Demography, Early History of

Simon Szreter, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Demography has developed since the seventeenth century as a core set of analytical techniques for evaluating observed
change in population aggregates in relation to the varying processes of mortality, fertility, and migration. It has been
dependent on the apparatus of nation-states to generate its essential data of population age- and sex-structures and ows of
vital events. Crucial technical developments have been the perfection of life tables and of stable population theory. The
necessarily contentious interpretation of the causes of demographic change involves a wide range of ecological, political, and
cultural factors, with the seminal work of Thomas Malthus (17661834) remaining highly inuential.

Demography is the study of processes of change in human
populations. Demography consists of three interrelated intel-
lectual activities: the collection and validation of appropriate
evidence; analysis using an expanding and sophisticated body
of mathematical and statistical techniques, which are designed
to avoid a range of pitfalls; and, nally, the interpretation of the
relationship between the revealed demographic processes and
the encompassing epidemiological, natural, economic, and
social environments. To a limited extent these relations can be
analyzed quantitatively but interpretation also requires
engagement with wider issues relating to culture, religion,
ideology, politics, and international relations, as exemplied in
the seminal work of the elds most inuential founding
thinker, Thomas R. Malthus (17661834).
The gradual emergence of the modern discipline of
demography between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries
was associated with an increasingly exclusive focus on mathe-
matically tractable properties of population aggregates. Fou-
cault has identied this schematically with an increasing focus
of sovereign powers typically nation-states on their pop-
ulations as aggregates, which came to be conceived within
analytical demography analogous to biological entities of the
natural world, with processes of fertility and mortality of
paramount concern for explaining change over time. Hence
knowledge of the age- and sex- structure of the population has
been necessary in order to measure these processes accurately,
requiring appropriate ofcial census and registration systems to
provide the necessary data. Kreager points out, however, that
since at least Aristotle, there has also always been a second
approach to the study of human population change, which
addresses sociocultural and political questions of what deter-
mines mutually acknowledged membership of a dened pop-
ulation, independently of the biological facts of life of birth
and death. As Bashford has recently shown, toward the close of
the nineteenth century the most economically advanced
nation-states became aware of the practical importance of such
issues of membership of their national populations as their
imperialist aspirations bumped up against each other in
a newly closed world lacking any further uncharted and
unclaimed open frontiers. Such ecological competition was
also informed by increasingly dominant racist and social
Darwinist conated perceptions of the physical and cultural
differences between human groups. Attempts to control and
guide or prevent certain population movements, to secure
desired imperialist patterns of settlement across the globe,
became a new object of state policy, with the proliferation of
the technology of the international passport c.18801930, as
both symbol of an individuals membership of a national
population and tool for attempting to control migration.
As an institutionalized academic discipline, demography is
a relatively recent arrival in the social sciences. Before World
War II there were only a handful of established academic posts
in demography, mostly privately funded in the US universities,
a couple at the London School of Economics. Yet, ofcials
performing at least some key population counting and
accounting tasks have existed for millennia, by virtue of the
obvious importance to political leaders of enumeration of
populations, or at least sections of them, for scal, military,
administrative, and colonial purposes. This dates back to the
worlds ancient civilizations, for instance, in Mesopotamia,
China, and Egypt. Furthermore, compilation of family gene-
alogies and maintenance of vital registers of births, marriages,
and deaths both for religious and legal purposes have vener-
able histories, too; and the data they generated are now proving
to be of value for demographic historians of early modern
Europe, North and South America, Japan, and China, for
instance.
Modern demographic study of population aggregates
requires two kinds of information. First, on the current stock of
the dened population (numbers of each sex alive at each year
of age) usually supplied through accurate and regular census
details (now taken decennially in most countries); and second,
information on the continuous ow of vital events, the
numbers of each sex born alive, and the numbers dying at each
exact age. This permits calculation of the age- and sex-specic
rates of fertility and mortality necessary for genuinely compa-
rable measures of a populations principal dynamic demo-
graphic characteristics. Allowing for the effects of net in- or
out-migration requires an additional source of information
for accurate demographic measures of fertility and mortality,
with various forms of undocumented migration always
providing a challenge for demographers to estimate in order
to produce unbiased estimates of population change. Many
further kinds of demographic and epidemiological analysis
can be undertaken provided that the appropriate detailed
information is routinely collected, as can occur in advanced

170 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03031-2

universalist, health care systems, such as details on ages and
causes of death, or on mothers ages and parity (i.e., how many
previous live births).
