The papers contained in Life under Pressure report work on local population analyses carried out on data from Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and China's Liaodong peninsula within the framework of the Eurasia Population and Family History Project. They are designed to test one of the conceptual foundations of historical demographic theory, the distinction between high- and low-pressure demographic regimes and their identification with the population patterns of east Asia and western Europe respectively. Like so much else in demographic theory, the origin of these ideas is conventionally traced back to Malthus. They are rooted in classical political economy's dismal conviction that mass living standards would inevitably fall as population grew until either the death rate increased or the birth rate fell so as to bring the system back into equilibrium. For present day demographic theory these two mechanisms characterize high- and low-pressure regimes respectively, and it is a basic assumption that the latter were effectively confined to western Europe whose distinctive marriage patterns kept fertility low and responsive to changing economic conditions; elsewhere—above all in the major Asian population centers—early and universal marriage kept birth rates inflexibly high and high-pressure demographic regimes prevailed as a result.

These assumptions underpin much of the interpretative work on the economic consequences of demographic variation undertaken by writers such as E.A. Wrigley, but influential as this work has been, their basic presuppositions have received little empirical examination. The main difficulty has been the shortage of historical Asian data of a scale or quality comparable to that available from western Europe, but analytical problems are involved as well. It is no good simply to compare death rates because these may vary due to noneconomic epidemiological factors. In principal it would be possible to track long-term movements in vital rates and correlate them with changing living standards in different regions, but data problems often make this very difficult in practice.

One widely adopted, less evidentially demanding, alternative to the method of secular correlation is the analysis of short-run associations between movements in aggregate vital events and those in staple food prices. The logic here is that, where high-pressure regimes prevail, living standards should be too low to allow for much accumulation of resources and so the general population will have little to fall back on in unusually hard times. Major increases in food prices should therefore reduce mass consumption almost immediately on a scale sufficient to compromise resistance to life-threatening infections, and the correlation between movements in prices and in total burials should be immediate and fairly strong. Conversely, in low pressure regimes, where there is more scope for accumulation, the impact of prices will be smaller and mediated through the effects of consequential social disruption on exposure to infection. Serial correlations between prices and deaths should therefore be weaker and lagged over a longer period.

Such analyses require only aggregate vital data and annual price series, which are relatively widely available, but even here there are problems. Aggregate correlations are a relatively blunt instrument, which may well obscure the experience of particularly “harvest sensitive” minorities, and there is always a risk that the confounding effects of climate on both harvests and the transmission of infection will distort the results. The authors of Life under Pressure largely avoid these pitfalls by using longitudinal nominal data of a kind that allows the measurement of age-specific mortality rates and the reconstitution of household relationships for periods of a century or more. The beauty of this arrangement is that it allows separate analyses to be undertaken for households with different characteristics and for individuals in different structural positions within them, as well as the familiar distinctions according to age and sex. The effects of life events such as widow- and orphan-hood, or even divorce, on mortality can also be studied alongside the impact of price fluctuations.

Nevertheless, if the conduct of such analyses is a science, their interpretation is an art requiring contextual sensitivity and local knowledge, without which reader and author alike risk being swamped in a sea of coefficients of varying statistical significance. Most of the contributions avoid this risk, and the best are very good indeed. The chapters are organized into three sections: “Comparative Geographies,” which examines differences in economic, familial, and demographic variables and in their inter-relationships between the five regions; “Local Histories,” which examines each region in turn; and “Comparative Demographies,” which focuses on age- and sex-specific effects—followed by a general concluding chapter that concentrates on the problem of agency in relationship to large-scale demographic variation.

The pattern that emerges from all this is complex and sometimes difficult to interpret, but two general features stand out. The first is the importance of household variables and relationships in determining the vulnerability of their members to fluctuating food prices even, or perhaps especially, though the implications of any one configuration may vary greatly between regions. The second is the need to re-interpret many commonly accepted high-level generalizations concerning the divergence between “East” and “West.” In particular, there proves to be remarkably little evidence of systematically higher mortality or lower living standards in the East before the later nineteenth century. Perhaps the most intriguing finding is that households' vulnerability to food price fluctuations was actually greater among the European communities studied than it was in Asia. The authors interpret this finding in terms of the differing functions of the state in the two cases: the protection of property in the west and the preservation of stability in the east.