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I've been following this debate with interest but some puzzlement.  The 
big news while Europe was industrializing was a massive and unprecedented 
rise in population--from something less than 120 million (excluding 
Ottoman Europe and Asiatic Russia) in 1700 to a little over 400 million by 
1900 (while some 60 million were emigrating!). In England and Wales, the 
rise was from 5.5 to more than 32 million over the same period.   
Historians have debated the causes for decades.  The early emphasis was on 
declines in mortality rates, with improved sanitation, the smallpox 
vaccine, the displacement of the plague-bearing black rat by the brown 
rat, beneficent climatic changes, better child care (pre-industrial infant 
mortality rates were an appalling 25% or more), etc. 
 
The CDR did fall from over 30 to under 20 during this time, but the 
more recent consensus has focused on increased fertility rates, owing to a 
lowering of the marriage age--exceptionally high in Europe.  Again 
there've been extensive debates over why this happened.  Cultural changes 
(Lawrence Stone's "affective individualism") were obviously important, but 
so was the importation of the potato from the Andes (a great calories per 
acre ratio) and cotton from India and N. America.  European couples 
generally had to be self-supporting to marry, and both these products 
enabled them to be so. 
 
The second wave of enclosures, really a response to the population rise, 
undoubtedly swelled the ranks of those emigrating to cities, but surely it 
was the sheer weight of numbers, from all the above causes and more, that 
created the urban proletariat.  Most historians have long ceased to look 
to ruling class legislation as an explanation. 
 
While classical political economists, even the last generation, can be 
justly charged with under-appreciating the substitution of steam for human 
and animal power, they were acutely aware, needless to say, of the 
population problem.  And they would have been quite delighted to be able 
to accuse the aristocracy of additional sins.  I have to believe with Tony 
Brewer that if they ignored the Game Laws it was not because they were not 
disinterested social scientists, but because the Laws' impact on 
population was negligible.  The work of E. P. Thompson's students in the 
'60s and '70s, interesting as it is, does not prove otherwise. 
 
Jeff Lipkes 
 
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