The mechanisms of biological, social, and cultural nature linking subsistence, mortality, and population, and determining its short and long term cycles, are discussed in an analysis of european demographic history. book description from the time of malthus, the insufficient supply of food resources has been considered the main constraint of population growth and the main factor in the high mortality prevailing in pre industrial times. In this essay, the mechanisms of biological, social and cultural nature linking subsistence, mortality and population and determining its short and long term cycles are discussed.

The author's analysis examines the existing evidence from the century of the great plague to the industrial revolution, interpreting the scanty quantitative information concerning caloric budgets and food supply, prices and wages, changes in body height and epidemiological history, demographic behaviours of the rich and of the poor. The emerging picture sheds doubts on the existence of a long term interrelation between subsistence of nutritional levels and mortality, showing that the level of the latter was determined more by the epidemiological cycles than by the nutritional level of the population. From the time of malthus, the insufficient supply of food resources has been considered the main constraint of population growth and the main factor in the high mortality prevailing in pre industrial times. He has been president of the international union for the scientific study of population.

He has published extensively on contemporary demography as well as on the history of population, and has taught or held fellowships at universities all over the world, including the college de france, the colegio de mexico, princeton university of california at berkeley, and brown university, providence, ri. Richard smith is senior lecturer, school of education, at the university of durham, england, and is editor of the journal of philosophy of education. Gloria hunniford is a major and much loved media celebrity who appears on numerous programs. She has won many prestigious awards including tv personality of the year and best dressed female. Jan de vries is a distinguished naturopath trained in a number of branches of natural medicine including homeopathy and osteopathy. He has established a number of clinics in england, has written numerous books on health, and has a huge client network making himself accessible to everyone, from the ordinary to the rich and famous. Paul johnson is a historian whose work ranges across the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities.

He contributes a weekly essay to the spectator and a monthly column to forbes , and lectures around the world. Wrightson, formerly professor of social history at the university of cambridge, is now professor of history at yale university. description: founded in 1975, population and development review seeks to advance knowledge of the interrelationships between population and socioeconomic development and provides a forum for discussion of related issues of public policy. Combining readability with scholarship, the journal draws on high level social science expertise in economics, anthropology, sociology, and political science to offer challenging ideas, provocative analysis, and critical insights. Each issue includes a lively collection of book reviews and an archives section that brings to light historical writings with a resonance for contemporary population debate. 4 moving wall the moving wall represents the time period between the last issue available in jstor and the most recently published issue of a journal.

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andrew hinde

department of social statistics, university of southampton this book is one of a series entitled the making of europe. Which aims 'to address crucial aspects of european history in every field political, economic, social, religious, and cultural' p. In this contribution to the series, massimo livi bacci attempts to produce a history of europe's population from roughly the end of the eleventh century to the present day within the confines of a volume of about 200 pages. This looks like a fairly ambitious undertaking, the more so when we learn that by 'europe', professor livi bacci means everywhere west of the urals.

Indeed one could question whether it is sensible even to try to generalise over such an extended period about a geographical area stretching from european russia to portugal. He is the author of population and nutrition: an essay on european demographic history cambridge, 1991 , and a concise history of world population second ed. Someone who has tackled the world's population history in a book of about 200 pages is surely well equipped to tackle europe's in roughly the same amount of space. How, then, does he set about the task? first, he erects a framework within which to set his narrative.

The framework sets individual or group choices against the constraints imposed by resources and the environment. He argues that this allows the story to be simplified because the constraints space, the availability of land, epidemiology, etc. The overall story is then about how human populations have adapted to those constraints, gradually freeing themselves more and more to behave as they choose. The beauty of this framework is that it can be used successfully for the whole of the historical period with which he is concerned. The way livi bacci views the 'constraints', however, is different from that adopted in much of the literature, especially that on the population history of england.

The latter has become embroiled in long debates about the relative importance of forces internal to the demographic system such as malthus's preventive check and exogenous forces such as the 'autonomous death rate' in reining in population growth prior to the eighteenth century. Schofield's the population history of england, 1541 1871: a reconstruction cambridge, 1981. But this is a relative newcomer compared with the long running dispute not specific to england about whether the long period of population expansion during the middle ages was brought to an end by a malthusian positive check at the end of the thirteenth century or by the 'exogenous' intervention of the black death in 1347 50. Whether the constraints are 'endogenous' or 'exogenous' is not really the interesting question.

What is interesting is how they limited the choices available to individuals and groups, and how populations responded to this. Land reclamation and attempts to intensify agricultural production have repeatedly been made over the centuries. Similarly, even though they did not possess prophylactic or therapeutic measures to combat diseases, populations did what they could to minimise their impact sometimes successfully, as in the case of quarantine measures against plague in the seventeenth century. Right up to the end of the nineteenth century there were setbacks, some of which were direct side effects of development. For example, in nineteenth century italy, public building projects and increased mobility of seasonal labourers facilitated the geographical spread of malaria. Similarly, pellagra spread in southern europe during the early nineteenth century as more and more people became reliant on a diet based on corn.