Simon Szreter

The article addresses the question of the relative importance of human population size and growth in relation to the environmental problems of planetary heating and biodiversity loss in the current, Anthropocene era. To what extent could policies to encourage lower fertility be justified, while observing that this subject is an inherently contested one. It is proposed that a helpful distinction can be made between specific threats to habitats and biodiversity, as opposed to those related to global energy use and warming. Pressures of over-population can be important in relation to the former. But with regard to the latter—rising per capita energy usage—reduced fertility has historically been positively, not negatively correlated. A case can be made that the high-fertility nations of sub-Saharan Africa could benefit from culturally respectful fertility reduction policies. However, where planetary heating is concerned, it is the hydrocarbon-based, per capita energy-consumption patterns of already low-fertility populations on the other five inhabited continents that is rather more critical. While it will be helpful to stabilise global human population, this cannot be viewed as a solution to the climate crisis problem of this century. That requires relentless focus on reducing hydrocarbon use and confronting the rising inequality since c.1980 that has been exacerbating competitive materialist consumerism. This involves the ideological negotiation of values to promote a culture change that understands and politically embraces a new economics of both human and planetary balance, equity, and distribution. Students of populations can contribute by re-assessing what can be the appropriate demographic units and measures for policies engaging with the challenges of the Anthropocene.

We estimate the impact of reductions in poor law expenditure on rural life expectancy and mortality rates in England and Wales following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Given the scale of cuts imposed, our estimates imply 8–10 per cent increases in mortality at ages 1–4 years and 2–4 per cent falls in rural expectation of life at birth. This is consistent with the reformers’ policy of reducing child allowances for larger families. These results help to explain the weak performance of national mid‐nineteenth century life expectancy measures during a period of rising real wages but falling welfare expenditure.

After reviewing evidence on long-run national trends in inequality since the 1320s and the history of ideas and measures of inequality, the focus is on the history of institutions which have influenced the trends in inequality. Here, the major surprise for many will be to learn that a progressively funded universal social security, health and welfare system was instituted by Elizabeth I in 1601. The welfare state was not invented but restored by the Labour government of 1945–51, decreasing inequalities substantially. In 1834, the parliament had reduced the Elizabethan Poor Law to a deterrent workhouse system, its funding halved in accord with the ideas of Bentham, Malthus and economic liberalism. Since 1979, the successor ideology of neo-liberalism has again increased inequality by reducing the progressivity of taxes and restraining expenditure on public services. After 1979, child poverty more than doubled to over 30% and has never returned to previous lower levels.

In this commentary we argue that after the crisis of Covid-19, and what it exposed about how vulnerable our society had become, the UK must now reinvent an empowering state, drawing inspiration from two extraordinary periods of history beginning over four hundred years ago.

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.

Studying the relationship between disease and fertility in antiquity is challenging. The first difficulty is establishing the presence, and then prevalence, of any particular condition before an assessment can be made of its demographic impact. In the case of what are now called sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the empirical obstacles to identifying such infections in the classical world are exacerbated by the moralizing that attends discussions of sexual practice and that has so strongly characterized the ways sexual behavior and pathology have been, and continue to be, conceptually conjoined. Julius Rosenbaum’s influential and exhaustive nineteenth-century exploration of the ancient history of syphilis (broadly construed), for example, is based on the assumption that venereal diseases are caused by the “abuse” of the genital organs for nonprocreative purposes. Their history is, therefore, the history of human “lasciviousness and debauchery,” and there was so much of that in classical Greece and Rome that syphilis and all kinds of genital afflictions necessarily followed.

We at last have a worthy sequel to Michael Flinn's (1977) edited collection, Scottish Population History from the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s. Michael Anderson's book squarely addresses and di...