Professor Sir E.A. Wrigley interviewed by Tim Guinnane, part I

This document is the transcript of an interview with Professor Tony Wrigley, conducted by Timothy Guinnane, in Cambridge, England, on May 25, 2011. The interview was videotaped and is available in its entirety at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~guinnane. This transcript has been edited slightly for brevity and clarity, and we have added footnotes to identify some scholars and their works. We thank Leigh Shaw-Taylor for making the video and for helping in numerous other ways.
Edward Anthony Wrigley was born in 1931 in Manchester England. He did his bachelor’s and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, and spent his academic career at that university as well as at Oxford and the London School of Economics. Among numerous honors, he was president of the British Academy, has received honorary doctorates from seven universities, and was knighted (Knight Bachelor) for services to historical demography. Wrigley has published widely in economic history and demography journals, and has written or edited more than a dozen books. A list of the books he has written follows this transcript.
TG: I am Tim Guinnane and I am here today in Cambridge in the United Kingdom interviewing Professor Sir Tony Wrigley, Tony to his friends, on behalf of the Cliometric Society. This video will be on the Internet and also there will be a shorter, written version of it. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview. Alan MacFarlane did a video interview five years ago. That interview included a lot of biographical material, so we’ve agreed not to repeat that.1 I did want to start with one question though: what got you interested in economic history in the first place?
TW: I think it’s partly a joint educational background. I read both parts of the history Tripos as an undergraduate and then Part II of the geography Tripos,2
1 That interview can be found at and perhaps that helps to explain why I was always interested in what you might call the material background of events, but it’s also partly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuYGTkhCUVc
2 Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge “read” for a particular Tripos in the way U.S. undergraduates study in a particular major. Part I of the Tripos is relatively broad-based, while Part II is more narrowly focused on the student’s particular interests. Wrigley received 1st Class Honors in Parts I and II of the history Tripos as well as on Part II of the geography Tripos.
coincidence. I got to know Munia Postan,
3 who was then the professor of Economic History in Cambridge, quite well. He was a fellow of the college at which I was an undergraduate, and in retrospect, it is very difficult to distinguish between the different influences that pushed me in that direction.
TG: What was geography in the Tripos at that point? Right now it is a subject which is in great flux. What was it then?
TW: It had a very strong physical element then. This was in the days before Peter Haggett transformed it by subjecting a lot of geographical material to statistical analysis so that now-a-days, or for a long time, geographers were very much more numerate than historians. Now cultural geography has taken over so I suppose the wheel’s turned again. But back in that time the basis of the whole thing was the physical description of the earth and the way in which human societies adapt to it.
TG: We’ll come back to that. It sounds like you had an early interest in the location of coal. One of the things that strikes me about your work is that most economic historians tend to have less interest in intellectual history, whereas you have a very serious intellectual history in Malthus, and you have edited his papers.4 Where do you think that came from? Or, how did that develop?
TW: I think it is connected with a long-standing interest in the difference between pre-industrial societies and post-industrial societies, and Malthus was a remarkably percipient, I think, analyst of the nature of the restrictions that affect all pre-industrial societies. I think he was a little unfortunate in this sense that the other two people who are usually regarded as founders of classical economics, Adam Smith and Ricardo, both first published very mature works. The first essay, Malthus’ first essay, is at least in part attributable, I think, to irritation with his father. He was still a very young
3 Michael Moissey Postan (1898-1981), Professor of Economic History at the University at Cambridge.
4 The works of Thomas Robert Malthus (edited, with David Souden), 8 vols (1986).
man, just over thirty. His father was a fairly keen supporter of the French Revolution and believed that the institutional change could produce perfect societies. And the first essay is really an attempt to show that this is nonsense. Drawing on his background, having read mathematics in Cambridge, he produced this argument that people found very difficult to counter about the difference between geometric and arithmetic progressions. Later, from the second essay onwards, he wrote quite substantially different works with somewhat different emphases too, but of course he’s remembered for the first essay, and even in its rather crude form it is a very helpful guide, particularly I think to people who live in a post-industrial world, to the nature of the world that used to exist universally.
TG: My suspicion these days is often when economic historians talk about a world being Malthusian or models being Malthusian, it’s a very reduced or impoverished understanding of Malthus, particularly the Malthus of the second essay.
