----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]