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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.2 (2006) 264-265


Reviewed by
Etienne van de Walle
University of Pennsylvania
Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900. By Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, and James Z. Lee (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2004) 545 pp. $45.00

Behind an unrevealing name, the population register is an original data-collection system that differs considerably from the mainstays of countries such as the United States—the separately administered censuses and vital-registration systems. Its principle is the constant updating of an initial or periodic enumeration by adding new births and in-migrants and removing deaths and out-migrants. Population registers make it possible to keep count of the resident population at all times, thus opening up possibilities of complex analyses. They have existed in a number of European countries (in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Belgium among others) and in Japan and parts of China at various times since the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Since their use was meant to serve local administrative or religious purposes, their preservation has been spotty, and their analysis by historical demographers has so far received less attention than the English or French projects based on parish records or the American studies of the census. The present volume constitutes a triumphant notification that this situation is changing. The wealth of individual data opened up to longitudinal analysis on a comparative basis constitutes an extraordinary opportunity to provide a second breath to the field of historical demography.

The collaborators have each adopted comparable methodologies with data on communities from rural Sweden, Belgium, Italy, China, and Japan, over various lengths of time (from a low of 12 years in one Chinese area to a high of 146 years in a Japanese one), for a total of almost 1.5 million person-years of observation (100,000 life histories in 100 rural communities, to quote the blurb on the cover). The database is undergoing further development. The information bears on individuals and their positions in households over time, and can be used to test hypotheses at the individual level from a longitudinal perspective. The focus is not on levels of mortality and their change, but on patterns of response to crises.

The underlying assumption is that the effect of economic stress, indexed through changes in food prices, can be documented by rises in mortality, thus providing a measure of the standard of living. Higher mortality provides an indication that particular persons are losing out in the "competition for resources." The comparative mortality response in relation to age, sex, and relationship with other members of a household thus suggests differences in the social organization of the various communities in the study. Although the extent to which this set of assumptions tends to "explain" changes in mortality risks by access to food rather than by more complex epidemiological factors (for which no data are available) is open to question, nevertheless, it provides a powerful theoretical underpinning to the examination of "life under pressure."

An intellectual tradition that goes back at least to Richard [End Page 264] Cantillon, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus has placed the Chinese and the English, or Western European, demographic systems in opposition. Even though the classical economists had limited knowledge of Asia, the Malthusian perspective continues to fascinate historians of Chinese demography. Several chapters of the book start with page-length quotations from Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798). Analysis of the data bank confirms sharp contrasts in domestic organization: Household formation in the East does not depend on marriage, and households are more complex. However, demographic behavior does not confirm Malthus' intuition that the individualistic West is more vulnerable to mortality crises than the East because it lacks welfare systems and family solidarity.

The volume contains valuable descriptions of the interactions between society and mortality in the various sites of the project. The chapters that examine various types of relationships comparatively and test hypotheses concerning them in the literature (gender differences, mortality...

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