TW: I certainly agree.
TG: What do you think they’re missing? What does the Malthus of the second essay have to offer us that people would do well to be reading?
TW: Keynes was an admirer of Malthus and one of the things Keynes once said strikes me as applying particularly well to Malthus. Keynes had been criticized for having been inconsistent, and he was irritated and he was alleged to have replied to whomever he was talking to “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” And I think Malthus, as he became very much better informed about the nature of demographic and other events, took them into account in modifying his original stance. The first essay is a very mechanical exposition of a possible relationship between population behavior and economic and social circumstances. As he developed his ideas, as he corresponded with a great many people, as he took on board the implications of the first census which was published three years after the first essay was published and before his later works, and as a result I think of his travels in Scandinavia, he substantially modified the rather mechanical nature of his
original views and in particular began to be much more conscious of the potential difference between European societies and others associated, for example, with marriage practices.
TG: One of the things that you are most noted for is your work with Roger Schofield, which first resulted in The Population History of England and then the later English Population History from Family Reconstitution.5 When that project started there was an unusual organization because you were relying very heavily on local genealogists and local historians to do some of the ground work. Can you describe how you decided to do it that way and what were some of the challenges and perhaps rewards of doing it that way?
TW: Well it all stems indirectly from the work of Louis Henry in France.6 I was very greatly struck when I first read his work in the way in which it opened up the possibility of doing serious demographic work from a much earlier period. All demographic measures depend upon being able to match numbers of events with the population at risk and it had seemed that until censuses were regularly taken, it was not going to be possible to examine demographic behavior in detail before, roughly, the beginning of the 19th century when national census-taking became normal. What family reconstitution opened up was the possibility of discovering in detail about fertility, mortality and nuptiality in a much earlier period. Now the initial difficulty was that French parish registers characteristically carry a lot more detail than English parish registers, although they only do so from a relatively late date, early in the 18th century. The big attraction in England was that we have plenty of parish registers that go back to the 16th century and on the whole, conform to the same principles in the information they record from that date, but the information is thinner. (Perhaps I should digress to say that David Glass,7
5 The Population History of England 1541-1871: A reconstruction (with Roger Schofield) was published in 1989. English Population History from Family Reconstruction (with R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and Roger Schofield) was published in 1997. who was then the leading demographer in this country, was then also very well aware of French work and had wanted to discover whether reconstitution was possible in England,
6 Lous Henry (1911-1991) was a pioneering French historical demographer. His book (with Michel Fleury), Des registres paroissiaux à l’histoire de la population. Manuel de dépouillement et de’exploitation de l’état civil ancien described the method of « family reconstitution ».
7 David Glass (1911-1978) was a British demographer with strong historical interests.
and he sent someone to work on Seaton and Beer, ironically a parish in Devon very close to Colyton, and concluded that the information in the English registry was too patchy for it to be feasible.
8) Now this enlisting big battalions, so to speak, actually springs from my reconstitution of the parish of Colyton because what I wanted to discover was whether there were other suitable parishes. And the original idea of empanelling lots of historians was to collect information that would enable you to sift out the good [parish] registers, those where the record was continuous and the level of detail matched a minimum that I now knew how to define. It turned out that very large numbers of local historians were easy to recruit. Louis Henry, himself, who had done the work in France with paid people working in a room in Paris, once referred to it as the “secret weapon Anglais,” having such large numbers of enthusiastic local historians.
Far more returns came in than I’d expected and Roger Schofield and I – we were collaborating closely in this venture – felt that it would be a pity not to try to make use of the aggregated material rather than just looking to identify reconstitutable parishes, and eventually managed to assemble a set of just over 400 of them and toyed with various methods of using aggregated data to generate measures of fertility and mortality --- trying to find another way around that problem that I’d begun by identifying, that even if you don’t have censuses and vital registration, can you still make inferences. Back projection, the first attempt to solve that problem, proved capable of producing interesting information in this way and greatly delayed the onset of reconstitution because it occupied both of us for a decade, I suppose.9 And we used local volunteers, I suppose essentially because the scale of funding you can hope to get wouldn’t have supported doing everything locally. It generated a massive correspondence, much of it very interesting, with these people who constantly wrote in saying, “My parish has such, such, such” or “I’ve come across this problem, what should I do about it?”
