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Malthus to modernity: wealth, status, and fertility in England, 1500–1879

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Abstract

A key challenge to theories of long-run economic growth has been linking the onset of modern growth with the move to modern fertility limitation. A notable puzzle for these theories is that modern growth in England began around 1780, 100 years before there was seemingly any movement to limit fertility. Here we show that the aggregate data on fertility in England before 1880 conceals significant declines in the fertility of the middle and upper classes earlier. These declines coincide with the Industrial Revolution and are of the character predicted by some recent theories of long-run growth.

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Notes

  1. Taking the Demographic Transition as the date overall marital fertility fell by 10 %. See Strulik and Vollmer 2014 for a recent empirical survey of global fertility trends.

  2. Theories which fail this challenge include, Becker et al. (1990), Hansen and Prescott (2002), and Lucas (2002). Galor and Weil (2000) and Galor and Moav (2002) achieve concordance with much of the fertility pattern but, as we will see below, still face challenges.

  3. Hollingsworth (1957) showed that from 1350 to 1729, the net fertility of the richest of English ducal families was generally below the average for England. Wrigley et al. (1997, p. 427) concluded that fertility differentials by occupation were “trivial” before 1837.

  4. This parish record analysis finds more muted effects than here, but this is because occupations are imperfect measures of wealth, wealth itself being the crucial explanator of fertility before 1760 as shown in Table 11.

  5. Assuming that 60 % of male deaths in 1861 were of men aged 21 or above.

  6. Wrigley and Schofield (, p. 510) stress the “remarkable homogeneity of the patterns” observed in the data for individual English parishes. For the years after 1837, Wilson and Woods (1991, p. 414) state, “In Victorian England and Wales demographic variations were local rather than regional.”

  7. Omission of children, at least in a sex-biased sense, appears to be inconsequential from 1580 on (see Table A1).

  8. Such measures include age-specific fertility rates, total fertility rates, and child to woman ratios.

  9. See Table A3. In about half of these cases, we only get the date of first marriage or the date of the first child born, but we can use this information to estimate a birth date for the testator from the fact that the average age at first marriage was 28, and the average age at first birth is 29.1.

  10. A concern with these marriage cohorts is that, for reasons of record availability, we have unbalanced death cohorts. For married or widowed men outside London, for example, we have 1,243 observations for the 1630s and 157 for the 1640s. This will lead to the marriage cohorts having an unbalanced age structure. Some will have too many older men and some too many younger men. To correct this, we calculate the net fertility by marriage cohort, reweighting by the inverse of the sizes of the probate cohorts who contributed observations to each marriage cohort.

  11. The will sample fails to identify some widowers, since if they have no surviving children or grandchildren and fail to mention their deceased wife or her relatives in the will, they will be classified as single. However, the number of such omissions should be constant over time.

  12. Using death duty registers, Green et al. (2009, p. 323) uncover a similar age-wealth profile for men dying in the late nineteenth century as for our men first marrying 1780-1879.

  13. The R 2 value of the relationship between wealth and fertility is several times higher than that between age and fertility.

  14. These dates correspond to a marriage cohort split on 1780. For men dying in 1860–1914, the sample over weights married men since, initially, we were concerned to sample only those whose age could be obtained from the censuses of 1841 and later. For this reason, we have to report Fig. 9 by death cohort.

  15. In this exercise, we counted as survivors only children still living at the time of the will, not those dead but with surviving children of their own.

  16. We can compare these rates to survival rates estimated from parish burial records. Before 1800, these suggest that 69 % of those born were alive at age 15, but the average child at the time of the will was older than 15, so these rates are similar (Wrigley et al. 1997, p. 262).

  17. This would be along the lines of “Demographic Transition theory.” Parents will rationally adjust their fertility (with a lag) to the mortality environment (Thompson 1929; Landry 1934; Notestein 1945).

  18. Clark and Cummins (2009) give further evidence against this possibility through an examination of the fertility patterns of men in different mortality environments in preindustrial England. The countryside was so much safer than London that if reduced mortality risks were leading to declining fertility, it should already have happened in the most rural locations even before 1780.

  19. The conclusions to the European Fertility Project (Coale and Watkins 1986) suggested that the fertility transition across Europe was not an economic “adaptation” but a result of “ideational change”—more closely associated with cultural and linguistic variables than the economy (see also Knodel and van de Walle 1986 and the literature review in Cummins 2009). Recent work which incorporates “social norms” into a couple’s fertility decision-making process includes that of Manski and Mayshar (2003), Munshi and Myaux (2006), and Bhattacharya and Chakraborty (2012).

  20. Boberg-Fazlic et al. (2011), however, find greater occupational differences in fertility before 1600 in the 26 Cambridge Group reconstitutions parishes, suggesting that this greater wealth effect before 1600 is likely correct.

  21. There are sufficient extant wills that it will be possible to check conclusively whether fertility among the rich was even higher before 1600.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Gregory Clark

  2. Department of Economic History, LSE, London, UK

    Neil Cummins

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Correspondence to Gregory Clark.

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Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang

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Clark, G., Cummins, N. Malthus to modernity: wealth, status, and fertility in England, 1500–1879. J Popul Econ 28, 3–29 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-014-0509-9

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