Books in the Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time series

This book reconstructs the demographic regime in Roman Egypt during the first three centuries AD, using as its main evidence the three hundred surviving census returns filed by ordinary declarants. The authors use modern demographic methods and models to reconstruct the patterns of mortality, marriage, fertility and migration that are likely to have prevailed in Roman Egypt.

This 1996 book uses a local study to explore some of the more significant societal changes of the modern western world. Drawing on a range of research techniques, it examines topics such as marriage, fertility, health, the work of women and children, illegitimacy and sexuality, and in so doing presents an exciting example of the 'new rural history'.

This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schurer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included in the 1911 'fertility' census, they consider the interactions between the social, economic and physical environments in which people lived and their family-building experience and behaviour. Techniques and approaches based in demography, history and geography enable the authors to re-examine the declines in infant mortality and marital fertility which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparisons are drawn within and between white-collar, agricultural and industrial communities, and the analyses, conducted at both local and national level, lead to conclusions which challenge both contemporary and current orthodoxies.

A campaign promoted by church and state between 1560 and 1696 is said to have produced in Scotland the most literate population in the early modern world. This book sets out to test this belief by comparing the ability to read and write in Scotland with northern England in particular and with Europe and North America in general.

In historical accounts of the circumstances of ordinary people's lives, nutrition has been the great unknown. Nearly impossible to measure or assess directly, it has nonetheless been held responsible for the declining mortality rates of the nineteenth century as well as being a major factor in the gap in living standards, morbidity and mortality between rich and poor.

Prior to the mid nineteenth century London experienced mainly indirect effects of the industrial revolution but it was, nonetheless, susceptible to many of the wider economic transformations that occured during the period 1700-1850. This book provides a detailed analysis of the changes to the economy and social structure of London during this time.

A compelling study from Nobel laureate Robert Fogel, first published in 2004, which examines health, nutrition and technology over the last three centuries and beyond. It will be essential reading for all those interested in economics, demography, history and health care policy.

In this book, Katherine Lynch discusses the place of the family in society from the late middle ages to the industrial period. She explores the family's function as an organization on the boundary between public and private life, and how this has been shaped by political, religious and demographic factors.

This 1997 book provides a geographical, demographic and epidemiological study of disease and mortality in early modern England. Using a wide range of sources, the author examines the dramatic variations in death rates and disease patterns across the English countryside, and in so doing gives the first detailed account of the history of malaria in England.

Although Western societies cannot escape from images of famine in the present world, their direct experience of widespread hunger has receded into the past. England was one of the very first countries to escape from the shadow of famine; in this volume a team of distinguished economic, social and demographic historians analyses why.

This collection of essays on land transfer presents detailed case studies from English rural communities over the period 1250-1850. The focus is on the strata of English society below the landed aristocracy and the urban merchant elites.

This book examines the dramatic fall in family size in Britain between 1860 and 1940. It overturns current thinking and presents new and surprising findings about the importance of sexual abstinence and widely spaced births.

A powerful analysis of demographic patterns in London over the 'long eighteenth century', concentrating on mortality but also including data on marital fertility, population structure and migration. The evidence indicates that mortality in London was generally much higher than in other settlements in England.

This is a study of rural social structure in the county of Essex between 1350 and 1500.