8 Wrigley reconstituted the Devon village of Colyton, publishing a seminal paper in the Economic History Review in 1966. “Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England” argued that marital fertility declined sharply between the first and second halves of the 17th century, violating the prior view that pre-industrial societies had little or no control of fertility within marriage
9 “Back projection” is a technique developed and reported in the Population History of England. Put simply, it takes an age distribution at a given date and works backwards in time by using the information on births and deaths derived from parish registers.
TG: I hadn’t realized that the original Population History book was not what you planned. So when you did the reconstitutions, it’s hard to imagine that there weren’t ways in which they were much better for having done the original work. Can you speculate on what they are? What I am driving at is usually when people do reconstitutions, that’s what they do. They don’t have this earlier step that you have with the more representative national set of communities.
TW: A difficulty in looking backwards is that you always impose more coherence on what’s happened in the past than was probably present at the time, but in retrospect anyway, what we were hoping to do, having published the aggregated volume, was first of all to use a totally different technique to see whether you’ve got similar results in changes in fertility and mortality and therefore by inference in national population trends. But more particularly, because the original study just treated England as an entity, doing a fairly large number of reconstitutions, twenty odd, offered the opportunity of seeing how much local variation there was and as it was originally planned would have included not just using nominal linkage techniques to reconstitute families, but also to link in other local information which we didn’t do partly because we were under tremendous pressure to publish something having spent quite a lot of time on the reconstitutions themselves, so it ended up as another purely demographic book. But it would originally have been intended to extend beyond that into the interplay between, for example, features of local society and changes in marriage behavior and so on. The two volumes do, however, make a good pair because they focus exclusively on the demographic material, but it is true that reconstitution gives you a nucleus of information about people to which you can then link court records or tax records, or Poor Law material, and so on and gain a much fuller insight into the way local societies functioned in the past and why they changed.
TG: If I could take you back to a more specific question about the reconstitution, you mentioned that Glass was skeptical about doing this in an English context. One thing that everybody “knows” about England and the early modern period is that it’s a very mobile society in many places, geographically mobile, and mobility is really the enemy of reconstitution, right, because you have people who were born and you know nothing about their subsequent life or you have a couple who
show up. How did you think about adapting the French techniques to the English context or did you just decide that there wasn’t really any way to adapt it so that you were going to just try to use methods that were as comparable as possible?
TW: Better to have some information than none, I suppose, is the short answer. The issues constantly cropped up about whether those who can be reconstituted because they stayed locally were unrepresentative of the broader population, and I think the most fruitful further thought, so to speak, about this issue was Steve Ruggles’ demonstration that it was perfectly possible using demographic simulation to show that the people who left the parish must have had very different demographic histories, must, for example, have married later than people who stayed at home because the longer you remain unmarried and then leave, of necessity, the older you will be before you actually do get married if you get married.10 And the logic, I think, of his argument is impeccable, though he himself was puzzled that when he tried to test it against empirical information, the differences were very much smaller than the generalized study had suggested starting from first principles. And, of course, that triggered me into looking into this much more closely also.11
10 Ruggles wrote, on this question, “Migration, marriage, and mortality: Correcting sources of bias in English family reconstitutions.” Population Studies 46(3), 1992. It turns out that the empirical evidence suggests surprisingly that those who moved and those who stayed at home differed very little. You can do this both by further torturing, so to speak, the reconstitution evidence as he did, but you can also use the enumerators books in the middle of the 19th century which give you information both for those who are still living where they were born and those who had moved, and a very large sample of that kind shows that the differences in particular for marriage ( I was interested in marriage behavior and the age at which people married) is trivially small at the order of a tenth of a year or perhaps two-tenths of a year. So the empirical information, though we couldn’t have known it when we started out, doesn’t suggest that those who move behave very significantly differently from those who remained at home, even though in logic you would expect that to be the case. There are, of course, also, there’s one group in this country for whom that isn’t a problem, and those are the Quakers,
11 The paper Wrigley alludes to is his “The Effect of Migration on the Estimation of Marriage Age in Family Reconstitution Studies.” Population Studies 48(1): 81-97, 1994.
because when Quakers moved, their information was sent to the quarterly meeting to which they moved, and the work that Vann and Eversley, although not focused on this particular problem, also suggested that migration doesn’t have the effect that in the abstract you might it expect it to do.
