Routledge Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, Volume I: General and Great Britain: 1

This large-scale comparative endeavor, complete in two volumes, reflects increasing concern with the population factor in economic and social change worldwide. Demographers, on their side, have been focusing on history. In response to this, Population in History represents the work of two practitioners that have begun to work together, using their combined approaches in an attempt to assess and account for population growth experienced by the West since the seventeenth century. There is a long record of interest in the history of population. But the interest now displayed is likely to be both more persistent and far more fruitful in its consequences. New studies have been initiated in many countries. And because the studies are more informed and systematic than many of those of earlier periods, they are already provoking the further spread of research. A much more positive part is now also being played by national and international associations of historians and demographers. It is not unlikely that, within the next fifteen or twenty years, the main outlines of population change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will be firmly established for much of Europe. Previous research has tended to appear in specialist journals and academic publications. This volume is intended to provide a more easily accessible publication. It has been thought appropriate to include some earlier work, both because of its intrinsic interest and because it provided the background and part of the stimulus to the later research. Of the twenty-seven contributions to this outstanding volume, seven are unabridged reprints of earlier work; the remaining contributions are either entirely new or represent substantial revisions of work published elsewhere. Review -There is much more in this rich, absorbing book. There is, especially, a challenge to American demographers and demographically-inclined sociologists to do more and better... if Americans leave the volume with only a stronger sense of the articulation between their contemporary studies and larger historical processes, they will have gained something precious and fundamental.- --Charles Tilly, American Sociological Review -[A]n important publication, the first of its kind in an exciting -new- field, and its appearance marks, at last, the official coming-of-age of historical demography.- --Peter d'A. Jones, The American Historical Review -Population in History, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley... is indispensable reading for all modern historians concerned with population growth... [P]erhaps the most important insight to come out of the work condensed by this book is the knowledge that population growth is neither, as was thought a generation ago, an 'independent variable' preceding industrialism as cause, if anything at all, nor, as has been thought more recently, an automatic consequence of industrialism, but the complex, interacting, cause-and-effect of a multitude of social, economic, political, intellectual, religious and moral factors operating at the most intimate level of human motivation and experience, which cannot be prejudged but must be studied afresh in the case of each individual society.- --H. J. Perkin, The English Historical Review -[T]his volume... make[s] more widely available the large body of research which has been produced as a result of the convergence of the interests of historians and demographers.- --James H. Johnson, The Geographical Journal -Historians and demographers will find Population in History an indispensible volume for a long time to come. There is much in it which stresses the need for them to discuss its contents together. It shows both how much the historian can gain from demographic techniques and how much the demographer needs historical perspective.- --W. D. Borrie, Population Studies -Lack of a population-history periodical has forced authors to publish in a wide variety of works; consequently, the de