History Of Demography Research Paper

As an organized academic subdiscipline it is a recent arrival in the social sciences. There were only a handful of established academic posts in demography, mostly privately funded in US universities, before the Second World War. Yet, by virtue of its obvious importance in terms of raison d’etat, enumeration of populations for fiscal, military, administrative, and colonial purposes dates back to the world’s ancient civilizations (and the Domesday Book demonstrates its sporadic occurrence in the medieval period, too). Further-more, compilation of family genealogies and maintenance of vital registers of births, marriages, and deaths for religious and for legal purposes both have venerable histories, now proving to be of value for demographic historians of early modern Europe, North and South America, Japan, and China. Proper demographic study requires two kinds of information: accurate and regular census details (now taken decennially in most countries) on the stock of the defined population (numbers of each sex alive at each year of age); and information on the continuous flow of vital events, the numbers of each sex born alive, and the numbers dying at each exact age. This permits calculation of the age-and sex-specific rates of fertility and mortality necessary for genuinely comparable measures of a population’s principal dynamic demo-graphic characteristics, while also allowing for the effects of net in-or out-migration. Many further kinds of demographic analysis can be undertaken if the appropriate information is collected.

The study of populations of any size presupposes an official apparatus of data collection of some considerable size and sophistication and demography is therefore unique among the social sciences in the extent of its intimate involvement with the priorities of governments and officials and the wider influences of politics upon the state. Until recently only government bureaucracies could command the clerical resources required for the statistical analysis. Hence, government census bureaux provided the initial demand for automated punch-card tabulating machines and later for the production of the first nonmilitary electronic computers (the US Census Bureau’s Univac, com-missioned for the 1950 census). The subsequent proliferation of cheap computing resources has undoubtedly been a necessary precondition for the expansion of demography as an academic discipline with numerous independent, nonofficial practitioners.

Demography has therefore had a close historical association with the rise of nation-states throughout the entire modern period. But demography’s early development has also been strongly influenced at times by the needs of smaller, subnational polities, such as the municipalities of Britain since the seventeenth century or the federated states of eighteenth-century Germany. Furthermore, the institutional and intellectual character of demography’s rapid disciplinary growth since World War II has been much influenced by explicitly transnational institutions such as the UN and the World Bank and major independent (though mostly American) philanthropic organizations, such as the Population Council, the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations. Nevertheless, national governments remain the principal collectors of continuous series of demographic data, so that the nation remains the typical ‘population’ addressed.

Modern demography’s origins are conventionally traced to the practitioners of ‘political arithmetic’ in Restoration England. From the sixteenth century onwards it was increasingly the practice of European cities to compile bills of mortality—weekly death records—as an early warning system for epidemics, particularly of plague. In London the existence of this data provided the immediate context for the first recorded efforts at demographic analysis by John Graunt (1629–74), ‘the father of modern demography.’ In his Natural and political observations made upon the bills of mortality (1662) he also used records of London christenings to develop a rudimentary Life Table. This is the fundamental technique for the correct analysis of mortality because it divides the population into age sections and gives statistics for the probability of dying at each age, which can then be arithmetically summed to a single average life expectancy at any age, enabling populations with vastly different age structures or mortality regimes to be compared. Graunt had thus grasped the two fundamental demographic insights: that the age and sex composition of a population powerfully influences the incidence of vital events; and this means that population processes are all significantly interdependent.

Life table techniques developed very gradually over the ensuing century, with notable work by Sir Edmund Halley (1656–1742), the Dutchman Willem Kersse-boom (c.1690–1771), the German Johann Sussmilch (1707–67), the Frenchman Antoine Deparcieux (1703–68), the Swiss-born Leonhard Euler (1707–83), and a host of British contributors to the so-called ‘population controversy’ (over whether or not the kingdom’s population had increased since the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, when the civil servant Gregory King had compiled, from tax returns, the only detailed estimate of a European nation’s population made in the early modern period). Finally, the first technically correct empirical life table was published in 1815, for commercial actuarial purposes, by Joshua Milne (1776–1851), using accurate census and vital registration data collected for public health purposes in Carlisle during the years 1779–87.

