The essays in this volume were among those presented at a conference in 2011 to celebrate Richard Smith's scholarly influence and achievements on his retirement, and they admirably reflect the breadth of his interests, and the inspiration he has provided for historians and historical research in Cambridge and far beyond. They fall broadly into two groups. Half of the essays are about the demographic, institutional or cultural conditions which facilitated or retarded economic growth in England and Europe, either by constraining human behaviour or by allowing greater room for choice in response to changing opportunities and circumstances. The other papers focus more narrowly on the subject of social welfare, exploring further some of the suggestions Smith has put forward about its potential economic and demographic importance, particularly in eighteenth-century England. Expenditure on the poor there was arguably large enough to have protected nuclear families from several kinds of life-cycle risk, facilitated labour mobility, and hence helped to keep both fertility and child mortality relatively low.
Some of the more wide-ranging chapters helpfully set current work of this kind in its broad historiographical context. In a lucid opening chapter Tony Wrigley situates John Hajnal's 1965 paper on European marriage patterns at the beginning of a process of research (much of it Wrigley's own) which has transformed our understanding of the exceptional economic development of north-west Europe. In Holland and England marriage choices could be made in response to economic opportunities, and choice could then determine demographic outcomes. Richard Hoyle ends the volume with an equally striking paper, taking in his case Alan Macfarlane's 1978 book The Origins of English Individualism as his starting point, and pointing out in characteristically robust fashion that individualism might impose constraints as well as offering choices. He notes that English laws determining individual rights to property and its transmission post-mortem hindered capital accumulation across generations, particularly in urban contexts. Until partnerships and joint-stock companies became commonplace after 1800, the chances of forming trading dynasties were slight and the consequence of periods of high mortality was an increase in unemployment and economic depression.
The potential importance of institutional constraints in England is also one of the conclusions which emerges from Bruce Campbell and Lorraine Barry's use of modern techniques of Geographical Information Science (GIS) to map the population geography of Britain in 1290. Comparison with a similar map for 1801 suggests that at the earlier date the distribution of population was much less responsive to economic opportunities than it was to be later, and was much more likely to have been determined by institutional factors like manorial lordship, status distinctions, and tenurial structures. Institutional constraints could be more or less powerful in different places, however, and two chapters here point out that England was in many respects relatively free from them. Tracy Dennison documents the differences between serfdom in pre-revolutionary Russia and in medieval England in some detail, and Sheilagh Ogilvie presents a masterly and carefully nuanced survey of the ways in which manorial, legal and community structures had a different impact on peasant behaviour in different places across much of medieval and early modern Europe. No two contexts were ever alike, and norms of behaviour, once established, changed only slowly over time.
The same might be said a fortiori about the welfare institutions whose impact in eighteenth-century England is the subject of other chapters. Although Julie Marfany's essay warns us that the extent and efficacy of provision for the poor in some parts of France and Spain may have been underestimated, there seems little doubt that the total resources transferred to the poor by various means in England were unique in scale, and that they had the capacity to shape, if not constrain, economic and demographic behaviour. No other country combined private charity and hospitals and almshouses, like those documented here by Nigel Goose and Margaret Yates, with the formal mechanisms of the poor laws whose operation in St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the incorporated unions of parishes in Suffolk, and in Bedfordshire villages, is discussed in some detail by Jeremy Boulton, Stephen Thompson and Samantha Williams, respectively.
This great machine of social welfare, however, offered many alternative avenues for relief, and was no more easily turned to new coherent purposes than its equivalent in modern Britain. Concerned as eighteenth-century legislators and local governors were to cut costs, limit outdoor relief, and enforce labour discipline in institutions, these chapters suggest they had little effect. In St Martin's, for example, in the period after 1725 when there was no outdoor relief at all, there were nonetheless enough options available to the poor for them to survive outside the workhouse for years, only entering it, as if into a hospice, when they were terminally ill. In such circumstances welfare payments were more likely to confirm than disrupt the demographic status quo, and it is significant that Thompson finds no evidence in Suffolk of their encouraging rapid population growth in a Malthusian fashion. He suggests therefore that England's institutional welfare arrangements occurred ‘downstream’ of demographic and economic processes which were left largely undisturbed.
As the editors remark in their introduction, it is characteristic of the kinds of research and speculation represented in this book that they leave many questions unresolved. The most intractable of them are those which involve disentangling demographic, institutional and economic conditions when it comes to accounting for historical change. As Richard Smith would be the first to say, however, that is what makes the questions discussed here so interesting, and the conclusions, however partial, so important.
