The Enlightened Economy by Joel Mokyr

Author:Joel Mokyr [Mokyr, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141969107
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Demographic Transformation in the Age of Enlightenment

I have already noted the rather astonishing growth in population that Britain experienced during the period in question. The essential data on the growth of British population are provided in table 13.1. The basic facts are not in doubt, although some details have remained controversial. At some point in the middle of the eighteenth century, British population abruptly began to surge at a rate far more rapid than ever experienced before. This phenomenon was not unique to Britain: in other countries in Europe, too, there were signs by 1750 that the Malthusian constraints were becoming looser. The early data are still somewhat conjectural and the experiences of different economies vary. In the Netherlands and Germany, for instance, population growth set in later, but once it had shifted into high gear, it was faster and continued for longer than in Britain. The French experience was the reverse: population did take off in the eighteenth century, but then its growth slowed down long before the British did. Even in the relatively backward southern and eastern parts of the Continent, the decades of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century mark a break in the “old demographic regime.” Something truly dramatic changed in the population dynamics of the European Continent and the British Isles. The hard but ineluctable question is why it happened.

The evidence on the disintegration of the Malthusian model in Britain is perplexing because it is quite clear that it happened before there was any sign of the Industrial Revolution, to say nothing of sustained economic growth. A detailed test of a Malthusian model is not easy to carry out, but work by historical demographers suggests that already by the mid-eighteenth century British demographic behavior was no longer very sensitive to fluctuations in real wages or real income. A recent paper by Nicolini (2007) finds the impact of real wages on mortality to be weak after 1640 and that on fertility to disappear around 1740. The reverse impact, of birth and death rates on wages, was found to be “weak and sporadic” (p. 115). In other words, the negative feedback mechanism that was supposed to regulate population through the sensitivity of birth and death rates to living standards and real wages seems to have been de-activated before the Industrial Revolution. In this respect, Britain was a leader; in no other country was the connection between real wages and demographic variables so weak (Galloway, 1988; Post, 1990). Yet Britain was just like the rest of Europe: after 1750 the old demographic regime seems to have collapsed abruptly everywhere and, whether the economy was rich or poor, in the nineteenth century population just took off.

As table 13.1 shows, demographic growth in Britain in the period 1700–1850 went through four stages. During the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, English population grew quite slowly, at an average growth rate of 0.26 percent a year. In the following forty years, 1751–91, population growth rate almost tripled to 0.

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