The study of populations of any size presupposes an ofcial
apparatus of data collection of some considerable sophistica-
tion and demography is therefore unique among the social
sciences in the extent of its intimate involvement with the
priorities of governments and ofcials and the wider inuences
of politics upon the state. Until recently only government
bureaucracies could command the clerical resources required
for the statistical analysis of national demographic data. Hence
demography before 1945 tended to be the preserve of state
ofcials or those with trusted ofcial access. It was in fact
government census bureaux, which provided the initial
demand for automated punch-card tabulating machines and
later for the production of the rst nonmilitary electronic
computers (the US Census Bureaus UNIVAC, commissioned
for the 1950 census). The subsequent proliferation of cheap
computing resources has undoubtedly been a necessary
precondition for the expansion of demography as an academic
discipline with numerous independent, nonofcial practi-
tioners now able to participate in the eld of study.
Demography has therefore had a close historical association
with the rise of nation-states throughout the entire modern
period. But demographys earlier development has also been
strongly inuenced at times by the needs of smaller, subna-
tional polities, such as the municipalities of Britain since the
seventeenth century or the federated states of eighteenth-
century Germany. Furthermore, the institutional and intellec-
tual character of demographys rapid disciplinary growth since
World War II has been much inuenced by explicitly trans-
national institutions such as the UN and the World Bank and
major independent (though mostly American) philanthropic
organizations, such as the Rockefeller and the Ford Founda-
tions, which funded the postwar institutional expansion of
demography and its associated theory of demographic transi-
tion through the UN Population Council and the rst centers
of training in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Nevertheless,
national governments remain the principal collectors of
continuous series of veried, authentic demographic data,
so that the nation remains the typical reference population
addressed.
Modern demographys origins are conventionally traced
to the practitioners of political arithmetic in Restoration
England. From the fteenth century onward, initially among
some Italian city states, it was increasingly the practice of
European cities to compile bills of mortality weekly death
records as an early warning system for epidemics, particularly
of plague. In London, the existence of this data provided the
immediate context for the rst recorded efforts at demographic
analysis by John Graunt (162974), the father of modern
demography. In his Natural and political observations made upon
the bills of mortality (1662), he also used records of London
christenings to develop a rudimentary life table. This is the
fundamental technique for the correct analysis of mortality
because it divides the population into age sections and gives
statistics for the probability of dying at each age, which can
then be arithmetically summed to a single average life expec-
tancy at any age, enabling populations with vastly different age
structures or mortality regimes to be compared. Graunt had
Demography, Early History of 171
thus grasped the two fundamental demographic insights: that
the age- and sex- composition of a population powerfully
inuences the incidence of vital events; and this means that
population processes are all signicantly interdependent.
Life table techniques developed very gradually over the
ensuing century, with notable work by Sir Edmund Halley
(16561742), the Dutchman Willem Kersseboom (c.1690
1771), the German Johann Sssmilch (170767), the
Frenchman Antoine Deparcieux (170368), the Swiss-born
Leonhard Euler (170783), and a host of British contribu-
tors to the so-called population controversy (over whether or
not the kingdoms population had increased since the
Glorious Revolution of 168889, when the civil servant
Gregory King had compiled, from tax returns, the only detailed
estimate of a European nations population made in the early
modern period). Finally, the rst technically correct empirical
life table was published in 1815, for commercial actuarial
purposes, by Joshua Milne (17761851), using accurate
census and vital registration data collected for public health
purposes in Carlisle by Dr John Heysham (17531834) during
the years 177987.
