DEMOGRAPHY

In the course of the nineteenth century, European governments began to organize their national statistical systems. The data, although imperfect, reveal some decline of mortality, the onset of family limitation within marriage, and an accelerating natural population increase (the difference between the birthrate and the death rate) that resulted in large growth; this was tempered by large emigration streams. As a result of demographic changes, the population grew at a different pace in the various regions and countries of Europe. Table 1 shows the population of the Continent and of the largest countries in 1800 and 1913, the factor by which their numbers were multiplied between the two dates, and the rate of growth at the beginning and end of the period.

mortality

Existing statistical series for England and France show an increase of the mean duration of life or life expectancy at birth, from around thirty-five years about 1800 to close to fifty years on the eve of World War I. In these two countries, the social consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization resulted in relative stagnation in the improvements at midcentury. The statistics suggest that the decline of mortality was more sustained in the rural Scandinavian countries, although mortality was very high in large cities like Stockholm. At the beginning of World War I Denmark had the highest life expectancy at birth, at 57.5 years. At

that time, however, the figure remained quite low in southern and eastern Europe (37.5 in Hungary for example), and it is likely that little improvement had occurred in these regions before the end of the nineteenth century. The mortality of cities was everywhere higher than that of the countryside. Children and infants were especially vulnerable, and only during the last decades of the nineteenth century was a spectacular decline of infant mortality notable throughout Europe.

There has been a great deal of speculation about the factors behind the decline of mortality. The deaths that resulted from the Napoleonic Wars have been estimated at several million men for France alone, but compared to previous centuries the nineteenth was relatively free of wars. The drop in the death rate reflected to some extent the less frequent visitation of epidemics and food shortages, although there were still some major mortalities, including several subsistence crises and deadly epidemics of cholera. Most notable was the famine that ravaged Ireland and several regions of Europe in the 1840s when a potato blight destroyed what had become the main food crop in these regions. What characterized the decline of mortality, however, was not so much the disappearance of exceptional flares but rather the prolonged decline of the background level. This corresponded to what has been termed the epidemiologic transition, a progressive change in the main causes of deaths from acute infectious diseases affecting people mostly at a young age to chronic, degenerative conditions such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers prevalent among older people.

The course of mortality during the period was influenced in opposite ways by the conflicting effects of economic and social change. On the one hand, an increasing part of the population resided in cities where high population density and poor living conditions encouraged the spread of infections (notably tuberculosis and diarrheas). The widespread use of child and female labor in industry and the poor hygienic conditions for working-class mothers were also factors. On the other hand, improvements of economic opportunities affected living standards and the development of transportation and markets may have resulted in better nutrition. The rapid diffusion of vaccination from the beginning of the century practically eradicated smallpox, a disease that may have accounted for up to a tenth of all deaths in earlier times. The technologies of sanitation made slow progress toward the provision of clean water and the construction of sewage systems. The discoveries of the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and the German physician Robert Koch (1843–1910) changed the theories of disease causation by showing that many diseases could be attributed to specific external causes such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Physicians became more aware of the need for antiseptic procedures, particularly in obstetrics and surgery. Most of all, the stage was set for more focused public-health efforts to control disease by improving sanitation and by educating the public on child nutrition and care. However, although public-health messages advocated maternal breast feeding, the main improvement in infant health may well have resulted from the more hygienic use of bottle feeding, pasteurization of milk, and the sterilization of bottles and rubber nipples. These efforts, in turn, probably accounted for the steep drop of infant and child mortality at the end of the period under consideration.

fertility

For most of Europe until the end of the nineteenth century the proportion of the population that was married remained an essential determinant of fertility. In eastern Europe, early and almost universal marriage resulted in a large number of births per woman. For example, total fertility in Russia reached seven children per woman. In contrast, western Europe was characterized by low intensity of marriage, a pattern that is accounted for by the requirement of individual access to the means of supporting a family before a young man could contract a marriage. A substantial proportion of the population never married; in Ireland, for example, close to 30 percent of women were still single on their fiftieth birthdays at the end of the century. Because of late marriage, the total fertility of those who married was also limited, typically to an average of four to five children. Illegitimate fertility accounted for only a small number of births in most regions of Europe. Nuptiality, in the demographic regime prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thus provided a mechanism linking reproduction to economic resources. This situation changed at a different pace in various parts of the continent.

