This short book is Peter Razzell's latest restatement of his rejection of Wrigley and Schofield's view of the relative contributions of fertility and mortality change to population development in England from the later sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and also of their views on causes and relationships to economic development. Razzell argues that population growth from the early eighteenth century was almost entirely a result of declining mortality, while fertility actually fell largely because marriage ages rose and proportions of women marrying fell. Falling mortality was largely due to a ‘transformation of the disease environment’, and the ‘development of capitalism’ was above all stimulated by cheap ‘surplus labour’ resulting from the resulting demographic growth.

The core of the book is a reassertion, with additional examples, of Razzell's long-held view that parish registration consistently under-recorded births, deaths and marriages so that both family reconstitution and Cambridge Group aggregative analysis produced deeply flawed demographic rates. So, for example, he counts the number of cases where two children in the same family were given the same names even when the burial of the older child cannot be found in parish registers, and uses this to provide ‘objective’ estimates of under-registration. This leads him to claim, for example, that the numbers of deaths in 18 English parishes (including some used in the Cambridge Group reconstitutions) should be at least a third higher than revealed by parish burial records in every half-century but one from 1600 to 1839. By comparing birthplaces stated at the 1851 census with baptism records, Razzell suggests that almost a third of all births were missing from the registers in the areas he examines. Comparing proportions of women aged 45 and over recorded as spinsters at the 1851 census with proportions recorded in various kinds of court proceedings at various periods from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, leads him to argue that marriage was almost universal in these earlier periods, but fell markedly thereafter; therefore, in contrast to the views of the Cambridge Group, fertility must also have fallen rather than risen over the eighteenth century.

There is no doubt that by examining these kinds of issues Razzell has raised very important questions about the reliability of many parish registers and some of the conclusions that might be drawn from them. Not surprisingly, however, those whose work he has criticised have already responded, often at great length. What one would then have expected in any book that claimed to be a serious contribution to scholarship would be some active engagement with the arguments of his critics. There is none of this here. Indeed, the writings of his critics do not even appear in his bibliography (which is also riddled with incorrect references), so this book gives a very one-sided picture to any reader not aware of the controversies.

For example, Razzell's use of missing burials of same-named children was the subject of extensive debate in Local population studies in 2011 and 2012. Here he completely ignores the work of his critics, which suggested that he had underestimated the frequency of ‘genuine’ living same-name siblings; that, from Scottish analogies, same-name siblings were likely to have had above-average mortality; and that many earlier-born siblings could anyway have died after moving elsewhere.

Similarly, a lengthy chapter by Wrigley concluding his 2004 book Poverty, progress and population responded to Razzell's earlier claims about under-registration of births and deaths. Among many criticisms, Wrigley noted that the work of the Cambridge Group is based only on registers selected for their apparent high quality and then only used for periods when quality was apparently maintained. It is thus highly misleading to use a wider range of registers without stating exactly why they were included, why others were excluded, what criteria were used in these selection processes (and, I might add, giving the ‘error rates’ for each individual parish rather than a simple mean – it is well known that some registers were poorly kept, but they are irrelevant to the debates). Wrigley also noted that if the registers used in the Cambridge Group reconstitutions were under-recording fertility by more than a quarter, as Razzell alleges, applying this inflation factor to their estimates of age-specific fertility in the second half of the eighteenth century would, highly implausibly, produce rates for women in their twenties that would exceed those of Hutterite women (usually taken as having had the highest known fertility anywhere). Also, birth under-registration on the level suggested by Razzell would inevitably produce far longer gaps between births than found in the Cambridge reconstitutions. Razzell in this book makes no mention of Wrigley's criticisms, simply adding further examples to those he has already cited in the past. He also offers no overall summary of his proposed alternative birth and death rates. This is essential to allow cross-checking of the arithmetical consistency of the resulting population change and required levels of net migration.

Many similar points could be made. Seeking to identify missing births by searching parish registers for those listed as having been born there in the Census Enumerators' Books assumes that census records of birthplaces are accurate – which they are often not. Searching for deaths in registers that match with probate records assumes that the minority who made wills were representative of the whole population. Inferring nuptiality from court appearances by spinsters implies that women who gave court evidence were a random sample of all women. And, so on …

All this is both sad and irritating, because Razzell has missed an opportunity to make a real contribution to key debates in English social and economic history. Some of his points undoubtedly merit further serious research, but by his refusal to engage seriously with his critics on their terms, this book takes us very little further along that path.