During the nineteenth century the principal vehicle for the further development of demographic analysis was the General Register Office (GRO) in London. This British lead was an unlikely development, in that the British census was not even established on a permanent basis (it had to be invoked by a separate Act of Parliament every 10 years), whereas the Scandinavian countries of Iceland (1703) and Sweden (1749) had already instigated regular census-taking, while the new, expanding American federation had also committed itself to regular censuses, as integral to its process of political representation. The French and Belgians, with Condorcet, Laplace, Duvillard, Fourier, and Quetelet led the world in the relevant mathematical fields of probability and the application of statistics to human affairs.

The British lead that opened up was due to a chain of chance occurrences. The GRO was created by statute to oversee from 1837 a national civil registration system of births, deaths, and marriages (created not for public health or demographic purposes but as a liberal legal reform granting dissenters a record of their vital events independent of the registers of the Established Church). As a temporary expedient this small department of government then became vested in 1840 with responsibility for taking the nation’s fifth census of 1841 (the first was in 1801). The Registrar-General’s statistical assistant, recently appointed through Court patronage in the as yet unreformed civil service, was an unknown man of humble origins, medically trained and a self-taught statistician (partly on a visit to Paris). A representative member of the European-wide generation enthused by the promise of a statistical science of society inspired by the Belgian astronomer, Adolphe Quetelet (1796– 1874), William Farr (1807–83) immediately seized the opportunity presented by his responsibility for processing the two essential sources required for demo-graphic analysis. He launched a four-decades long career of innovative demographic and comparative epidemiological work. Britain was at this time in the throes of a profound mortality crisis in its industrial cities (in addition to rural Ireland’s fatal famine) and Farr saw his work as a public health campaign.

Thus, while it was in a Parisian publication that the term ‘demography’ was first coined in 1855—by Quetelet’s countryman, Achille Guillard—it was in Britain that it was most intensively practiced and developed as ‘vital statistics.’ Significant work was certainly done in other official statistical offices. Indeed, the most important subsequent technical innovation was the Lexis diagram invented by the German statistician, Wilhelm Lexis, in 1875 for representing the relationship between cohorts (or generations) and period effects (events).

The GRO’s lead was surprising in another sense in that the single English name most famously associated with the origins of demography is not the civil servant William Farr with his primary medical focus on preventable mortality, but the cleric and academic Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose focus was on the economy and preventable fertility. His conservative polemic, An essay on the principle of population, published anonymously in 1798, enunciated that ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.’ Malthus, who held the first ever Chair in Political Economy in Britain and regarded Adam Smith as his principal mentor, thereby applied the fundamental economic problem of scarcity to demography and produced an analysis which famously stimulated Darwin to apply a similar logic to the problem of the origin of species, with profound intellectual results.

Malthus was the seminal influence on demography, in terms of the third intellectual activity outlined above, interpretation. His forthright axioms and policy implications demanded a response from the intellectuals of every country and secured a permanent place in the social and biological sciences for the discussion of population problems. In the much revised and extended editions of his Essay he continued to feed the debate, further analyzing and exploring the manner in which aggregate population change, mortality and migration, and individuals’ and families’ reproductive behavior is integrated into the encompassing natural, social, and economic environment, while using examples drawn from across the world to show how profoundly they were also influenced by customs, beliefs, and politics. He notoriously drew the wrath of Marx for his support for the radical reduction of the nation’s welfare net with the amendment of the Poor Law in 1834, on the grounds that its ‘generosity’ was discouraging prudence among the prolific poor, who married too young and so had too many children.

Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century most of those studying demographic phenomena were gentlemen scholars in local and national statistical societies, medical men, municipal and some state officials scattered all across Europe and North America. From mid-century they met periodically at International Congresses of Statistics, then of ‘Hygiene and Demography’ and eventually of ‘Eugenics.’ But it was not until the interwar decades of the twentieth century that demography began to emerge with an independent disciplinary and professional identity, marked initially by the formation in 1928 of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, followed in 1931 by the foundation of the Population Association of America.

