Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as Birth Control in Pre-Transition England

Why a long-term perspective is beneficial for demographers

Although many contemporary demographers pay attention to historical demography, there is often a surprising lack of appreciation of the demographic circumstances and systems of the past, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are not relevant to the present or that the methods, data, and questions addressed by historical and contemporary demographers are different. This paper provides an overview of historical demography as published in Population Studies and how this has developed over time. Drawing on this, I demonstrate that historical and contemporary demography use similar data sources and identical methods, and they often address comparable questions. I argue that an appreciation of demographic patterns and processes is beneficial for all demographers, even those who work on the most recent time periods, and that better integration of historical and contemporary demography would be beneficial to both. The paper also considers three challenges for historical demography as it moves forward.

Stop! Go! What Can We Learn About Family Planning From Birth Timing in Settler South Africa, 1835-1950?

We revisit the discussion on family limitation through stopping and spacing behavior before and during the fertility transition with a sample of 12,800 settler women's birth histories in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Using cure models that allow us to separate those who stop childbearing from those who continue, we find no evidence of parity-specific spacing before the transition. We do find evidence of non-parity-based birth postponement before the transition. Increased stopping and parity-independent postponement characterized the beginning of the fertility transition, with increased parity-specific spacing following later in the transition phase.

Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. This paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data. Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield were sensitive to changes in the quality of the parish registers and cautiously applied the principles of family reconstitution developed by Louis Henry. We examine how these choices affect the measurement of fertility and biases that are introduced when important principles are ignored.

Twins Support the Absence of Parity-Dependent Fertility Control in Pretransition Populations

A conclusion of the European Fertility Project in 1986 was that pretransition populations mostly displayed natural fertility, where parity-dependent birth control was absent. This conclusion has recently been challenged for England by new empirical results and has also been widely rejected by theorists of long-run economic growth, where pre-industrial fertility control is integral to most models. In this study, we use the accident of twin births to show that for three Western European-derived pre-industrial populations-namely, England (1730-1879), France (1670-1788), and Québec (1621-1835)-we find no evidence for parity-dependent control of marital fertility. If a twin was born in any of these populations, family size increased by 1 compared with families with a singleton birth at the same parity and mother age, with no reduction of subsequent fertility. Numbers of children surviving to age 14 also increased. Twin births also show no differential effect on fertility when they occurred at high parities; this finding is in contrast to populations where fertility is known to have been controlled by at least some families, such as in England, 1900-1949, where a twin birth increased average births per family by significantly less than 1.

Religion and fertility patterns: comparison of life history traits in Catholics and Protestants, Hallstatt (Austria) 1733-1908

Catholicism and Protestantism have different ways of promoting the family unit that could influence survival and fertility at a population level. Parish records in the Austrian village of Hallstatt allowed the reconstruction of Catholic and Protestant genealogies over a period of 175 years (1733-1908) to evaluate how religion and social changes affected reproduction and survival. Life history traits such as lifespan beyond 15 years, number of offspring, reproductive span, children born out of wedlock and child mortality were estimated in 5678 Catholic and 3282 Protestant individuals. The interaction of sex, time and religion was checked through non-parametric factorial ANOVAs. Religion and time showed statistically significant interactions with lifespan >15 years, number of offspring and age at birth of first child. Protestants lived longer, had a larger reproductive span and an earlier age at birth of first child. Before the famine crisis of 1845-1850, Protestants showed lower values of childhood mortality than Catholics. Comparison of the number of children born out of wedlock revealed small differences between the two religions. Religion influenced reproduction and survival, as significant differences were found between Catholics and Protestants. This influence could be explained in part by differential socioeconomic characteristics, since Protestants may have enjoyed better living and sanitary conditions in Hallstatt.

From Malthusian Disequilibrium to the Post-Malthusian Era: The Evolution of the Preventive and Positive Checks in Germany, 1730-1870

This study draws on a new data set of vital rates and real wages to explore short-term and long-term behavior of the preventive and positive checks in a major economy of premodern mainland Europe. Four results stand out. First, the preventive check was fairly stable throughout the period 1730–1870; its magnitude of 0.2 to 0.35 was comparable with that of England, northern and central Italy, and Sweden. Second, the eighteenth century was characterized by Malthusian disequilibrium in that there was no long-term relationship between the crude death rate and the real wage, whereas the crude death rate’s instantaneous response to income changes was a substantial –0.4. Third, the short-term positive check may have weakened over the eighteenth century and largely disappeared in the 1810s. The diversification of food risk resulting from the spread of potato cultivation, market integration, and the development of the nonagricultural sectors are potential explanations of the demise and disappearance of the positive check. Fourth, between the 1810s and the 1860s, vital rates and the real wage were stationary, which is consistent with a post-Malthusian regime in which technological progress depended on population size. The 1810s marked the time when Germany transited from a Malthusian regime in disequilibrium to the post-Malthusian era.

The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography

This reflection on the evolution of methods and data in historical demography argues that we can still find inspiration and guidance in the work of the founders of our discipline. Historical demography is in the midst of a transition from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. Previous generations relied on demographic models to squeeze as much information as possible from the small amounts of data available. Today we live in a new era of large data sets and regression models. Researchers are creating both regional and international historical data sets of unprecedented size and depth. When examined closely, however, the methods that we use now make the same simplifying assumptions that generated the key advances of earlier generations. As we transition to new methods, demographic insight must inform our analyses and enrich our conclusions.

Randomness in the Bedroom: There Is No Evidence for Fertility Control in Pre-Industrial England

Overturning a generation of research, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413–436 (2017) found strong parity-dependent fertility control in pre-Industrial England 1540–1850. We show that their result is an unfortunate artifact of their statistical method, relying on mother fixed effects, which contradicts basic biological possibilities for fecundity. These impossible parity effects also appear with simulated fertility data that by design have no parity control. We conclude that estimating parity control using mother fixed effects is in no way feasible. We also show, using the Cambridge Group data that Cinnirella et al. used, that there is no sign of parity-dependent fertility control in English marriages before 1850.

Further Evidence of Within-Marriage Fertility Control in Pre-Transitional England

The identification of parity effects on the hazard of a next birth in cross-family data requires accounting for heterogeneity in fecundity across couples. In a previously published article, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413-436 (2017), we stratified duration models at the maternal level for this purpose and found that the hazard of a next birth decreases with rising parity in historical England. Clark and Cummins Demography, 56 (2019) took issue with this finding, claiming that the result is a statistical artifact caused by stratification at the maternal level. This reply documents that our previous finding is robust to addressing Clark and Cummins' critique.