Mortality in Europe from 1720 to 1914 Long-Term Trends and Changes in Patterns by Age and Sex

Abstract

Abstract On the eve of the First World War the demographic transition in Europe was far from complete and, in particular, the decline in mortality had a long way to go: indeed, it had hardly begun. However, though we are well aware of what has happened since that time, our knowledge of earlier developments is often vague, sometimes confused, and always incomplete. Regular reliable statistics on mortality only became available in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Social scientists know that there is often a time-lag between the appearance of a particular phenomenon and the construction of instruments designed to measure it. In spite of the long history of burial registers this is also true of mortality, whose course altered radically between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is easily understandable that the historical demographers responsible for the organization of this volume are interested in an analysis of mortality over this extended period, when the conditions for demographic transition first appeared. But I would ask for sympathy for the difficulties faced by a demographer (who is not a historian) and who has been asked to provide a synthetic view based on very diverse material within a relatively short space, and for his frustration at having to omit the most recent period in which the decline of mortality was most pronounced, and for which there exists an abundance of statistical information to document the transition.

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