12
TG: Okay, now a final question about this sort of project. My impression is that the first book, Population History of England, is just vastly more well known than the reconstitution work. I don’t know if this is your impression, certainly among the economic historians there’s lots and lots of research which uses your counts of births, deaths and marriages as an input into an econometric exercise. Have you noticed that yourself or do you disagree, and the second question is what do you think is missing if you just look at the first book and ignore the reconstitution evidence.
TW: I am uncertain in trying to reply. I think to some extent this is an Anglo-American divide, so to speak. The overwhelming majority of economic historians in the United States are economists in training and naturally seize upon long-time series and feed them into models and that’s being done very extensively. The great majority of economic historians in this country don’t have formal economic training, they began life as historians or geographers, some as economists, and, therefore, they are much more likely to be sympathetic to the kind of information that comes out of reconstitution, I think. The limitations of the first book, I think, are obvious, precisely because they only refer to the national unit, and there are so many aspects of change in this country that are highly regional that if you simply stick with national series you limit what you can do. The inverse projection technique in principle could have been used regionally as well, but as far as I know a whole lot hasn’t been done. If it were done, it would be interesting to see how far that produced similar results or the same degree of differences you get from reconstitution material.
TG: That’s a very interesting idea. Someone could take your material and just re-do it on a regional basis.
12 Wrigley is alluding to Richard T. Vann and David Eversley, Friends in Life and Death: the British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition (1992).
TW: Yes, I think it would be a good idea to do more aggregative analyses themselves because a lot depends on having a large number of parishes I think. If we’d had say a hundred parishes, we’d have been very lucky to be able to do what we were able to do with four hundred. And you do need to re-weight, well, you know a large part of that book is taken up with the problem of trying to convert the four hundred counts that we acquired into something that’s arguably like the national picture, and to do that regionally would also be quite challenging, I think.13
LST: Would you be able to replicate for regional study the migration flows that you’ve estimated at the national level which were a key input. That would be more difficult.
TW: I think it would. Yes, I need to think further about that problem. I am not sure.
TG: That was Leigh Shaw-Taylor, our cameraman. Thank you Leigh.
I want to shift to interest which is both earlier and more recent, and then we’ll come back to the connection to population. In your doctoral dissertation, 14 you stress the physical location of coal seams as an important part of the logic or the causal forces in the economic development in continental Europe. And at the same time, there is a strong theme in that work of national units not being terribly interesting, or not necessarily the right way to think about economic development, because this one coal seam straddles Germany, France and Belgium. How did you come upon that as sort of a research topic and general idea?
TW: It was an overambitious exercise, but the background to it was a belief that I’d acquired, I think, as an undergraduate that the fact that economic history is an offshoot historically of political and constitutional history, had been carried over into the assumption that the explanation of economic
13 “Four hundred counts:” for each of about four hundred parishes, Wrigley and Schofield obtained counts of births, deaths, and marriage.
14 Published as Industrial Growth and Population Change (1961).
change links naturally to national units in the same way that political history clearly does. And I was looking for an opportunity to test whether ignoring national units in some ways produces a more coherent picture. The belt of coal fields you have mentioned stretches through three countries. The traditional economic histories of each of those countries tended to explain the success of industry by the banking system or the excellence of technical education or some feature of national government activity. What I wanted to test was whether in fact what was similar about developments in these three coal field areas, was more striking than the differences between them, and this was a convenient test bed. In fact, it proved, it was overambitious in all sorts of ways, but what it brought out very early to me was how difficult it is to do international work of that sort in that period if only because the economic series that exist are extremely difficult to compare, because they are compiled on a different basis. For example, I was very frustrated that coal price data – I’ve forgotten which is which – but in one of the countries that I was interested in there were pit-head prices and another there were market prices. The same sort of problems occurred when you were looking at occupational structure and so on. Two of the things, however, which you can measure with a fairly clear degree of close similarity as to measurement, is the production of coal itself – a lump of coal is a lump of coal – and the population data since a head is a head is a head. In going into the work I certainly didn’t expect to make as much use of population data as I ended up doing, but it was faute de mieux in a sense, and then you begin to see that it has great interest of its own. What I’d originally intended to do and what came out of it were fairly strongly dissimilar, but you’re right that what lay behind it was the conviction that at least some things are better understood if you don’t stick with the national unit than if you do.
