Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 215

(pb). This important volume is made up of fifteen essays, thirteen published between 1986 and 2003, and two more previously unpublished. The unpublished essays are of special interest in that they serve as markers to Sir Tony Wrigley’s distinguished career as the premier economic and demographic historian of pre-industrial England. ‘Demographic retrospective’ (Chapter 15) defends the methodology and findings of a famous research project that took three decades, while ‘The occupational structure of the English labour force in the mid-nineteenth century’ (Chapter 5) is a prologue to a new project on occupational structure in earlier decades and centuries. That new project, also hinted at in the introduction (p.6), is the latest phase in a distinguished career stretching back over four decades.

Part I is about ‘the wellsprings of growth’. Wrigley highlights how the gradual nature of economic growth before 1850 – just enough to sustain population growth and keep living standards from falling – implies that England was already ‘different’ in 1700. Its economy must already have been much more productive than those of its continental neighbours. Angus Maddison (in The World Economy: a millennial perspective, 2001, p.90) corroborates: English GDP per head was half again as high as France’s in 1700, and nearly double that of Spain and Portugal – though only two-thirds that of the Netherlands. The key to England’s success lay in institutions that allowed it to marshall land and labour efficiently, and in its coal. By the early nineteenth century England’s occupational structure was not that of an economy that had undergone an ‘industrial revolution’: but neither was it that of a ‘pre-industrial economy’. This was reflected in the major roles of 216 the agricultural traditional manufacturing occupations (carpenters, tailors, butchers) and the size of the tertiary or service sector.

Wrigley’s long-standing interest in Malthusian economic demography culminated in an elegant seven-volume edition of Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (which he co-edited with David Souden) in 1986. Here that interest is reflected in Chapters 6 to 8. Two of these chapters are concerned with the issue of poverty and the prospects of the working class, while the third addresses the connection between the ‘high cost of provisions’ and famine. In his second publication, Malthus did not deny the connection but noted that in 1799 western Sweden suffered much more than England, although the price of its staple food (rye) rose much less than that of corn in England. The observation feeds into the emphasis on entitlements stressed by another close reader of Malthus, Amartya Sen.

One of Wrigley’s earliest papers was his 1967 classic on London’s role in the English economy c. 1650–1750 (in Past & Present, no. 37). Part II of the present collection is devoted to the role of towns and cities. Themes covered here include Adam Smith on the positive feedback effects resulting from trade between country and town; the connection between pre-industrial urbanization and occupational distribution; and the impact of demand on the regional and occupational patterning of the population.

Historical demography is addressed in Part III (Chapters 12 to 15). This section promises to be Wrigley’s last word on a project that was his core research interest for three decades. Wrigley engages in particular with the critiques of Stephen Ruggles and Peter Razzell; he is more impressed by the former’s worries that reconstituted families are subject to selection bias than by the latter’s feisty insistence that the underreporting of deaths in parish registers led the Cambridge Group to underestimate the role of mortality in English population change. Wrigley takes both critiques seriously, however, and his formidable defence of the Cambridge Group’s project surely succeeds in its aim of shifting the balance away from ‘those who remain in doubt’. The rebuttals apply simulations, counterfactual calculations, clever comparisons with Scandinavian data, and reductiones ad absurdum.

It is a sobering fact that Sir Tony Wrigley managed to produce these papers over a period that also saw the publication of the multi-authored English population history from family reconstitution 1580–1837 (1997) and his tenure as president of the British Academy. Labor continuat.