Two Islands

Abstract

The first and best documented escape from the Malthusian trap occurred in the island kingdom of Britain and particularly in England. The demographic peculiarity of England began to become apparent to historians in the mid 1960s when the systematic reconstruction of the population history of England was undertaken by members of the ‘Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’. ‘Indeed the more deeply the English experience is probed, the more unusual it appears to be.’¹ Wrigley, Schofield, Laslett and others showed that somehow England had moved from a situation where there were periodic crises caused by war, famine and disease to a much lower and steadier level of balanced mortality and fertility well before the eighteenth-century industrialization process began.