Problems in European Historical Demography, 1560‐1914

The paper aims to provide an introduction, at an intermediate level, to a range of issues in European demographic history over the early modern and modern periods.  It will offer a review of patterns of population growth and distribution, as well as the demographic processes of mortality, fertility, nuptiality and migration seen in their social, economic and political context. Coverage will include a survey of “classical” early modern European historical demography, and of the demography of economic, social and political modernisation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

Topics to be covered may include: sources and methods of historical demography (including  family reconstitution, aggregative analysis and back-projection techniques); economy and population in pre-industrial western Europe and the concept of “demographic regimes”; patterns of marriage and household formation; marital fertility, birth intervals and the concept of “natural fertility”;  epidemics, pandemics and infectious disease mortality; urbanisation and the “urban mortality penalty”; long-term population growth and the concept of “demographic transition”; the secular decline of fertility and mortality; war and population; forced migration and the demography of nationalism; population policy; the demography of totalitarianism.