During the nineteenth century the principal institution
promoting the further technical development of demographic
analysis was the General Register Ofce (GRO) in London. This
British lead was an unlikely development, in that the British
census was not even established on a permanent basis (it had to
be invoked by a separate Act of Parliament every 10 years),
whereas the Scandinavian countries of Iceland (1703) and
Sweden (1749) had already instigated regular census-taking,
while the new, expanding federation of the United States of
America had also committed itself to regular censuses, as an
integral part of its new process of democratic political repre-
sentation. Meanwhile the French and Belgians, with the
Marquis de Condorcet, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Fourier,
Adolphe Quetelet, Alexandre Parent-Duchtelet, and Louis
Rn Villerm, initially led the world in the relevant mathe-
matical elds of probability and the application of statistics to
human biomedical affairs. The British lead in vital statistics
that opened up in the mid-nineteenth century was due to
a chain of chance occurrences. The GRO was created by statute
to oversee from 1837, a national civil registration system of
births, deaths, and marriages, which was created not for public
health or demographic purposes but as a liberal reform granting
dissenters, a record of their vital events independent of the long-
standing parish registers of the Established Church, in order to
ensure nonconformists legal rights in common with the rest of
the population in relation to records for property-holding
and inheritance. In 1840, as a temporary expedient this small
department of government, the GRO, then became vested
with responsibility for taking the nations fth census of 1841
(the rst occurred in 1801). The Registrar Generals recently
appointed statistical assistant, William Farr, was an unknown
man of humble origins, a trained medical doctor, and a self-
taught statistician (partly through a visit to Paris, in 1830s
a leading center of application of statistics to medicine).
A representative member of the European-wide generation
enthused by the promise of a statistical science of society
inspired by the Belgian astronomer, Adolphe Quetelet (1796
1874), William Farr (180783) seized the opportunity pre-
sented by his responsibility for processing the two essential
172 Demography, Early History of
sources required for demographic analysis. He launched a four-
decade long career of innovative demographic and comparative
epidemiological work. Britain was at this time in the throes of
a profound mortality crisis in its industrial cities and Farr saw
his work analyzing the death rates as guiding a national public
health campaign to reduce preventable mortality from the
many infectious and sanitary diseases, which his studies
demonstrated to be so variable in their incidence in different
local government jurisdictions across the land. Of course rural
Ireland also suffered the calamity of its great famine in the late
1840s but Farrs remit did not extend there. Although Ireland
was an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1801, there
was to be no vital registration system for the property-less,
Catholic peasantry until 1864. Thus, while it was in a Pari-
sian publication that the term demography was rst coined in
1855 by Quetelets Belgian countryman, Achille Guillard it
was in Britain that it was most intensively practiced and
developed as vital statistics. Signicant work was certainly also
done in other ofcial statistical ofces. Indeed, the most
important subsequent innovation following the perfection of
the life table in the development of demographic techniques of
analysis was the Lexis diagram invented by the German statis-
tician, Wilhelm Lexis (18371914), in 1875 for representing
the relationship between cohorts (or generations) and period
effects (events).
The GROs lead was surprising in another sense in that the
single English name most widely associated with the origins of
demography is not the civil servant William Farr with his
primary medical focus on preventable mortality, but the cleric
and academic, Thomas Robert Malthus, whose focus was on
the economy and preventable fertility. Malthuss An essay on
the principle of population, as it affects the future improvement of
society, published anonymously in 1798, famously enunciated
on page 14 of its opening chapter that Population, when
unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence
increases only in an arithmetical ratio. He argued that all
policy to enhance a populations welfare was conservatively
constrained by this limitation principle. Malthus, who held the
rst ever Chair in Political Economy in Britain and regarded
Adam Smith as his principal mentor, thereby applied the
fundamental economic problem of scarcity to demography and
produced an ecological analysis, which, as is well-known,
subsequently independently stimulated rst Darwin and then
A.R. Wallace to each apply a similar logic to the problem of the
origin of species, thereby coauthoring in 1858 the theory of
evolution through survival of the ttest.
Malthus was therefore, at once, a seminal inuence on
evolution, ecology, and demography. In relation to demog-
raphy this was especially in terms of the third intellectual
activity outlined above, interpretation. His forthright axioms
and their policy implications demanded a response from the
intellectuals of every country and secured a permanent place for
the discussion of population problems in the social and bio-
logical sciences and in the corridors of government and power.
