Nobel laureate Robert Fogel's compelling new study examines health, nutrition and technology from 1700 to 2100. Although throughout most of human history, chronic malnutrition has been the norm, a synergy between improvements in productive technology and human physiology has enabled humans to more than double their average longevity and to increase their body size by over fifty percent over the past three centuries. Larger, healthier humans have contributed to the acceleration of economic growth and technological change, resulting in reduced economic inequality, declining hours of work and a...

This book is a pioneering social and economic study of a London suburban parish in the seventeenth century, which sheds new light on the important but relatively neglected topic of London's social history. Chapters on demography, social and occupational structure, topography, population turnover and residential mobility, and neighbourly relations, lead to a discussion of the involvement of the inhabitants of the district in local government and church ceremonial. Throughout, social and economic features of the neighbourhood are compared to those found elsewhere in London, and in other towns...

State Corporatism and Proto-Industry focuses on the WÜ rttemberg worsted industry, an example of a "proto-industry" that arose in many parts of Europe preceding factory industrialization. It has been argued that these proto-industries broke down traditional society but this book suggests otherwise. With the help of the state, corporate institutions such as merchant companies and rural guilds, regulated every aspect of rural life and thus profoundly shaped early modern European economic, demographic and social development.

Death and the Metropolis offers 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 study is based on a variety of sources including weekly and annual Bills of Mortality, parish registers and Quaker vital registers, and employs the techniques of family reconstitution and aggregative analysis. The data are analysed within the framework of a structural model of mortality change comprising the proximate determinants of exposure to, and resistance...

This book follows the social, economic and demographic transformations of the Alpine area from the late Middle Ages. Its aim is to reassess the image of the upland community which emerges from the work of historians, geographers and social anthropologists. The book therefore deals at length with such problems as the causes and consequences of emigration and patterns of marriage and inheritance in favouring or hampering the adjustments of local populations to changing economic or ecological circumstances, and tackles the vexed question of the relative importance of cultural and environmental...

Death and the Metropolis offers 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 study is based on a variety of sources including weekly and annual Bills of Mortality, parish registers and Quaker vital registers, and employs the techniques of family reconstitution and aggregative analysis. The data are analysed within the framework of a structural model of mortality change comprising the proximate determinants of exposure to, and resistance...

This book is the first full-length analysis of the London working population and the effects of the industrial revolution in London to appear for over sixty years. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century London may not have experienced the direct effects of the industrial revolution to any great extent, but the indirect effects were felt strongly. L. D. Schwarz disagrees with the view that "The industrial revolution was a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere," and seeks to judge the effect of industrialization on what was the country's largest manufacturing city. Its size and role as...

In rural England prior to the Industrial Revolution people generally married when they were not busy with work. Parish registers of marriage therefore form an important and innovative source for the study of economic change in this period. Dr Kussmaul employs marriage dates to identify three main patterns of work and risk (arable, pastoral and rural industrial) and more importantly to show the long-term changes in economic activities across 542 English parishes from the beginning of national marriage registration in 1538. No single historical landscape emerges. Instead A General View of the...

These essays in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle present detailed case studies from English rural communities over the period 1250 1850, these essays reveal that much land was transferred between living persons who were related neither by blood nor by marriage and that kin were often not the only members of work groups or assistance networks in the countryside. Although the focus is on the strata of English society below the landed aristocracy and the urban merchant elites, the preoccupation with those holding land whether under freehold or customary or copyhold tenure is tempered by essays that...

Making a Medical Market begins with the first voluntary hospital in 1720 and ends in 1911 with national health insurance. It looks at different forms of practice--public appointments in hospitals, office under state welfare systems, and private practice. From the 1750s medicine became more commercialized. Doctors were successful in raising demand for their own services but were unsuccessful in restricting competition. Many medical practitioners struggled to make a living by seeing many patients at low fees, so that "five minutes for the patient" is not a new feature of health care.