Theories and heuristics: how best to approach the study of historic fertility declines?

"This paper argues that a move away from a unifying but teleological framework for studying fertility declines can only been intellectually emancipating and is a necessary precondition for scientific advance. The study of change in human reproduction is an immensely complex and multi-faceted problem which requires the combination of both quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence and their respective methodologies of enquiry. The theoretical challenge is to construct an intellectually facilitating heuristic framework for synthesis of comparative, multidisciplinary study of the multiple fertility declines that have occurred, not to seek a replacement 'general narrative' for discredited demographic transition and modernization theories. Quantitative historical demography can only gain in its explanatory power by engaging with studies which also incorporate research into such qualitative aspects of gender as sex and power and which address a more historicist understanding of the role of culture by exploring its relationship with institutions, ideology and politics. It is argued that a number of recent, contextualized local and comparative studies of fertility declines are demonstrating how productively to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to explore rigorously these aspects of the history of fertility declines. Within the heuristic framework envisaged here, priorities for further research in the future would include exploring comparatively the relationship between reproductive change and communication communities with respect to the ideologically and politically-mediated issues of sex, religion, health, disease and education." (author's abstract

Incentivising an ethical economics: A radical plan to force a step change in the quality and quantity of the UK's economic growth

Our analysis looks at previous periods of British economic history to identify the enabling conditions for our most successful episodes of economic growth, noting the crucial importance of large-scale improvements in welfare and human capital to their success, and the negative impacts when these policies were reversed. In its own prescription for kick-starting growth, IPPR calls for a rebalancing of power to move the economy out of its current low wage/low productivity equilibrium. This, IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice argues, requires a shift in power from: corporate management to employees/trade unions; short-term financial interests to long-term investors; dominant companies to entrepreneurs; Westminster to the nations and regions; and households with great wealth to those with little. We agree wholeheartedly that such structural and institutional change, including a greater emphasis on localities, allied to significant revenue-raising tax and wealth redistribution, is essential to deliver a step change in the quantity and quality of economic growth. We argue that this must be achieved through reconceptualising the welfare system as a growth promoter. Our radical proposal provides a general, motivating mechanism to achieve this

How and why does history matter for development policy ?

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that"institutions matter"for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that"history matters,"since institutions clearlyform and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognize that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This paper endeavors to open and sustain a constructive dialogue between history -- understood as both"the past"and"the discipline"-- and development policy by (a) clarifying what the craft of historical scholarship entails, especially as it pertains to understanding causal mechanisms, contexts, and complex processes of institutional change; (b) providing examples of historical research that support, qualify, or challenge the most influential research (by economists and economic historians) in contemporary development policy; and (c) offering some general principles and specific implications that historians, on the basis of the distinctive content and method of their research, bring to development policy debates.Cultural Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Population Policies,Cultural Heritage&Preservation,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness

Chapter Twelve Revealing the Hidden Affliction

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s

Introduction

This volume is a necessarily multidisciplinary collection dedicated to the extremely difficult task of uncovering and exploring what can be reconstructed of the dimensions and the scale of the historical impact of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) on human infertility. As a subject for inquiry, this comes close to Winston Churchill’s celebrated phrase, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The riddle, which remains for medical and epidemiological science today, is how to quantify just how much the different STI organisms have affected female and male infertility. The mystery is how to find sufficient evidence to reveal how far different populations in the past were afflicted by these potentially sterilizing social diseases. The enigma is the question of whether any of the STIs have afflicted human populations from time immemorial, or whether there is evidence of more specific dating of the emergence of any STIs in historical, archaeological, or biogenomic records and, if so, when? The pandemic of HIV/AIDS in the late twentieth century demonstrated unequivocally not only that STDs are culturally refracted and technologically defined, which we already knew, but also that the infective microorganisms—being socially constructed through human activity—can themselves have a history and a potentially discoverable origin date in their entry into their human hosts. Therefore, there is a meaningful historical debate to be had over their origins

Infant mortality and social causality: Lessons from the history of Britain’s public health movement, c. 1834–1914

What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle—the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at the dawn of the previous century—as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. In doing so, we retrace the historical processes through which the evolving public health movement gradually helped crystallise a scientific understanding of the social causes of excess mortality. We map the dominant ideology of the public sphere at the time, chart the shifting roles of the state, and retrace the historical origins and emergence of ‘public health’ as a distinctive category of state policy and public discourse. We situate the public health movement in this historical configuration and identify the cracks in the existing ideological and administrative edifice through which this movement was able to articulate a novel approach to population health—one that spotlights the political economy of social inequality. We relate this historical sequence to the rise of industrial capitalism, the social fractures that it spawned, and the organised counter‐movements that it necessitated

The pox in Boswell's London: an estimate of the extent of syphilis infection in the metropolis in the 1770s†

This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is constructed, providing an indicator of over 20 per cent syphilitic infection. The principal primary sources are hospital admissions registers, augmented with an analysis of London’s workhouse infirmaries. A range of potentially confounding factors are taken into account, including the contemporary conflation between syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, patients who shunned hospitals in favour of private treatment, possible double-counting of patients, institutional patients who may have hailed from outside London, and the complexity of establishing what should constitute the ‘at-risk’ population of London for this period. Cultural and medical historians have demonstrated considerable pre-occupation with venereal disease in the texts of the eighteenth century, while demographic and epidemiological historians, lacking any quantitative evidence, have tended to ignore the disease. This article can now demonstrate for the first time just how extensive syphilis was likely to have been and, by doing so, offer an original contribution to major debates in the history of sexuality and the demography of early modern London.The research for this article was in part facilitated by the funding under the five-year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award 088708, ‘Generation to reproduction’, held at Cambridge University’s History and Philosophy of Science Department, for which Simon Szreter was a co-applicant

Scarlet fever and nineteenth-century mortality trends: a reply to Romola Davenport

AbstractRomola Davenport's recent article is presented as a significant revision of the interpretation of the reasons for rising and then falling urban mortality in Britain in the nineteenth century put forward by Szreter and Mooney, which emphasized the importance of the politics of public health. Davenport's claims that mortality patterns c. 1830–70 were driven by a synchronized rise and fall of scarlet fever across Europe and North America, as well as in rural locations in Britain, are based on frail and inconclusive forms of evidence. The epidemiological evidence presented by Davenport in fact indicates a chronologically lagging—not leading—role for scarlet fever in contributing to the rise in urban death rates before 1850 and the subsequent fall in urban mortality after c. 1870 in Britain.</jats:p

Revealing the Hidden Affliction: How Much Infertility Was Due to Venereal Disease in England and Wales on the Eve of the Great War?

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s. The secularist Malthusian League had positively promoted birth control, and now economists and eugenicists, feminists and Fabians, as well as leading figures in the church and in the medical profession, all agreed that this was a momentous matter. Previously, human fecundity—the capacity to conceive and reproduce—had not been considered a significant social variable. While the fertility of individuals or couples might be subject to some variation, with the odd exception populations and nations had dependably high fertility. Since Malthus—and even more so since Darwin’s generalization of Malthus’s proposition to all species—it was an accepted fact that nature was fecund to a fault. Fertility was too robust, not too frail. Consequently, one of the eternal human predicaments, both for the individual and for government, was how to rein in this exuberant fertility. So the dawning perception of the nation’s flagging and apparently fragile vitality—and indeed that of several other urbanizing nations, too—was a serious shock, expressed not just in politics but also science and literature