In the ve-times revised and extended editions of his Essay in
his own lifetime he continued to feed the debate, further
analyzing and exploring the manner in which aggregate pop-
ulation change, mortality and migration, and individuals and
families reproductive behavior is integrated into the encom-
passing natural, social, and economic environment, while
utilizing an ever-increasing range of examples drawn from
across the world to show how profoundly they were also
inuenced by customs, beliefs, and politics. He notoriously
drew the wrath of Marx for his support for the radical reduction
of the nations welfare net which resulted in the amendment of
the Poor Laws in 1834, on the grounds that its generosity was
discouraging prudence among the prolic poor who married
too young and so had too many children. However, as Bash-
ford points out, Malthus cannot be caricatured simply as
a heartless apologist for bourgeois capitalism and European
expansion his moral concerns for the future of the indigenous
inhabitants of North America and their way of life contrast
interestingly with the contemporary views of Benjamin
Franklin, for instance. While Mao Zedongs initial policy for
Communist China, more people, more power, was, following
Marx, consciously anti-Malthusian, China retained allegiance
to communism when it radically reversed this policy with the
hyper-Malthusianism of the one-child policy from the late
1970s under the inuence of the Song group of technocrats,
whose rise to policy preeminence has been documented by
Greenhalgh.
Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century,
however, most of those studying demographic phenomena
were, like Darwin, gentlemen scholars in local and national
statistical societies; also medical men, municipal, and some
state ofcials scattered all across Europe and North America.
From mid-nineteenth century they met periodically at
International Congresses of Statistics, then of Hygiene and
Demography and eventually of Eugenics. But it was not until
the interwar decades of the twentieth century that demography
began to emerge with an independent disciplinary and
professional identity, marked initially by the formation in
1928 of the International Union for the Scientic Study of
Population, followed in 1931 by the foundation of the Pop-
ulation Association of America.
However, this formative era from the late nineteenth
century onward had also witnessed the rise of nationalist and
imperialist rivalries and associated racist, social Darwinist
ideologies. This came to exert a dominant (though not
uncontested) inuence over the practice of demography during
the interwar years. French demography was perhaps the rst to
experience this overtly nationalist and xenophobic current, in
the form of a defensive pronatalist popular reaction to defeat in
the FrancoPrussian war of 187071. This was partly ascribed
to her extremely low birth rate, the French being the rst nation
in the world to have practiced widespread family limitation.
The titles of the works of Frances leading demographers, such
as Arsne Dumont, Jacques Bertillon, and Adolphe Landry
repeatedly referred to Dpopulation and decadence while her
great novelist, Zola, writing in exile in London after the Dreyfus
affair, mourned Frances lost Fcondit (1899). The study of
population problems in the interwar period became increas-
ingly subsumed within this social Darwinist agenda. With its
continuing necessary association with the state, demography
was inevitably heavily implicated in the policies of the Fascist
and Nazi regimes with their totalitarian ideologies. Under
the Nazi regime the potential for both demographic and
economic forms of analysis to be applied as analytic systems of
logic devoid of humane or moral considerations became trag-
ically manifest. Nazi Bevlkerungswissenschaft mechanically

extended the notion of an economically optimal density of
population (relative to capital and living standards, rather than
simply land), which had underpinned Hitlers racist notion of
Lebensraum, to arrive at apparently logical but murderous
conclusions that population densities should be reduced in
inefcient circumstances, where Jews and Poles were con-
cerned, for instance.
International demography conferences in both Rome and
Berlin in the late 1930s were partially boycotted and disrupted
due to concern at the emerging demographic policies of Fascist
regimes. But even in more liberal Britain, USA, or social
democratic Sweden, demographic analysis became obsessed
with class-differential fertility, problem families, and fears of
a ight from parenthood associated with a succession of
illiberal movements for national efciency, eugenics, and
social hygiene. Only in the ideologically separatist USSR, was
population analysis relatively free from this association (until
Stalins own pronatalist drive during the war). But this was
primarily because of the absence of Western-style demogra-
phers, due to Marxs historic demonization of Malthus as the
ultimate apologist of the bourgeoisie and their dismal science
of political economy. In the massive, unmanageable conti-
nental empire of the new Soviet Union, Hirsch shows how the
alternative (Aristotelian) compositional and membership
approach to population accounting was dominant in the of-
cial practice of the revolutionary peoples commissars: a
preoccupation with mapping the geographical distribution of
ethnic nationals (narodnosti) and with the control of movement
of categories of workers in the economy through the use of an
internal passport system in fact inherited from the Tsarist
regime, the Propiska, similarly to the Chinese Communist
states subsequent adapted usage of the ancient Hukuo system
of household registration.
