Population Growth and Agrarian Change: An Historical Perspective

by D. B. Grigg

Overview

Since the 1950s much attention has been paid to the effect of rapid population growth on the rural societies of the Third World. Yet it is often forgotten that Europe faced similar problems in the past. This book, first published in 1980, suggests some ways of looking at the interrelationships between population growth and agrarian change, and uses these approaches to consider the demographic and agrarian problems of various parts of Europe in the past – in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in the early nineteenth century. These places are then compared with rural societies in the developing world at the present time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521296359
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/18/1980
Series:	Cambridge Geographical Studies , #13
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Part I. Methodology: 2. Overpopulation: definition and measurement; 3. The symptoms of overpopulation in agrarian communities; 4. The possibilities of increased output in pre-industrial societies; 5. Demographic adjustments to population growth; Part II. Malthus Justified: 6. European population in the long run; 7. Western Europe in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: a case of overpopulation?; 8. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 9. France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 10. Ireland: the great tragedy; 11. Interim conclusions; Part III. Malthus Refuted: 12. Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 13. Breaking out: England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 14. France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 15. Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 16. Coda to part three; Part IV. Malthus Returns?: 17. The developing countries today: the demographic response; 18. The developing countries today: the production response; 19. Conclusions; Notes; Index.