The eleven essays in Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain 1290–1834 represent the proceedings of a conference held at Cambridge in autumn of 2011 in honor of Richard Smith, professor emeritus of historical geography and demography at that institution. Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson, and S. J. Thompson, the editors, facing the challenge that published proceedings always pose, have formulated their theme as an inquiry: “to what extent did demographic decisions and outcomes reflect the free choice of individual agents in response to changing economic opportunities and imperatives as opposed to the constraints that … social, legal and political structures impose in any given society, and that themselves are also subject to alteration over time?“(2). The discussion of choices and constraints in this collection tends to focus on two groups of economic actors: poorer householders on the one hand, and the agents of poor relief on the other. Periodization is important here, corresponding in this case to the high watermark of British population before the catastrophic pandemics of the later fourteenth century at one end, and the passage of the “New Poor Law” at the other. While the essays focus on Britain (and, for the most part, England), there are interesting comparative essays taking in northern, southern, and eastern continental Europe.

The sole entry on the “choice” side of the register is E. A. Wrigley's chapter, which opens the collection. Here he argues that the comparatively later age of marriage of women in England and other parts of the North Sea basin, together with a tendency for more women to remain single (both individual choices made in response to economic circumstances) led to a higher standard of living. The nuclear household pattern that resulted from later marriages (as opposed to the “split” pattern that prevailed elsewhere) was a factor, as was the enhanced productivity of single women. The most comprehensive treatment of the “choices versus constraints” dimension of the collection is Sheilagh Ogilvie's chapter on the preindustrial countryside, which usefully elucidates how institutional structures, community norms, and legal systems all put limits on peasant agency to a much greater extent than any sort of “peasant mentality.”

It is in the five essays on poor relief, however, that the most interesting results are found. The decisive victory of indoor relief embodied in the New Poor Law, with its reliance on the workhouse, belies the apparently quite sincere efforts of local agents—parish overseers, private philanthropists, and others—to relieve the distress of the poor and do so effectively. Indoor relief, an option available to parishes after the first quarter of the eighteenth century, was actually the more costly option, and on the local level, at least, outdoor relief was not framed as the moral hazard that it was by national critics like Malthus and Ricardo. There are particularly informative essays by Jeremy Boulton and Stephen Thompson on the gradual, piecemeal restructuring of the apparatus of poor relief from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Boulton writes that outdoor relief remained remarkably resilient even in parishes that opted to build workhouses after legislation allowed that possibility. Those consigned to indoor relief were generally the destitute elderly; outdoor relief in the form of one-time payments or regular pensions survived for those whose need was deemed to be temporary. Julie Marfany's chapter reinforces the idea that the Poor Law (which had no equivalent in Europe in terms of scale and scope) was a spur to economic growth, as it encouraged calculated risk, such as migration. It also lowered mortality by preventing excessive migration to cities during times of economic hardship.

There are more new directions for research proposed here than there are firm conclusions, and some of the latter are rather anodyne. It is really surprising, for example, that adolescents from less sterile urban environments (and who therefore had more immunities to disease) were less likely to die in residence at school or university than those from rural areas? One supposes, however, that the apple-and-orange relationship of medieval English villeinage to Russian serfdom in the century before emancipation might be less obvious to some readers. Nevertheless, in the aggregate, the essays usefully reinforce some commonplaces about the demography and economy of early modern Britain, well known to nonspecialists but perhaps imperfectly understood: the recovery of British population over three centuries to its pre-plague levels, the relatively high standard of living that humbler Britons enjoyed, the disconnect between Malthus's (correct) projections about population growth and his (incorrect) prognostications of a consequent subsistence crisis. In the closing chapter, Richard Hoyle's reconsideration of Alan Macfarlane's Origins of English Individualism (1978), Hoyle applies Macfarlane's conclusions about the agrarian sector to trade, finding that businesses were no more likely than farms to pass to widows or to surviving children in an age when legal infrastructure did not exist to allow economic concerns to take a form distinct from the individual household family.

The editors suggest as one general conclusion of this broad range of essays that the demographic and economic choices of individuals and groups over these six hundred years were never unconstrained responses “to changing economic indicators or opportunities” (13). One might also point to the suggestion of a number of contributors that various forms of public assistance, and the Elizabethan Poor Law in particular, played in fostering rather than inhibiting economic growth. All of these conclusions, the editors caution, await “systematic testing in the future” (13).