In the non-Communist world in the immediate aftermath
of World War II and Nazi excesses, in Europe, it was only in
France and Britain that institutions for demographic research
positively ourished. LInstitut National dtudes Dmo- economic growth was seen as a generic process, such that less-
graphiques under Alfred Sauvy (18981990) and the Pop-
ulation Investigation Committee of the London School of
Economics under David Glass (191178) both founded their
respective journals in 1946, Population and Population Studies,
respectively. However, the decade of the 1940s in fact marks
a signicant shift in which the center of gravity of the discipline
of demography migrated from the colonial powers of Europe
to USA. It was symbolic of this coming change that in work
published between 1907 and 1939 a European-born but
American-naturalized mathematician, Alfred Lotka (1880
1949), devised the proofs for the equations of renewal
processes, which underlie stable population theory (showing
that populations always come to exhibit a constant age struc-
ture and growth rate if their fertility and mortality rates are
unchanging). This has proved to be the most important
mathematical advance in demography since the perfection of
the life table technique (which applied to nonrenewal
processes). Intriguingly, unknown to Lotka, Leonhard Euler
(170783) had already solved these equations in the eigh-
teenth century. Indeed, Lotkas work itself remained largely
unexploited until after World War II, both facts which
demonstrate that technical advances within social science
disciplines do not in themselves necessarily cause change but
Demography, Early History of 173
are dependent on the institutional context and on demand
factors external to the discipline.
After World War II, demography rapidly responded to the
demand of the growing global preoccupation with planned
economic growth, propelled in this direction by the US stra-
tegic interests in the context of the Cold War rivalry with the
USSR for client states among the many decolonizing peoples of
the less-developed world. Consequently, the period since 1945
has become a relatively clearly demarcated third era in the
history of demography when, with racist sociobiology dis-
credited, in many senses it returned to the original Malthusian
economic agenda and a policy preoccupation with fertility
restraint, especially in the developing countries where most of
the worlds poor reside. The model of demographic transition
has dominated the disciplines approach throughout this era.
This is a general historical model, promoted and adapted by
Frank Notestein (190283), the highly inuential and well-
connected rst Director, 193659, of the Princeton Ofce of
Population Research (OPR), the most important institutional
center for the new American-led demography. Demographic
transition theory proposes that in order for a nation to achieve
sustained long-term economic growth it must reduce both its
mortality and, especially, its fertility levels to those attained by
the modernized, liberal democratic Western countries. The
model has surprisingly little consistent support in either the
historical or contemporary record but it has survived repeated
revisionist challenges and has undoubtedly served the disci-
pline well as a model that is compliant with an overarching
ideological position endorsing the goals of promoting
economic development of liberal market economies round the
world. This has successfully elicited a continuous ow of funds
for both research and family planning programs from Western
governments and philanthropic foundations.
It was in this policy context that external demands increased
for various applications of stable population theory. Within the
dominant postwar liberal consensus of modernization theory,
developed countries could be engineered to repeat the experi-
ence of the developed countries. Fertility restraint and mortality
reduction were important population policy inputs to permit
the occurrence of incremental capitaloutput ratios, considered
essential for industrialization. This would be jeopardized by
too great a demographic dependency burden (too many young
and invalid old in the population) diverting national income
into current consumption instead of savings and capital accu-
mulation. Stable population theory enabled model life tables
to be devised by A.J. Coale (19172002) (Notesteins successor
as Director of OPR) and Paul Demeny, and indirect estimation
techniques to be formulated by W. Brass (192199) of the
London School of Hygiene, which permitted the measurement
of demographic parameters in many of the less-developed
countries where primary information, both census and, espe-
cially, vital registration, was defective. A further application, for
the same reason, has been its use in back projection and
generalized inverse projection in historical demographic work.
