Aging in World History by David G. Troyansky

Author:David G. Troyansky [Troyansky, David G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, World
ISBN: 9781317381419
Google: x92oCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-05T16:10:35+00:00

7

Demographic Transitions and Implications for the Aged

As we saw in the previous chapter, cultural shifts surrounding old age beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century occurred against the backdrop of some lengthening of the average life span for individuals in the Western world. It was not dramatic, and it was not yet the beginning of the population aging that would occur from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth and twenty-first. But it did mean a greater visibility of the aged and children’s greater familiarity with grandparents. At the same time, Enlightenment-era literature focused new attention on population and social welfare, and French Revolutionary legislators and administrators identified emerging needs of vulnerable populations as well as the rhetorical uses of old persons in stabilizing regimes. The era of the French Revolution also marked an inflection point in the demographic history of Europe, with important implications worldwide.

One of the ways in which historians have defined modernity has been through population trends characteristic of the last couple of centuries. Historical demographers speak of an old demographic regime and a new one. The old regime was characterized by high death rates and high birth rates, in a kind of balance described as it was coming to an end at the turn of the nineteenth century by Thomas Malthus (An Essay on the Principle of Population). The new regime involved reduced death rates and birth rates. As we will see, the transition from one to the other could occur as rapidly as a few decades in the less developed world of the second half of the twentieth century and as long as a couple of centuries (or more) among some Western Europeans beginning around 1800. How world populations have transformed themselves has varied from place to place. Scholarship undertaken from the 1960s through the 1980s attempted to draw a vast portrait of fertility decline across Europe, but the evidence failed to confirm one model followed everywhere. Nonetheless, the basic ingredients have been loosely comparable. Demographers focus principally on rates of birth, marriage, and death; they also examine rates of migration. Migration in the modern world has usually involved movement from country to city and along international paths, and marital rates have varied significantly from place to place, but the key variables in what has been called the demographic transition have been births and deaths.

Over the long term, birth rates and death rates have both come down, as methods of contraception have become more effective and public health measures, education, nutrition, and medicine have had their impacts. The international history of the demographic transition is characterized by differences in timing. In some places, birth rates declined first and death rates followed. But more often, mortality decline preceded fertility decline, and the natural result was population growth. More reliable sources of food, cleaner water, the disappearance of plague, and small but consequential climatic change (a warmer eighteenth century after the “Little Ice Age” of the seventeenth) made a difference on the mortality side.

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