult decision to postpone the Roger Schofield Memorial Conference, which was due to take place on 4th April.
The committee will now work to rearrange the conference for later in the year. The date and venue will be confirmed once arrangements are in place and it is clear that speakers and attendees should be able to travel easily and freely to the conference.
# 'Plagues and Peoples Revisited' workshop cancelled due to COVID-19 outbreak
12th March, 2020
The 'Plagues and Peoples Revisited' workshop has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We hope to reschedule the event at a later date. Further details will be posted on the website when they become available.
# 'Plagues and Peoples revisited' workshop
27th February, 2020
An interdisciplinary workshop, 'Plagues and Peoples Revisited', (to be held in Cambridge, March 23-24 2020) celebrates the conclusion of the Wellcome Trust-funded project 'Migration, mortality, and medicalisation: investigating the long-run epidemiological consequences of urbanisation'.
It will showcase multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of historical mortality patterns, and encourage the development of new interdisciplinary research projects.
# Urbanization and mortality in Britain, c. 1800–50
27th February, 2020
A new paper by CAMPOP member Romola Davenport has been published in the Economic History Review (online early). The paper addresses the question of whether mortality worsened specifically in industrial and manufacturing towns in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in England.
Using comparative data for British, European, and American cities and selected rural populations, the study finds good evidence for widespread increases in mortality in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. However this phenomenon was evident in rural as well as urban populations, and so it is unlikely to represent a simple trade-off between health and wealth during industrialisation. The paper suggests that documented changes in scarlet fever virulence may have contributed to the rise and subsequent fall of mortality.
# Roger Schofield
9th April, 2019
It is with great sadness that we learn that Roger Schofield has passed away.
Roger was a key member of the Group from its very early days, and although his recent years were blighted with disability, he retained a strong interest in and connection with the Group.
Roger was born in 1937 and received both undergraduate and PhD degrees in history from the University of Cambridge. In 1966 he was appointed as Research Assistant at the Group - which was then only two years old itself. He quickly began to play a major role in corresponding with and encouraging 'le secret weapon anglais': the small army of amateur local historians who collected and counted baptisms, burials and marriages from parish registers around the country in an early crowd sourcing exercise. He played a major role in the analyses of these data, offering important and novel interpretations of the course of British population history published in numerous journal articles and books. He was Director of the Cambridge Group from 1974 to 1994, and played a significant role in British and international historical demography: among other roles he was President of the British Society of Population Studies, 1985-87, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge since 1969.
In the prime of his life, before the major stroke he suffered in the late 1980s or early 1990s, he was a man of immense energy and razor-sharp intellect. He was also unfailingly kind, generous, and encouraging towards young and visiting scholars at the Group.
In recent years his health suffered further setbacks, but he continued to live at home with the help of carers, and was always interested to hear news of the Group and of old friends and colleagues. He was a key member of the Group in all sorts of ways: in its ground-breaking work, its direction, and its collegiate and enabling atmosphere. Those of us who knew him will miss him greatly, and we all have much to thank him for.
# New paper from CAMPOP member Romola Davenport, 'Infant-feeding practices and infant survival by familial wealth in London, 1752–1812'
15th March, 2019
A new paper has been published by CAMPOP member Romola Davenport, 'Infant-feeding practices and infant survival by familial wealth in London, 1752–1812', published in History of the Family (Online Early).
The paper demonstrates that infants mortality was initially higher in wealthier families in eighteenth century London, but declined across the social scale over the period 1752-1812.
# Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History
5th January, 2016
The Ellen McArthur lectures in economic history, to be held at the Law Faculty at 5pm on 23rd & 24th February and 1st & 2nd March 2016, will be given by Professor Jane Humphries, University of Oxford.
Women from all times and regions will be seen about their daily lives, at work and at home, in these 4 lectures. New sources will be used to reconstruct and analyze their many productive contributions to their families and communities. Snapshots in time and micro studies underpin a more general account which can then be related to the grand narratives of British economic history. Jane Humphries will argue that we need to acknowledge the productive activities of women and children to build not only a more complete but a more correct economic history.
# Sebastian Keibek awarded JRF at Queen's College, Cambridge
19th February, 2015
Many congratulations to Sebastian Keibek, a PhD student at CAMPOP, who has been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Queen's College, Cambridge, starting on 1 October 2015.