Along with the application of ground-breaking work in the
family reconstitution of historical communities by Louis
Henry (191191), this has enabled Sir E.A. Wrigley (b.1931)
and his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of
Population and Social Structure to utilize the parish registers of
174 Demography, Early History of
baptisms, marriages, and burials originally established by the
Tudor monarchy to reconstruct the detailed demographic
record of the rst industrial nation, England, back to the mid-
sixteenth century, thereby, incidentally, demonstrating the
invalidity of the demographic transition model in this impor-
tant case.
Demography has achieved a considerable degree of disci-
plinary and institutional success, in many senses enviable by
the standards of the other social sciences. Since 1945, training
institutions have proliferated, primarily under the aegis of the
Rockefeller-funded Population Council located in New York,
so that demographers are now trained in many centers in all the
continents. By plausibly reducing, for certain purposes, the
complexity of human affairs in matters of reproduction,
morbidity, mortality, migration, and mobility, to tractable
mathematical models, demography has achieved considerable
analytical power. Like classical and neoclassical economics,
conventional demographic analysis embraces a positivist
epistemology. It also starts from the liberal and democratic
foundational ction that each individual can, in principle, be
legitimately treated as an equivalent accounting unit,
a presumption that could only make sense in a post-Lockean
world, where a working man could be deemed to count for
the same as a prince, hence demographys rst text by John
Graunt came from the hand of an exact contemporary of John
Lockes, another survivor of the modern worlds rst overthrow
of a supposedly divinely appointed sovereign. The resulting
accounting system has provided the basis for an increasingly
elaborate range of useful technical developments, such as,
recently, multistate and multiregional demography.
Inevitably, however, there is an intellectual price to be paid
for the preservation of demographys analytical rigor. Rather
like the practice of so-called mainstream economics, this,
along with its close relationship with the policy needs of
governments and other agencies involved in planning and
development practices, has tended to insulate demography
somewhat from the discipline of full engagement with the rest
of the social sciences and humanities. Like all scientic activi-
ties, demography socially and ideologically constructs its
objects of study but there has been little explicit acknowledg-
ment of the implications of this. Thus, for a discipline, which
has devoted much energy to rening, for instance, calibration
of the proximate (biological and physiological) causes of
fertility variation, there has been much less interest in under-
standing how the demographers own concept of fertility itself
has arisen, and this applies to other social categories and their
context dependence, such as population, family, or house- Dupquier, J., 1984. Pour la dmographie historique. P.U.F., Paris.
hold. This disinclination to engage in critical reexive practice
has undoubtedly had signicant and, for such an applied and
policy-oriented discipline, real consequences. For many
decades, vast resources have been devoted to family planning
programs aiming to transplant modern, Western contracep-
tive practices into an enormous variety of diverse cultures. More
policy effectiveness might have been forthcoming if both
fertility and birth control had from the start been approached
as culturally variable entities, whose meanings had to be
researched in any population before attempting to modify
them.
The future of demography, established as it now is in all the
worlds major cultures and with departments of practitioners
in most governments, is likely to include much more active
discussion of the relationship between its inherited inventory
of Western social categories and those of other peoples,
something also likely to follow from the increasing sophisti-
cation of historical and anthropological demography. It is
likely to be less exclusively consumed with the problems of
engendering economic growth and more with social equity and
public health issues, including those of longevity and aging,
along with another Malthusian inheritance ecological
problems of the uses and distribution of material wealth, plus
the major issues of the rise of international migration and
mobility in a more culturally interconnected (globalized) but
also more unequal world economy. This would, to some
extent, represent a return, on a global scale, to the issues, which
so preoccupied the mid-nineteenth century demographic
observers of the human disruption wreaked in Britain and
Europe by the worlds rst great wave of rapid economic
growth. At the same time greater reintegration of demography
into the intellectual concerns of both the biosciences and also
the wider humanities is likely to be mutually benecial, with
the recent advances in study of the human genome, greater
appreciation of gender and sexual diversity, and also of the
changing planetary environment as three salient and diverse
examples of major recent intellectual developments likely to
impact on the ways demography is used and studied in the
future.
See also: Data Bases and Statistical Systems: Demography;
Demography: History Since 1900; Families and Households,
Formal Demography of; Historical Demography; Malthus,
Thomas Robert (17661834); Population Aging: Economic and
Social Consequences; Population Forecasts.
