The role of demography in long-run economic growth has been subject to increasing attention.
This paper questions the received wisdom that marital birth control was absent before the
nineteenth century. Using an extensive individual-level dataset covering 270,000 births from
80,000 families we show that higher national and sector-specific real wages reduced spacing
between births in England over more than three centuries, from 1540-1850. This effect is present
among both poor and rich families and is robust to a wide range of control variables accounting
for external factors influencing a couple’s fertility such as malnutrition, climate shocks and the
disease environment