TG: Just a small follow-up question. Sidney Pollard pushed this idea fairly hard.15
15 Sidney Pollard (1925-1998) was an economic historian who held academic positions in both Britain and Germany. His Peaceful conquest: the industrialization of Europe 1760-1970 (1981) stresses the idea mentioned above, that nation-states are not sensible units for the analysis of early industrialization. You must have talked to him – do you think he over-stressed it or did he stress it in a different way, do you think?
TW: He stressed it in a different way, I think. He was interested in the international aspect of it, but I think he was even more interested in the intra-national aspect of it and was apt to stress how rapid industrial growth, for example, is localized within countries, but there is a strong similarity between our viewpoints and I think he made fairly frequent cross references to my work and vice versa – we were hammering at the same theme.
TG: So we will come back to population, as I said, but you’ve just suggested that one of your reasons for your early interest in population was just that the data were more obvious in some way. This takes us to a slim book that you wrote, it was a set of lectures – I can’t remember which lecture – Continuity, Chance and Change. Now this is, to my knowledge, which lectures were they first, just for the . . .
TW: It was a series called the Ellen McArthur Lectures, which are given usually biennially, I think, or triennially in Cambridge. 16
TG: To my knowledge or at least this is the most well-known exposition of your idea of the difference between an organic economy and a mineral economy. So could you briefly explain the difference and then tell us a bit about how this came about.
TW: Well, if I can take advantage of ideas that, in a way, crystallized a bit later, it’s convenient I think to go back to a distinction that medieval philosophers made between the fungible and consumptible. A fungible is something like a field, the use of which in one year leaves it perfectly possible for you to return to it the next year. A consumptible is something like a slice of cake, which if you eat it, it is gone, and my idea about organic economies stems from that. They are essentially fungible. They are dependable in the sense that year after year you have access to the same resources,
16 Published as Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (1990)
but they are limited by the nature of those resources, and the nature that limits them is the process of photosynthesis. Everything, all material production, involves using energy and in pre-industrial economies, organic economies, the limit is set by the process of photosynthesis since that is the basis of everything that the economy did. In the form of food and fodder it provided mechanical energy. Plowing a field involves using oxen or horses who are fed by vegetation. Smelting iron or lead involves heat energy which you get from burning wood and so on. Elementary physics shows that the theoretical possible total amount of energy that a pre-industrial economy could make use was very limited. It means that the kind of world in which we live today was literally physically impossible, as David Ricardo pointed out in his work. He ends a paragraph in which he summarizes the way in which agricultural limitations make prolonged exponential growth impossible by saying, and this is a physical fact, it’s not to do with human institutions. What happens in the industrial revolution is you switch to being a consumptible-based economy. You can gain access to the products of photosynthesis accumulated over many hundreds of millions of years in the form of coal or oil or natural gas, and that blows the top off the limits that had previously affected economies: but you do so at a price. You are using something of which it is true to say that every ton you dig out of the earth means that there is a ton less left. So, post-industrial economies have the possibility of exponential growth and degrees of wealth that were previously literally unthinkable and were unthinkable to all the classical economists. But you do this at a price --- unless you can find some other way of gaining access to energy, you will eventually run out of cake and be forced back to where organic economies always were placed, which is why nuclear power, for example, is such an important but also such a tendentious issue. Despite the best efforts of the large companies that depend upon coal and oil, they can’t go on sustaining economies indefinitely, and the more rapidly growth takes place, the more rapidly consumptibles disappear. If an economy like China is making 500 million tons of steel a year as they now are, you are approaching that point much more rapidly than would have been the case if you’d stuck with the relatively small amounts of steel that used once to be produced. In any case, it is simply physically impossible for every family to have a car or to build 100,000 ton ships and so on, if you are limited in the way that organic economies were limited. And the fundamental idea in Continuity, Chance and Change, though I didn’t quite express it in that way at the time, was this idea.