However, this formative era from the late nineteenth century onwards had also witnessed the rise of nationalist and imperialist rivalries and associated racist, social Darwinist ideologies. This came to exert a dominant (though not uncontested) influence over the practice of demography during the interwar years. French demography was perhaps the first to experience this overtly nationalist and xenophobic current, in the form of a defensive pronatalist popular reaction to defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1. This was partly ascribed to her extremely low birth rate, the French being the first nation in the world to have practiced widespread family limitation. The titles of the works of France’s leading demographers, such as Arsene Dumont, Jacques Bertillon, and Adolphe Landry repeatedly referred to ‘Depopulation’ and ‘decadence’ while her great novelist, Zola, writing in exile in London after the Dreyfus affair, mourned France’s lost Fecondite (1899).

The study of population problems in the interwar period became increasingly subsumed within this social Darwinist agenda. With its continuing necessary association with the state, demography was inevitably heavily implicated in the work done under the Fascist and Nazi regimes with their totalitarian ideologies. For this reason international conferences in both Rome and Berlin in the 1930s were partially boycotted and disrupted. But even in more liberal Britain, USA, or social democratic Sweden, demographic analysis became obsessed with class-differential fertility, ‘problem families,’ and fears of a ‘flight from parenthood’ associated with a succession of illiberal movements for national efficiency, eugenics, and ‘social hygiene.’ Only in the USSR was population analysis relatively free from this association (until Stalin’s own pronatalist drive during the war) but this was primarily because of the absence of demographers, due to Marx’s historic demonization of Malthus as the ultimate apologist of the bourgeoisie and their ‘dismal science’ of political economy. Given the bitter interwar political legacy in Europe, it was only in France and Britain that institutions for demographic research, L’Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques under Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990) and the Population Investigation Committee of the London School of Economics under David Glass (1911–78), positively flourished in the immediate aftermath of the war, both founding their respective journals in 1946, Population and Population Studies.

The decade of the Second World War marks a significant shift in which the center of gravity of the discipline of demography migrated from Europe to the USA. It was symbolic of this coming change that in work published between 1907 and 1939 a European-born but American-naturalized mathematician, Alfred Lotka (1880–1949), devised the proofs for the equations of renewal processes which underlie stable population theory (showing that populations always come to exhibit a constant age structure and growth rate if their fertility and mortality rates are unchanging). This has proved to be the most important mathematical advance in demography since the perfection of the Life Table technique (which applied to nonrenewal processes). Intriguingly, unknown to Lotka, Euler had already solved these equations in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Lotka’s work remained largely unexploited until after the Second World War, both facts which demonstrate that technical advances within disciplines do not in themselves necessarily cause change but are dependent on the institutional context and on ‘demand’ factors external to the discipline.

After the Second World War, demography rapidly responded to the ‘demand’ of the growing global preoccupation with planned economic growth, propelled in this direction by US strategic interests in the context of the Cold War rivalry with the USSR for client states among the many decolonizing peoples of the less developed world. Consequently, the second half of the twentieth century has become a relatively clearly demarcated third era in the history of demography when, in some senses, it has returned to the original Malthusian agenda of a preoccupation with economics and with policies to promote fertility restraint, especially among the world’s poor. The idea of ‘demographic transition’ has dominated the discipline’s approach throughout this era. This is a general historical model, promoted and adapted by Frank Notestein (1902–83), the highly influential and well-connected first Director, 1936–59, of the Princeton Office of Population Research (OPR), the most important institutional center for the new American-led demography. Demographic transition ‘theory’ pro-poses that in order for a nation to achieve sustained long-term economic growth it must reduce both its mortality and, especially, its fertility levels to those attained by the ‘modernized,’ liberal democratic Western countries. The model has surprisingly little consistent support in either the historical or con-temporary record but it has survived repeated revisionist challenges and has undoubtedly served the discipline well as an overarching ideological position which has successfully elicited a continuous flow of funds for both research and family planning programs.

