Robert Woods

The Effects of Population Redistribution on the Level of Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

Changes in life expectancy in England and Wales during the nineteenth century are examined with particular reference to the conclusion of E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield that no radical increase in life expectancy occurred between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The focus is on the effect of population redistribution on mortality and on mortality differences between rural and urban areas. (ANNOTATION)

Mortality and sanitary conditions in the “Best governed city in the world”—Birmingham, 1870–1910

Abstract The growth of population in nineteenth-century Britain has often been attributed to the decline in mortality during that period. Here the relationship between improvements in sanitary conditions and the fall in disease mortality is considered for one particular city in the period 1870–1910. Medical Officer of Health reports are used to show the spatiotemporal patterns of both a selection of fatal diseases and sanitary conditions in Birmingham in the 1880s. This evidence suggests that administrative developments in hospital provision, for instance, need to be combined with public health improvements in any explanation of mortality decline. Further, that poverty, as reflected by back to back housing, is more closely associated with high mortality than variables measuring sanitary conditions.

Ethnic segregation in Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s

(1979). Ethnic segregation in Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s. Ethnic and Racial Studies: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 455-476.

Book review: Petersen, W. 1979: Malthus. London: Heinemann. vii + 302 pp. £9.50: Haines, M.R. 1979: Fertility and occupation: population patterns in industrialization. London and New York: Academic Press. xiii + 275 pp. £10.80, US

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) has always been a controversial figure: not because of his actions, he led a very quiet academic life, but because of his writings and in particular the ways in which they have been used by subsequent generations. Malthus was a moralist, an economist, a demographer and a political economist, but these roles were rarely clearly distinguished. He frequently wrote on matters of political economy with the phraseology of a moralist. He was a conservative with a fervently held belief in individual freedom, both economic and political. His major works the First essay of 1798 and the Second essay of 1803, are strongly worded documents, but they also show a distinct shift of emphasis. ’Malthus 1798.’ and ’Malthus 1803’ are in a sense different characters. As his friend and colleague Francis Horner once remarked, there was in hialthus’s work ’a want of precision in the statement of his principles, and distinct perspicuity in upholding the consequences which he traces from them’ (quoted by James, 1979, 150). Here lie the reasons for htalthus’s controversial position and the problems that any contemporary critic will have to contend with. There can be