Economic and Social Implications

Abstract

The previous section concluded that the mechanisms of economic change and demographic control worked well enough in most places to prevent population growth from reducing the living standards of the mass of the population to a subsistence level. Some countries, however, and England in particular, did substantially better than this: there was real economic growth. England, in a period of rapid demographic change, also experienced the onset of the world’s first ‘industrial revolution’, a shift to sustained, industry-led economic growth, associated with major changes in the scale and organisation of production. By 1850 similar transformations were also getting under way over much of the rest of Western Europe. Could the demographic growth have been a causal factor in these economic changes?