Mortality and Metropolis: The Case of London 1675–1825

Recent work in population history emphasizes that demographic phenomena should be seen in a wider social and economic context. This perspective is, however, more easily achieved in the case of fertility than of mortality, which is widely treated as a variable ‘exogenous’ to economy and society. In the present paper it is argued that the inclusion of spatial structure and migration in accounts of historical demographic regimes can restore long-term variations in mortality to an ‘endogenous’ position. Within such a model a central role is played by large metropolitan populations, which act as endemic reservoirs of infection, with high but relatively stable levels of mortality. Data from the annual London Bills of Mortality allow empirical testing for the period 1675–1825, with results which generally conform to theoretical expectations, although a substantial reduction in mortality occurs during the latter part of the period.