The population of England exploded during the Industrial Revolution. Between 1750 and 1870, population quadrupled, from 5 million to more than 20 million. In two pathbreaking books, the Cambridge Group, using innovative techniques, reconstructed the demographic history of the English from Anglican parish registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages (Edward A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield The Population History of England 1541–1871, Cambridge University Press, 1981; Edward A. Wrigley, Ros S. Davies, James E. Oeppen, and Roger S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837, Cambridge University Press, 1997). They concluded that declining mortality played a minor role in the eighteenth century population explosion. The driving force was higher fertility, arising, as Malthus would have predicted, from earlier marriage ages and more frequent marriage. Despite contemporary critiques, this interpretation has become the consensus.

Almost a lone contrarian has for years maintained this interpretation is completely wrong. Peter Razzell argues that the Cambridge Group overestimate fertility increases and underestimate mortality declines by applying erroneous “inflation” rates to account for under-registration in the parish records. The claimed rise in fertility is an artefact created by assuming registration quality deteriorated over time and therefore applying larger “inflation” rates to later baptisms. In this book, Razzell presents again empirical evidence that the lazy parish clerks were consistent in their negligence from the 1500s to the 1800s.

Razzell has been making his case against the Cambridge Group conclusions for years, and his critique has been largely dismissed as that of a crank. But the arguments he lays out once more here are serious and challenging. Seven chapters of uneven quality tackle the empirical record on mortality and fertility. Razzell is best as historical detective. Chapter 1 makes his case concisely. He weaves through his strongest external checks on the quality of parish registers, cross-referencing probate records with local parish burials, applying the “same-name” technique (the presence of repeated first names within a family indicated a preceding death) to baptism registers and checking the 1851 census place of birth entries with baptisms. The evidence is troubling. Under-registration is considerable, at about 25 percent for burials and more than 30 percent for baptisms, and consistent in extent from 1543 to 1849.

Demographic Transition Theory ascribes population expansion to abrupt changes in early life mortality. For England, this does not seem to be the case. In Chapter 2, Razzell applies the “same-name” technique to the Cambridge and other data. He concludes that changes in infant and child mortality are not driving the eighteenth century population expansion, since these rates only fall significantly after 1800 (but 1750 for the elites). What then is driving the population growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution?

Razzell argues that it is not fertility (Chapter 4) but adult mortality (Chapter 3). Based on analyses of the Inland Revenue Register, 1710–3, marriage registers (for fathers' presence), seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, members of Parliament from 1660 to 1820 and Hollingsworth's aristocratic data, Razzell argues adult mortality improves in the 1700s. However, Razzell performs no exercise to show that the reductions in adult mortality he finds could even come close to explaining the magnitude of the population growth during the Industrial Revolution.

The remaining analytic chapters are thin expositions of an ancient literature on the mechanisms of mortality decline (Chapter 5), and on the relationship between population and capitalism (Chapter 6).

Is the book worth reading? An Introduction setting out the context of the disputes for the general reader is sorely lacking. Chapter 1 dives straight into the registration controversy without an adequate explanation or incorporation of a growing literature on populations' role in English economic history (outside of a short Preface). The empirical research presented in this book is itself not new and is available in greater detail elsewhere. The book is weak beyond the basic point of Chapter 1. There is no incorporation of recent and highly cited research on the theoretical and empirical link between demography and economic growth and no mention of modern scholarship of the Industrial Revolution (only 13 of the 188 or so references are from the 2010s). The tables rarely report sample sizes and there are no standard errors or indications of variance. The interested specialist would have to look elsewhere to understand the underlying data. For students, the book is too narrow.

However, the central criticisms of the work are significant, and have been widely ignored and forgotten. This matters, as much recent work assumes that the picture of the population history of England established by the Cambridge Group is sacrosanct. Indeed, some recently published empirical analyses of the Cambridge Data ignore Razzell's critiques entirely (see European Economic History Review, Demography). English population history and its idiosyncrasies have formed the basis for ambitious theorizing about the emergence of modern economic growth. So a restatement of the Razzell critique is timely and important.

Is Razzell purely interested in destruction? One wonders why the research conducted in this book did not provide the basis for new burial and baptism inflation rates? One of the many virtues of the Cambridge Groups work is they have provided specifics for other scholars to work with—quinquennial estimates of a variety of demographic features. This has been invaluable for economic historians and shown light where there was none. Razzell even argues that using the Cambridge raw series of baptisms and burials is the “most appropriate way of estimating population growth” as under-registration is constant. Using his estimates of the relative rates of birth under-registration compared to death under-registration Razzell should be able to determine the relative importance of fertility and mortality changes to the Industrial Revolution population explosion. If he feels ill equipped for this task, then others should consider whether another consistent picture of the demography of England 1740–1837 is possible.