Poverty, Progress, and Population

Introduction: 1. In search of the industrial revolution; Part I. The Wellsprings of Growth: 2. The divergence of England: the growth of the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 3. Reflections on the history of energy supply, living standards and economic growth; 4. Two kinds of capitalism, two kinds of growth; 5. Men on the land and men in the countryside: employment in agriculture in early nineteenth-century England; 6. Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions; 7. Why poverty was inevitable in traditional societies; 8. Malthus on the prospects for the labouring poor; 9. The occupational structure of England in the nineteenth century; Part II. Town and Country: 10. City and country in the past: a sharp divide or a continuum?; 11. 'The great commerce of every civilised society': urban growth in early modern Europe; 12. Country and town: the primary, secondary and tertiary peopling of England in the early modern period; 13. Brake or accelerator? Urban growth and population growth before the industrial revolution; Part III. The Numbers Game: 14. How reliable is our knowledge of the demographic characteristics of the English population in the early modern period?; 15. Explaining the rise in marital fertility in the 'long' eighteenth century; 16. No death without birth: the implications of English mortality in the early modern period; 17. Demographic retrospective; Bibliography.