TG: Now in your most recent book,17 there are very striking calculations I have quite enjoyed about how much land you would have to have to grow all the matter to create the energy to replace the products of the English coal fields, and as you point out, it would be simply impossible. What strikes me about this is that Robert Allen has recently published a book18 stressing the unusual features of British coal fields as an explanation for the industrial revolution. In your more recent book you couch what your efforts are slightly differently, but maybe it’s worth just ruminating on how your argument about coal and the British Industrial Revolution differs from Allen’s, if it does.
TW: I am not sure quite how to answer that question. I don’t think that there’s any conflict between what I say and what he says, but we approach it in a very different manner, because the essence of his story of the occurrence of the industrial revolution in this country is the combined effect of labor being expensive, which pushes you towards capital-intensive solutions to production problems, and coal being cheap, which makes it possible for you to make use of energy on a much greater scale. There’s nothing in that that’s in conflict, I think, with what I chose to highlight, but the point that I was most anxious to try to bring home is the idea that in considering the industrial revolution, we should pay at least as much attention to the question of why it didn’t come to a halt as to the question of why it started up. In that context, it’s the ability to gain access to what appeared to be unlimited quantities of energy in a new way that enables growth to continue. Otherwise, the arguments that the classical economists made would have continued to remain appropriate. Adam Smith said that there is an opportunity for considerable growth, and he was conscious of the nature of the growth as it occurred and why it occurred: by creating relatively large markets that enabled the division of function to take place, by specialization. But the very process of growth in effect ensures that it must come to a halt and the end situation that he depicted would be worse than or no better than where you started out essentially because of this energy problem. He didn’t express it in that form, but it exactly parallels the argument that I’ve made. It’s one reason why I’ve always felt it’s illuminating
17 Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010)
18 Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009)
in considering what happened in England to be very conscious of what happened in the Netherlands, as indeed Adam Smith was. He had quite frequently said: if you want to know what the future holds for us, turn to consider what happens in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands a man of good standing can borrow money at 2 ½ percent. In this country, in England, it’s 3 ½ or 4, in France or Scotland it’s 7 or 8 percent. What that reflects, he said, is the fact that the opportunity for profitable investment has largely been exhausted in Holland, they are now investing in other countries and that is going to happen elsewhere. The return you can get on capital is an indirect reflection of the opportunity for further growth, and as that peters out, the return that you can hope to get will decline to the point where investment tapers off and growth ceases.
TG: Now again, following up on this and going back to the population questions, one of the things that one would expect after thinking about, especially the more mechanical version of the Malthusian model, is that as an economy begins to exploit coal fields and have higher real wages and so forth, the demographic patterns would overwhelm economic growth and that another way you would reach this sort of unpleasant outcome that economic growth didn’t really lead to anything better for the population would just be much earlier ages at marriage and higher fertility as a result. So what this highlights is the importance of not just these technological things such as coal but English demographic patterns in making economic growth possible in the long run. How do you see those two fitting together and how do you, again if you could just ruminate on how people think about this more broadly today. Are they doing it justice?
