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Front Matter |
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Abstract
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The Analytical Approach |
John C. Caldwell |
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Abstract
The papers collected in this volume are focused on human reproduction and survival over the full span of mankind’s existence. The decline in the last two centuries of fertility and mortality from moderately high, and often very high, to lower levels is called the “demographic transition.” This book examines the determinants of fertility and mortality levels and their balance, from the time when the world’s people were solely hunters and gatherers to when an increasing number live in cities undertakingwork far removed from producing food. Although the focus is on reproduction, the search for explanations crisscrosses the work of others whose central concern is production.
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Pretransitional Population Control and Equilibrium |
Bruce K. Caldwell |
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On the issue of the cultural control of family size before the fertility transition, most demographers appear to disagree with many of those cultural anthropologists with whose work they are most likely to be familiar. Typifying the demographer’s stance, van deWalle (1968b, p. 489) wrote: “Control of marital fertility by contraception, as we knowit today inWestern countries, is without doubt a fairly recent development.” He went on to conclude that the typical pattern for most of the world’s population had for aeons been one of early marriage followed by uncontrolled fertility. A similar conclusion was drawn by Knodel (1977, p. 242), who decided that birth control must have been adopted by the vast majority of mankind only fairly recently and that its practice was innovative.
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Was There a Neolithic Mortality Crisis? |
Bruce K. Caldwell |
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Abstract
The proposition that the Neolithic Revolution, characterized by the beginning of agriculture or irrigation or urbanization, was associated with a significant rise in mortality has been widely discussed and mostly supported over the last halfcentury. The case is found in the medical or epidemiological literature, especially that in the ecological tradition, and in works on anthropology and palaeodemography. This paper examines how these ideas developed and questions whether this near-consensus could prove to be fallible.
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Population Intensification Theory |
John C. Caldwell |
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Abstract
“Population intensification” means increasing the density of population on a fixed area of land, and is restricted in this paper to natural increase, thus excluding migration or conquest. There has been a recent tendency to treat the topic as if there were on offer only two theories of intensification, those of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), especially as set out initially in 1798 in . (henceforth .), and Ester Boserup (1910–1999), as set out in 1965 in . and amplified in later works (1970, 1975, 1976, 1981, 1985, 1999). This paper examines the cases put forward by these two writers, and then argues that their theories do not exhaust the possible explanations for population intensification. Malthus is briefly summarized, because, although most social scientists are well aware of his postulates (.. Dupâquier, Fauve-Chamoux and Grebenik 1983; Wrigley 1986) certain points will be taken up later in the paper, and additionally his writings were the model against which Boserup reacted.
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On Net Intergenerational Wealth Flows: an Update |
John C. Caldwell |
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Abstract
Nearly 30 years ago in an essay, “Toward a restatement of demographic transition theory,” I advanced what has come to be known as “wealth flows theory.” Much relevant research has since been carried out, and accordingly an update of the original essay is necessary.
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Fertility Control in The Classical World: was There an Ancient Fertility Transition? |
John C. Caldwell |
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Abstract
Important questions for demographers are whether the modern fertility transition is unique and whether the Industrial Revolution was required to achieve it. If it is not unique, then its most likely predecessors were probably found in the classical period, especially in Ancient Rome, or in Soong China or Tokugawa Japan (treated separately in Caldwell and Caldwell 2005). The reasons in the Roman Empire include the high level of urbanization, the extent of commercial farming, and the extensive monetization of the economy. The ordinary citizen achieved his ends through the law rather than through the force of family numbers. It was widely believed by contemporaries that Roman population decline was taking place, and the Emperor Augustus’s marriage legislation was aimed at increasing the fertility of at least part of the society, the upper classes. Many recent historians and classicists have drawn attention to the use of means which could have limited numbers in both the family and society, and some have implied a fertility decline which may have resulted in moderately low fertility for centuries (see Riddle 1997). This paper mostly concerns Rome, but Greece will not be ignored because
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Family Size Control by Infanticide in the Great Agrarian Societies of Asia |
Bruce K. Caldwell |
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Abstract
An important issue in demography is whether there is evidence for premodern population control, especially control of family size. In an earlier paper we have argued that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Palaeolithic society consciously practised population control; its approximate long-term population equilibrium is probably adequately explained by non-infanticidal mortality balancing fertility (Caldwell and Caldwell 2003a). Certainly babies were often killed when deformed or in times of crisis but not on a scale to constitute a demographically significant impact.
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Transmuting the Industrial Revolution into Mortality Decline |
John C. Caldwell |
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After centuries with life expectancy at birth around 40 years and infant mortality rates of 150 per thousand births or higher, mortality in the late nineteenth century began to fall in advancedWestern countries so that by the end of the twentieth century life expectancy had doubled to nearly 80 years and infant mortality was around 5–7 per thousand births (see Table 8.1 and also Riley 2001:39). This extraordinary change in the human condition was the product of the Industrial Revolution which led to real average incomes rising from 1820 to the end of the nineteenth century by two to three times and to the end of the following century by 16–18 times (excluding England where incomes were already higher than elsewhere in 1820 and Australia where they were lower). Mortality above two years of age fell fairly generally from about 1870, but that of infants and to a lesser extent one-year-olds waited until the turn of the century before major decline set in. The aim of this essay is threefold: to explore how the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions produced the mortality decline; to explain why the mortality decline began, in England at least, well after industrialization began; and to e
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The Delayed Western Fertility Decline: an Examination of English-Speaking Countries |
John C. Caldwell |
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The Western fertility decline was inevitable, given that child mortality was persistently falling and the economic value of children was progressively undermined by urbanization, compulsory schooling, legislation restricting the exploitation of minors, and the kind of employment available in an advanced industrial system. Indeed, by 1800 French marital fertility (as measured by the index ..) had fallen 10 percent (the criterion for transition employed by the Princeton European Fertility Project). (Weir 1994:330–331). It is inconceivable that such a fall occurred in conflict with family economic needs, and thus it is evidence that French children were not of net economic value to their parents by the end of the eighteenth century.
