Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830Death and the Metropolis offers a powerful analysis of demographic patterns in London over the 'long eighteenth century', concentrating on mortality but also including data on marital fertility, population structure and migration. The study is based on a variety of sources including weekly and annual Bills of Mortality, parish registers and Quaker vital registers, and employs the techniques of family reconstitution and aggregative analysis. The data are analysed within the framework of a structural model of mortality change comprising the proximate determinants of exposure to, and resistance against, infectious agents on the the part of populations. Within this framework a model is established describing the specific demographic and epidemiological characteristics of early modern metropolitan centres. The evidence indicates that mortality in London was much higher than in other settlements in England for most of the period, but declined steeply in the later eighteenth century. This apparently reflected changes in exposure to infections. |
Contents
Mortality theory and historical epidemiology | 7 |
Aspects of metropolitan economic and social life | 40 |
a preliminary test | 89 |
Mortality among London Quakers | 131 |
Mortality levels among the general population | 162 |
total | 183 |
The seasonality of mortality | 203 |
principal components analysis | 222 |
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Common terms and phrases
adult burial age-groups Age-specific burials Allhallows Apr Jul Oct associated Aug Oct Dec baptisms Bills of Mortality bread prices burial seasonality burial series burial totals cause of death cent changes child burials Christ Church Spitalfields coefficients consumption convulsions correlations Cripplegate crises De-trended burials decades demographic diseases districts East City East Thames economic effects eighteenth century estimates Feb Apr Jun figure Holborn increase infant burials infant mortality infection intramural parishes Jan Mar Jul Sep Nov Jun Aug Oct L group latter level of mortality London Bills metropolitan mortality levels mortality peaks Oct Dec Month parish group Parish Register pattern period population principal components analysis ratio relationship relatively respiratory tuberculosis sample scores Sep Nov Feb Shoreditch significant smallpox Southwark spatial St Botolph Aldersgate St Giles St Giles Cripplegate St Mary Stepney substantial suggests tion total burials trend typhus variance Westminster whilst Wrigley Z scores