TW: I could talk at length about this. In a nutshell, I think it’s entirely appropriate that John Hajnal’s essay19
19 John Hajnal (1924-2008), a British demographer, wrote two influential essays on the “western European marriage pattern.” The first was "European marriage patterns in perspective," in Population in History, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley. London (1965) the second, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household System,” appeared in Population and Development Review 1982 is perhaps the most influential single statement or approach to the interplay of demographic behavior and economic circumstance that we’ve had in the post-war world, and his focus on the importance of a very different marriage system in parts of western Europe seems to me
an essential part of the understanding of the backgrounds of the industrial revolution. The argument goes in this form: it’s linked to the fact that social convention meant that embarking upon marriage meant creating a new household, and, therefore, that there was an economic hurdle to be overcome to enable you to marry. It is very different from nearly all other societies where on marriage you characteristically join an existing household and may eventually become head of it, but much later. If the west European pattern exists, if those conventions prevail, then you make it likely that fertility will be sensitive to economic circumstances to a much greater degree than would be the case where, for women at any rate, marriage is universal and takes place at a very early age soon after sexual maturity. It both means that it’s quite likely that marriages won’t be formed until a large part of the fertility life of the wife has been spent without bearing children and also that significant proportions of both sexes would never marry. And one of the things that I think proved demonstrable in the wake of the demographic work that was done on England was that in the early modern period, both aspects of marriage were sensitive to secular economic trends and helped to ensure that you don’t have to live on the edge of what people always referred to as the Malthusian precipice, though in fact Malthus, himself, in his later work was very sensitive to this issue and pointed out that it was possible to reach an equilibrium position in which real incomes were well above bare subsistence because of suitable marriage characteristics. Where this pattern exists it’s quite possible for a significant proportion of the population to get well beyond the point in which they have to spend all their income on the bare necessities of life and given the nature of income elasticities of demand, you therefore create the incentive to produce other goods in far greater quantities than where such goods are bought only by a tiny minority of the wealthy. Now, it’s true that if it continued to be the case that improving economic circumstances encouraged people to marry earlier and more universally as happened in late 18th and early 19th century England, you can imagine a circumstance, as H.G. Wells did in one of his novels, in which the whole country gets carpeted with people, but one of the unpredictable but crucial changes that occurred with increasing wealth, was that people chose to have fewer children. Then age at marriage and whether or not people marry have less and less bearing on how many children they have, and you can well reach the point, as reached by many countries in Europe and now much more widely where fertility is below replacement level. Thus population trends may be downwards, not
upwards. Increasing standards of living rather than producing burgeoning populations may produce the opposite. But in the crucial period, in the run up to the industrial revolution, the sensitivity of fertility to economic circumstances may have been crucial in creating a degree of demand for products other than basic necessities, which encourages investment in a way that’s much more difficult to achieve where a different demographic system exists.
TG: So it would be fair to say that you think that understanding the industrial revolution and subsequent growth requires understanding of both what we think of as the economy but also population patterns.
TW: Well, yes and no. I think it’s absolutely demonstrable that access to energy in an unprecedented scale is a necessary, though perhaps not a sufficient, condition for an industrial revolution. Whether the kind of marriage system that existed in Western Europe was a necessary condition, I am not sure. I mean that might be pushing the argument too far, but it’s at least very reasonable to believe that it was one of the circumstances that made the changes easier than they would have been if the sort of demography that was true of eastern Europe, for example, had also been the case in the west.
TG: In your work, I have always been struck by the fact that often you are talking about something, say the nature of the industrial revolution, and I am sure you are perfectly aware, you’ve actually mentioned today, a number of other ways of viewing this. And you tend not to even mention those things, not in the sense of ignoring them but just in the sense of not trying to take a position. Let me give you one example. A lot of economic historians stress Britain’s constitutional arrangements in property rights and things like that as fundamentally causal, maybe necessary, maybe not sufficient but certainly necessary.20
20 I was thinking primarily of “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing To my knowledge you don’t really have anything to say about that. What underlies that style?
TW: What underlies it is the problem of distinguishing between the chicken and the egg. I have no quarrel with the view that institutional change and enforceability of contracts and all that sort of thing is characteristic of this society and others in the transformations that occur. But if you look back on the Civil War, for example, and the evidence that showed of the huge influence of mercantile London, how can you know that it’s the egg rather than the chicken, so to speak. Why not suppose that the institutional changes to which you refer are downstream from the power of the city of London rather than the reverse, or rather that there’s a feedback between the institutional changes and what’s happening in the economy. The belief that you can isolate something and say it’s downstream from something else may be naïve. It’s part of the scenario, so to speak, but to wish to set it to one side and treat it as the trigger for what happened, I’m very dubious about it.
TG: This is interesting. So what I took as just reticence is actually a more critical posture.
TW: No, it’s more like indifference. I mean, well I know this is a platitude. You can’t conduct controlled experiments. You can’t tell what would have happened if there had not been these changes, but these changes and some of the other developments that have been highlighted, seem to me difficult to arrange in a causal sequence. The chicken and egg problem is prominent and it’s not given the prominence that it deserves.
