Jacob Rose

Research Topic

England’s fertility decline: A new exploration using digitised individual census
records, 1861-1921.

Supervisor: Sian Pooley and Jane Humphries

My research hopes to address a deficit in our understanding of why and how fertility rates decline rapidly shortly after modern economic growth begins. Many historical perspectives in the field are buttressed by macroeconomic models which rely on aggregate data, often yielding results which contain considerable variance, ecological biases, or problems with the direction of causality. Despite this, economists have often not explored the socio-economic and cultural historical records required to unpick, disaggregate, and explain the noise in their fertility models. Thus, comparison between anything but the very largest spatial or chronological population units becomes difficult, meaning that specific causal forces are elusive.

The recently-compiled 'Integrated Census Microdata' (I-CeM) provides 222 million digital individual-level British census records 1851-1921, which allows researchers to re-aggregate enumerated individuals and communities where data quality allows, and record-link individuals longitudinally to analyse the fertility behaviour of generations of cohorts. These techniques, combined with rich mixed-methods comparative archival research into economic and social changes occurring in localities - from democratisation of education, labour market changes, and the sporadic expansion of local-state welfare - may allow me to identify which specific exogenous shocks to local societies and communities changed fertility behaviour. Every historian claims that their period was one of 'major change', but in fin de siècle western Europe the fundamental reproductive relationship seen in all human societies and most animal species - that more resource leads to more births - was, for the first time, reversed.

Funded by ESRC and St John's College