Bibliography
Anderson, M.J., Citro, C.F., Salvo, J.J., 2012. Encylopedia of the U.S. Census: From
the Constitution to the American Community Survey, second ed. Sage Copress,
Los Angeles, CA.
Bashford, A., 2014. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth.
Columbia University Press, New York.
Breckenridge, K., Szreter, S. (Eds.), 2012. Registration and Recognition. Documenting
the Person in World History. Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 182. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Desrosires, A., 1998. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical
Reasoning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Dupquier, M., Dupquier, J., 1985. Histoire de la dmographie. Perrin, Paris.
Eyler, J.M., 1979. Victorian Social Medicine. The Ideas and Methods of William Farr.
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Foucault, M., 1991. Governmentality. In: Burchell, P., Gordon, C., Miller, P. (Eds.), The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures by and an Interview
with Michel Foucault (R. Pasquino, Trans.). Harvester, Hemel Hempstead, UK,
pp. 87104.
Girard, A., 1986. Linstitut national dtudes dmographiques. Histoire et developpe-
ment. INED, Paris.
Glass, D.V., 1973a. The Development of Population Statistics. D C Heath,
Farnborough, UK.
Glass, D.V., 1973b. Numbering the People. The Eighteenth-Century Population
Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain. D C
Heath, Farnborough, UK.
Gotz, A., Heim, S., 2002. Architects of Annihilation. Auschwitz and the Logic of
Destruction (A.G. Blunden, Trans.). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Greenhalgh, S., 1996. The social construction of population science: an intellectual,
institutional and political history of twentieth-century demography. Comparative
Studies in Society and History 38 (1), 2666.
Grrenhalgh, S., 2008. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Dengs China. University
of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Hacking, I., 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Hauser, P.M., Duncan, O.D. (Eds.), 1959. The Study of Population: An Inventory and
Appraisal. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Hirsch, F., 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the
Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Hodgson, D., 1983. Demography as social science and policy science. Population and
Development Review 9 (1), 134.
Hodgson, D., 1991. The ideological origins of the population association of America.
Population and Development Review 17 (1), 134.
Ipsen, C., 1996. Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Kreager, P., 1988. New light on Graunt. Population Studies Journal of Demography
42 (1), 129140.
Kreager, P., 2008. Aristotle and open population thinking. Population and Development
Review 34 (4), 599629.
Kreager, P., 2009. Darwin and Lotka: two concepts of population. Demographic
Research 21, 469502.
Le Bras, H., 2008. The Nature of Demography. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Lee, R., 2004. Ofcial statistics and demography in the Third Reich. In: Mackensen, R.
(Ed.), Bevlkerungslehre und Bevlkerungspolitik im Dirtten Reich. Leske
Budrich, Opladen, pp. 101124.
Demography, Early History of 175
Notestein, F.W., 1982. Demography in the United States: a partial account of the
development of the eld. Population and Development Review 8 (4), 651687.
Ryder, N.B., 1964. Notes on the concept of a population. American Journal of
Sociology 69, 447463.
Schweber, L., 2006. Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France
and England, 18301885. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Soloway, R.A., 1990. Demography and Degeneration. Eugenics and the Declining
Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain. University of North Carolina Press,
Durham, NC.
Szreter, S., 1991. Special issue: the general register ofce and the public health
movement 18371914. Social History of Medicine 4, 435463.
Szreter, S., 1993. The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change:
a critical intellectual history. Population and Development Review 19 (4), 659701.
Szreter, S., 1996. Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 18601940. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Szreter, S., Sholkamy, H., Dharmalinghan, A., 2004. Categories and Contexts.
Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography. Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Teitelbaum, M., Winter, J., 1985. The Fear of Population Decline. Academic Press,
New York.
Von Glahn, R., 2012. Household registration, property rights and social obligations in
imperial China: principles and practices. chapter 1. In: Breckenridge, K., Szreter, S.
(Eds.), Registration and Recognition. Documenting the Person in World History,
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 182. Oxford University Press, pp. 3966.
Wrigley, E.A., Davies, R.S., Oeppen, J.E., Schofeld, R.S., 1997. English Population
History from Family Reconstitution 15801837. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.