In England a decline in age at marriage and an increase in the proportions ever-married resulted in higher overall fertility starting toward the middle of the eighteenth century, and reaching its peak around 1820; after that, a decline in nuptiality, combined with sustained marital fertility, led to a decline in the birthrate. France, however, followed a different model: an early decline of marital fertility, perceptible at the national level since the beginning of the nineteenth century, was accompanied by a progressive relaxation of the preventive check of marriage. In most countries of Europe, however, there was little change either in the frequency of marriage or in marital fertility before the end of the century. The decline in the fertility of

marriages, due to the increasing adoption of birth control, was noteworthy after 1870 in most of Europe. Between 1880 and 1914 a majority of the province-sized administrative units of Europe had undergone the onset of a steady decline in marital fertility. There were laggards, but principally in rural areas remote from the center of the continent.

Table 2 illustrates the differences in the determinants of fertility about 1900. The indices in the table are those used in a large project on the decline of fertility in Europe conducted at Princeton University between 1963 and 1986. I_g is an index of the fertility of married women, expressed as a percentage of the very high fertility of a standard population, the Hutterites of North America, whose religious beliefs prohibited the use of birth control. I_f, overall fertility, is computed in the same way, but this time without distinction of marital status, while I_m is the proportion of married women weighted by their potential fertility. In the absence of illegitimate births, the product of I_g and I_m would equal I_f. In other terms, the indices show the extent to which overall fertility is determined by the level of marital fertility and by marriage. In Russia and Ireland, the levels of marital fertility are about the same, and probably unaffected by voluntary birth control, but the check on marriages in Ireland reduces overall fertility to the level reached by France, where the adoption of family limitation was paralleled by younger and more universal marriage than earlier in the century.

Factors causing the decline of marital fertility involved both a change in the demand for children and the development and spread of methods of birth control and their acceptability. The transition occurred before the widespread use of sophisticated techniques and implements, but that does not mean that there was no cultural diffusion of contraceptive practices and of the small-family ideal. The increase in demand was linked to many factors, including a growing concern for the health and welfare implications of large families; it occurred in the face of opposition by religious and civil authorities. The states were concerned by the military implications of differential national growth.

migration

The growth of population would have been considerably higher in most European countries if the outlet of international migration had not been available. The statistics are not precise, particularly in the beginning of the period, but it can be estimated that close to fifty million Europeans emigrated during the period (not counting upward of five million Russians moving to Siberia, that is, from the European part of the country to its Asian provinces). Three-quarters of the international migrants went to the United States. The demographic effect on growth includes not only the migrants, but also their own natural increase. Migration released demographic pressure, particularly on the land, at the time when increases in productivity, the decline of cottage industry, and consolidations of tenure led to growth of landlessness and rural poverty in Europe. Mass migration occurred primarily in search of employment.

Agricultural crises pushed workers and their families off the land. In particular the potato blight in 1846 and 1847 for Ireland and southwestern Germany resulted in the large emigration. More than one million Germans and an even larger number of the Irish departed between 1844 and 1854. The improvement of transportation, particularly by seafaring ships (the shift from sail to steam had occurred by 1870) and railroad facilitated mass migration. Legal and administrative obstacles to migration were progressively removed, and it was often encouraged and assisted by the authorities. Emigrants were particularly numerous from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia before the 1870s, largely in the direction of the United States. After 1880 and until 1914, however, migration from southern, central, and eastern Europe accounted for more than 70 percent of the total. The list of countries of destination expanded, too, with large streams of migration from Europe to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, all countries where abundant land and an expanding capitalist economy promoted the growth of agriculture and industry.

Taken together, the changes in mortality, fertility, nuptiality, and migration that took place during the long nineteenth century amounted to a profound transformation of the demographic system. They accompanied many economic, social, and technological changes occurring during the century, at the same time making them possible and made possible by them. It would be wrong to say that the mortality decline caused the decline of fertility, or that these two declines were closely determined by economic and social changes. Medical technologies and the ideology of birth control were widely diffused. In the space of one century, Europe was well on its way from a situation of high to one of low mortality and fertility. The peaks of population growth and migration witnessed by the long nineteenth century would not be encountered again.

See alsoEmigration; Immigration and Internal Migration; Marriage and Family; Public Health; Transportation and Communications.

bibliography

Bardet, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques Dupâquier, eds. Histoire des populations de l'Europe. Vol. 2: La reévolution démographique, 1750–1914. Paris, 1998. Extensive discussion by European experts, with chapters on components of demographic change and on individual countries.

Coale, Ansley J., and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds. The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Princeton, N.J., 1986. The result of a large research project based on data on some seven hundred province-size units.

Hatton, Timothy J., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. Oxford, U.K., 1998.

Livi-Bacci, Massimo. The Population of Europe: A History. Translated by Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen and Carl Ipsen. Oxford, U.K., 1999. A compact summary insisting on mechanisms.

Schofield, Roger S., David Sven Reher, and A. Bideau, eds. The Decline of Mortality in Europe. Oxford, U.K., 1991. A collection of essays discussing facts and theories.

Etiennevan de Walle