It was in this policy context that the demand for various applications of stable population theory arose. Within the dominant postwar liberal consensus of ‘modernization theory,’ economic growth was seen as a generic process, such that less developed countries could be engineered to repeat the experience of the developed countries. Fertility restraint and mortality reduction were important population policy inputs to permit the occurrence of incremental capital: output ratios, considered essential for industrialization. This would be jeopardized by too great a demographic dependency burden (too many young and invalid old in the population) diverting income into current consumption instead of into savings and capital accumulation. Stable population theory enabled model life tables to be devised by A. J. Coale (Notestein’s successor as Director of OPR) and in-direct estimation techniques to be formulated by W. Brass (1921–99) of the London School of Hygiene, which permitted the measurement of demographic parameters in many of the less developed countries where primary information, particularly vital registration, was defective. A further application, for the same reason, has been its use in back projection and generalized inverse projection in historical demo-graphic work. Along with the use of ground-breaking work by Louis Henry, this has enabled E. A. Wrigley and his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population to utilize parish registers to reconstruct the detailed demographic record of the first industrial nation, England, back to the mid-sixteenth century, thereby, incidentally, demonstrating the invalidity of the demographic transition model in this important case.

Demography has achieved a considerable degree of disciplinary and institutional success, in many senses enviable by the standards of the other social sciences. Since 1945 training institutions have proliferated, primarily under the aegis of the Population Council, so that demographers are now trained in many centers in all the continents. By plausibly reducing, for certain purposes, the complexity of human affairs in matters of reproduction, morbidity and mortality, migration and mobility to tractable mathematical models, demography has achieved considerable analytical power. Like classical and neoclassical economics, conventional demographic analysis embraces a positivist epistemology. It also starts from the liberal and ‘democratic’ foundational fiction that each individual can in principle be legitimately treated as an equivalent accounting unit (a presumption that could only make sense in a post-Lockean world, where a working man could be deemed to count for the same as a prince, hence demography’s first text by John Graunt came from the hand of an exact contemporary of John Locke’s, another survivor of the modern world’s first overthrow of a supposedly divinely-appointed sovereign). The resulting accounting system has provided the epistemological basis for an increasingly elaborate range of useful technical developments (such as, most recently, multistate and multiregional demography), for which the separate entries on ‘Demography’ may be consulted.

Inevitably, however, there is an intellectual cost for the preservation of demography’s analytical rigor. Exceptional as it is, this has rather cut off demography from the rest of the social sciences and humanities, such that the entire ‘linguistic turn’ has gone largely unremarked in this discipline. Like all scientific activities, demography socially and ideologically constructs its objects of study but there has been little explicit acknowledgment of the implications of this. Thus, for a discipline which has devoted much energy to refining, for instance, calibration of the proximate (biological and physiological) causes of fertility variation, there has been much less interest in under-standing how the demographers’ own concept of fertility itself has arisen, and this applies to other social categories, such as ‘population,’ ‘family,’ or ‘house-hold.’ This disinclination to engage in critical reflexive practice has undoubtedly had significant and, for such an applied and policy-oriented discipline, real consequences. For many decades vast resources have been devoted to ‘family planning’ programs aiming to transplant ‘modern,’ ‘western’ contraceptive practices into an enormous variety of diverse cultures. More policy effectiveness might have been forthcoming if both fertility and birth control had been initially approached as culturally variable entities, whose meanings had to be researched in any population before attempting to modify them.

The future of demography, established as it now is in all the world’s major cultures, is likely to include much more active discussion of the relationship between its inherited inventory of ‘Western’ social categories and those of other peoples, something also likely to follow from the increasing sophistication of historical demography. It is likely to be less consumed with the problems of engendering economic growth and more with social equity and public health issues, including those of longevity and ‘aging,’ along with ecological problems of the uses and distribution of material wealth. This would represent a return, on a global scale, to the issues which so preoccupied the mid-nineteenth century demographic observers of the human disruption wreaked in Britain and Europe by the world’s first great wave of rapid economic growth. At the same time greater reintegration of demography into the intellectual concerns of the other social sciences seems long overdue and likely to be mutually beneficial. In particular, with its technical core in an abstract accounting approach, demography has remained relatively gender-neutral in its analyses, in the sense that it has singularly failed to attempt to grapple with thelinguistic and epistemological complexities that arise from acknowledging a negotiated and dialectical relationship between the two sexes in all that they do. A genuinely two-sex demography is likely to constitute the next fundamental advance.

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