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Regional Paths to Fertility Transition |
Pat Caldwell |
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In recent years there has been an enormous increase in our ability to undertake a meaningful analysis on a global scale of regional paths to fertility transition. Generalizations can be made not only because most countries in the world are now participating in the transition, but also because enough sub-Saharan African countries have at last joined the transition to allow us to hazard hypotheses about the conditions of onset of fertility decline there too.
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The Globalization of Fertility Behavior |
John C. Caldwell |
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Between the late 1950s and the late 1970s fertility began a persistent major decline in countries containing almost four-fifths of the world’s population. The exceptions that did not follow within a further decade were nearly all found in three regions: sub-Saharan Africa, Arab Southwest Asia, and Melanesia. The range of populations involved in the decline was unpredicted and unprecedented. Few developing countries had ever before had a sustained fertility decline, while the West had immediately beforehand been experiencing either stable fertility levels or, because of the postwar “baby boom,” rising levels.
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Social Upheaval and Fertility Decline |
John C. Caldwell |
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Abstract
A significant theme in fertility transition theory is that family size tends to be larger than child mortality levels and material conditions would necessitate. This is explained by the persistence of cultural supports or “props” fashioned in an earlier era and implies that fertility is likely to decline if there is a major social upheaval such as is constituted by a revolution or defeat in a total war. The proposition has recently been put forward with regard to the French and American Revolutions. This article examines thirteen major upheavals, most in Europe, and finds support for the thesis that they are accompanied by unusual fertility declines. Less support is found for the proposition that the explanation is the weakening of now outdated cultural forces. Rather, the demographic change seems to involve a transition from fertility levels appropriate to earlier material conditions to ones suited to the new situation. The one factor that is common to all upheavals is an uncertainty about the future and a desire to postpone irreversible demographic decisions until the situation is clearer. Among those countries already undergoing a fertility transition, fertility levels do not re
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Demographic Theory: a Long View |
John C. Caldwell |
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Demographic theory has been largely transformed over the last halfcentury from grand theory to short-term theory, often endowed with such immediacy as to so limit our vision of the future that even population policymaking is made difficult. Demographic theorists lost their nerve as the globalization of declines in mortality and fertility proceeded much more rapidly than they had anticipated and as the “baby boom” in a number of developed countries quelled expectations of continuing fertility decline.. There is a parallel here to the undermining of Malthusian theory by dramatic increases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in food production, a phenomenon explained by the Industrial Revolution’s effects on agricultural and transport technology. Focusing on the leading countries in the demographic transition, this essay will argue that far too little attention has been paid to the nature of the economic and related social revolutions of our age and that our theoretical perspectives pay too little attention to ultimate constraints on population growth.
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Policy Responses to Low Fertility and its Consequences: a Global Survey |
Pat Caldwell,Peter Mcdonald |
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The consequences of low fertility depend on just how low fertility has fallen and how long it has been at that level. Table 14.1 lists very low fertility countries (total fertility rate (TFR) below 1.5), moderately low fertility countries (TFR 1.5–2.0), and countries at replacement level, together with their TFRs in 2001 and the period that the TFR had been continually below 2.1. The last measure is probably open to question for some countries as it depends on the ability of the United Nations (2001) Population Division to reconstruct past fertility levels. In the West, fertility began to fall widely after 1965, at first because of a reduction in the proportion of high-parity births (Prioux 1990). Japan followed in 1973 (Retherford, Ogawa and Sakimoto 1996). By the 1990s the TFR had fallen below one in several northern Italian provinces and in the area that had previously been East Germany (Cliquet 1991:136; Witte and Wagner 1995:389; Conrad, Lechner and Werner 1996:349).
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Explanations of the Fertility Crisis in Modern Societies: a Search for Commonalities |
Thomas Schindlmayr |
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Fertility declined in most of the industrialized world from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s when much ofWestern Europe recorded, for the first time in history, total fertility below two, with net reproduction only three-quarters of replacement levels (Keyfitz and Flieger 1968). At that time some observers forecast that advanced industrial societies would experience a decline in population numbers (see Charles 1934), but this prediction was subsequently discarded as birth rates rose and analysis showed its flaws. It was found that many births had been deferred, and that completed family size had fallen below replacement level for fewbirth cohorts and by only a modest amount. Furthermore, it had required the dire economic conditions of the World Depression to produce even these modest changes. Consequently, demographic transition theorists gave little thought to the possibility that the end of demographic transitionwould see shrinking populations.
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Back to the Future: the Great Mortality Crises |
John C. Caldwell |
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Human history from the Neolithic Revolution until recently has been haunted by great morality crises. They have been the concern of Thomas Robert Malthus (1959) in the . (originally published in 1798); of a scientific committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) which published . (Charbonneau and Larose 1979); and of an influential article (Watkins and Menken 1985); these crises also appeared throughout Wrigley and Schofield’s (1981) . and Le Roy Ladurie’s (1974) ..
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Back Matter |
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Abstract
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发表于 2025-3-21 16:16:08
