England's Population: A History Since the Domesday Survey (review)

General surveys of a nation's or a region's demographic history, at least for the United Kingdom and North America, are rare. Those that appear usually take the form of edited volumes with a number of contributing scholars—for example, Michael Anderson (ed.), British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present (Cambridge, 1995), or Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (eds.), A Population History of North America (Cambridge, 2000). Given that demographers, like historians, tend to specialize in periods, edited, multi-author surveys are to be expected. Hence, this single-authored volume that ventures to span England's population history from 1086 to the 1990's—in a relatively compact volume—is doubly rare. Admittedly, however, it has a fine predecessor, Wrigley and Schofield's pioneering work in reconstructing English population history from 1541 to 1871.¹

Hinde's book, however, is more than a concise re-telling of the Wrigley-Schofield story, in several ways. First, the time span is extended, earlier and later, by dividing England's demographic history into three parts: the medieval period, the early modern era, and the post-1750 experience. Second, the analytical framework, though owing much to Wrigley and Schofield's specialist volume, is specifically addressed to nonspecialist readers. Because Hinde assumes that "readers will have no knowledge of demographic methods" (x), his conclusion that "during the last hundred years, the English population has journeyed as far through fertility-mortality space as it did during the eight preceding centuries" could not stand without a clear exposition of demographic techniques (269). The eleven "teaching boxes" that he places throughout the book define demographic variables; explain their linkage to, or derivation from, other variables; specify their effect(s) on the components of population change; and clarify the demographic measures as they appear in the tables and figures. These thumbnail sketches are precise and apt, though it would take a perceptive initiate to recognize that insertion of the phrase, "in the absence of migration," is crucial to plotting population-growth paths in fertility-mortality space (12).

Third, the book devotes considerable discussion to causal mechanisms at work—in changing fertility, mortality, and nuptiality rates, in the Malthusian preventive check on population growth, in internal and international migration, and in producing a "demographic transition." Fourth, for all its relatively small size, the book is a compendium of references, both for literature and data. Each of the three parts has an appendix on sources, methods, and data complexities or questions. Thefootnotes are detailed and extensive enough to provide interested readers with the resources to proceed farther.

Capable surveys, even if introductory, should accurately reflect the current state of scholarship in a field, as well as its methodology and its debates. Hinde's volume succeeds on all three grounds.