Recombinant Family Formation Strategies1 |
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| Authors: | DAVID LEVINE |
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| Institution: | DAVID LEVINE did his doctoral work with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and has taught at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education since 1975. He has most recently published Reproducing families: the politicd economyof Englishpopulation history (Cambridge 1987). His next book is a study of the nascent coalmining industry, Whickhcmx an industrial society in the pre-industrial world, 1560–1765, co-authored with Keith Wrightson. |
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| Abstract: | Abstract In contrast to the 'modernization' model of demographic change, popularized by the publications of the European Fertility Project, this paper sets the revolution in family life in an historical perspective. First, I briefly consider the creation of a distinctly north-west European system of production and reproduction; second, I discuss how this regime led to the emergence of a revolutionary solution to the population/resources squeeze in early modern England; third, I consider how it came to be severely dis-equilibrated in the period of industrialization, urbanization and improvements in life-expectation which became generalized in the age of the Industrial Revolution; and, fourth, I propose that the re-equilibration that we celebrate within the rubric of the Demographic Transition can perhaps be more effectively understood as both an innovation and an adjustment which occurred in response to the historical ruptures - demographic and economic, cultural and political - engendered by the twin processes of material change and state formation. |
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