Hinde on Razzell, _Population and Disease: Transforming English Society, 1550-1850 _

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (July 2008)

Peter Razzell, _Population and Disease: Transforming English Society, 
1550-1850 _. London: Caliban Books, 2007. xviii + 314 pp. £45 
(cloth), ISBN: 978-1-85066-047-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Andrew Hinde, Southampton Statistical Sciences 
Research Institute, University of Southampton.


For more than 30 years, Peter Razzell has played the role of an 
outsider questioning and criticizing the accounts of population 
change and economic development in the English past which formed the 
prevailing historical orthodoxy. In the 1970s, his response to the 
McKeown thesis argued that McKeown and his colleagues had 
underestimated the roles of immunization against smallpox and 
improvements in personal hygiene in effecting the decline of 
mortality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, 
he has been skeptical of the account of English population history 
written by E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Schofield and their colleagues at the 
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 
arguing that the latter depends unduly on assumptions made about the 
accuracy of English parish registers, assumptions with which Razzell 
disagrees.

In this, his latest book, Razzell returns to both these themes (his 
review of one of the Cambridge Group's major works is republished as 
Chapter 3, and Chapter 7 is a summary of his work on the conquest of 
smallpox), but takes his critique of existing research into England's 
demographic history much further than he has hitherto. The book 
consists of ten chapters, six of which have previously been 
published. Chapters 1-5 and Chapter 9 question the empirical evidence 
underlying the academic consensus about the population history of 
England, and mount a challenge to the established view of what 
happened. In Chapter 10, Razzell ranges even beyond this, into the 
question of the relationship between population change and economic 
development in general. Put very simply, Razzell argues that 
population growth in England between 1550 and 1850 was determined 
largely by exogenous changes in mortality, and specifically by the 
nature and virulence of infectious diseases. Economic growth was 
largely determined by population growth. When mortality was low, as 
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and again 
after 1750, and the population was able to grow, economic growth was 
encouraged. When the disease environment was harshest, as it was 
between 1650 and 1750, economic stagnation was the consequence. On 
the other hand, industrialization was part of a separate process, 
described by Razzell as the "development of capitalism" (p. 251) 
arising from factors largely unrelated to population and the social 
structure. These arguments are described in detail in the two central 
chapters to the book, entitled "Poverty or Disease Environment: The 
History of Mortality in Britain, 1500-1950" and "Population, Poverty 
and Wealth: The History of Mortality and Nuptiality in England, 
1550-1850."

The bulk of Razzell's empirical evidence is derived from the Church 
of England parish registers. The Cambridge Group argued that 
ecclesiastical registration of births and deaths was virtually 
complete in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and held 
up well until the mid eighteenth century before deteriorating 
substantially to become seriously deficient between 1780 and 1820. 
The first two chapters of this book consist of an examination of the 
reliability of burial registration by the Church of England. 
Razzell's analysis suggests that burial registration was at its most 
defective in the early years of Anglican registration, with around a 
third of deaths not being registered, and improved (if anything) 
during the eighteenth century. Thus mortality was substantially 
higher in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than has previously 
been thought, and consequently there was much greater scope for a 
fall in mortality during the eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries. Razzell presents less data on the quality of baptism 
registration, and they only cover the period since 1760, but his 
evidence suggests that there was little change between 1760 and 1834 
in the proportion of births which were not registered. By contrast, 
Wrigley and Schofield argue for a substantial deterioration in the 
quality of the baptism registers between 1760 and 1800 and it is 
largely as a consequence of their correction for this trend that they 
conclude that fertility rose in England during this period, and that 
a rise in fertility was the main reason for the acceleration in 
population growth.

If Razzell is correct, then the implications for our understanding of 
England's population history are profound. For a start, the mid 
sixteenth century no longer marks a shift from the mortality-driven 
system of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to a system 
dominated by the Malthusian preventive check. Neither is there any 
need to explain the rapid population growth after 1740 in terms of 
the demise of the preventive check. Rapid population growth after 
1740 happened because mortality declined as the impact of disease 
became less severe, partly through the application of medical 
technology, and partly through improvements in personal and communal 
hygiene. The past 40 years of research into early modern English 
demography have thus been a blind alley down which historical 
demographers have been led because they failed to appreciate the 
extent of omissions in the parish burial registers of the sixteenth, 
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The remaining chapters of the book examine the role of personal 
hygiene in influencing English mortality between 1500 and 1900 and 
the issue of social and economic mortality differentials in England 
before the twentieth century. The last of these is especially 
interesting, for Razzell argues that a social class gradient in 
mortality is a relatively recent feature, only clearly emerging since 
1900. Before this, overconsumption and the fact that many wealthy 
people lived in unhealthy urban environments counteracted any 
advantage conferred by their greater incomes.

It is too early to tell whether Razzell is correct in his main 
thesis, and much more work needs to be done to evaluate his approach. 
For example, much of his evidence is based on his "same-name" 
technique, which he describes in the first chapter of this book. This 
method is based on the fact that in the English past, parents hardly 
ever gave the same forename to two living children. Razzell presents 
an evaluation of the accuracy of this method which seems fairly 
convincing, but given the weight that it has to bear, more research 
is surely needed. I have a few minor quibbles with the presentation 
of the data. Razzell presents many estimates of the child mortality 
rate and infant mortality rate. Yet he does not state how these were 
calculated (whether they are central or initial rates, for example). 
Several tables in Chapters 4 and 5 include details of a quantity 
which is described as the sum of the infant mortality rate and the 
child mortality rate. The interpretation of this sum is problematical 
since the denominators of the two rates are different. It might also 
have been interesting to compare the infant and child mortality rates 
for various localities estimated from early nineteenth century 
reconstitution data with those for the same localities calculated 
from early civil registration data (say for the 1850s) to see whether 
they are consistent.

Despite these reservations, this is a thought-provoking book which is 
likely to stimulate debate among researchers interested in the 
population history of England. It is aimed largely at an academic 
readership, and assumes considerable familiarity with the source 
materials and relevant scholarship. For those who possess this, 
however, it is definitely worth delving into.


Andrew Hinde is the author of _England's Population: A History since 
the Domesday Survey_ (London, Arnold, 2003). He is on the editorial 
panel of the journal _Local Population Studies_, in which two of the 
chapters in Razzell's book were first published. Email: 
PRAHinde at aol.com or Andrew.Hinde at soton.ac.uk.
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