TG: Okay. So I just have one more question which is really not so much about your work, it’s about our field. Economic History has always been, I think, a slightly marginal field, not in an especially derogatory way, and in the States it has been clinging to Economics Departments, maybe a version of it is coming back in History Departments, in Britain there are all kinds of funding issues which may threaten many, many different fields. If a bright undergraduate from Cambridge University came to you and said they’re interested in these issues, what kind of advice would you give
Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England” by Douglass North and Barry Weingast Journal of Economic History 1989.
them, both about whether this is a reasonable way to devote one’s professional life and what kinds of things to study, where to study, how to go about it. In other words, when you see the world unfolding, where do you see the next generation of scholars coming?
TW: I wish I could give either a clear-cut or an optimistic reply to that. Just, so to speak, as background, one of the things that’s rather unusual about this university, Cambridge, is that there has never been a separate department of Economic History as there were in a great many British universities, and virtually all of them have disappeared. But Economic History has always been a plank in the Tripos and so undergraduates have the opportunity to be exposed to economic history automatically if they read history. One of the encouraging possibilities, which is quite new, is the far greater importance of the M.Phil., a one-year post-graduate degree which is now for most people a prerequisite for going on to do a Ph.D. That enables you in principle to begin to acquire techniques that you can’t expect to acquire as an undergraduate and maybe one of the developments that helps to restore economic history as a viable possibility. If it is to flourish, it so to speak has to show that it really is important, and I suppose one of the reasons for the kind of work that I’ve been doing is that I consider that the distinction between an organic economy and the kind of economy we now have is fundamental to the understanding of history generally and not just to economic history and, therefore, that economic history is a topic that history students in general should embark on with enthusiasm, which I can’t claim that they do now, but I hope it might happen in the future.
TG: Okay, well just one last question. George Monbiot, who I realize is sort of related to you, has a blurb on the back of your most recent book suggesting that your book has something to say about global warming.21 Obviously it does and maybe it doesn’t, so what do you think it has to say about the problem of global warming?
21 George Monbiot is a British journalist. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian and is active in environmental efforts, including initiatives related to global warming. The blurb says, in part, “If you want to understand how our dependency on fossil fuels began and what we might do to escape it, you must read this book.”
TW: I think it must have something to say about it, because an inescapable concomitant of gaining access to energy on a previously unprecedented scale, is that it produces huge problems. And as it turns out, many of those problems are, so to speak, long-term accumulative, and there is always the background possibility of reaching a tipping point at which the degree of environmental change which has been triggered by the massive use of fossil fuels, gets to a stage where, whatever we do, we face a very difficult and unpleasant future. One of the issues that these sorts of questions, I think, bring into prominence, is an issue that Peter Laslett, for example, was much concerned about: inter-generational justice.
22 Are we justified, so to speak, in relaxing in the relative comfort of modern life if the penalty is going to be paid not by us but by our great-grandchildren. In my view, the fact that so much that’s to do with global warming and other aspects of environmental change is uncertain, ought to make people all the more determined to do something and to do something quickly, precisely because no one knows how these changes may accumulate and whether there will prove to be a tipping point. So it is, if you like, a moral issue which people are very unwilling to address in general. I don’t think I’ve answered your question.
TG: Well, I think it was, in fact, an answer. Do you have anything else to add on one of the questions?
TW: Well you know that I refer to a Greek myth in that book and I do so because the gods wish to punish some one individual and to do so by putting in a jar, which was to be given as a present, unimaginable forces that will be released when the jar was opened. It eventually was opened but not by the man whom they hoped to punish, a very typically Greek twist to the story. And it released forces which were unimaginable to those at the time and of which they were unconscious, and it
22 Peter Laslett (1915-2001) was an English historian. He and Wrigley co-founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Laslett’s early research concerned the development of political theory, but he later turned to historical demography and especially the structure of historical households. Towards the end of his career he developed an interest in aging and the themes Wrigley notes above. These issues are discussed in A Fresh Map of Life (1989) and Justice Between Age Groups and Generations (co-edited with James Fishkin, 1992).
seemed to me that the industrial revolution had something very similar about it. Contemporaries were completely unconscious of it. If you said to a man in the street in the 1790s what’s that revolution that’s going on, they would say oh, it’s the bloody French again. If you said, no I am referring to your revolution, they’d have said, what revolution? And it wasn’t just the man in the street, the best informed men --- Adam Smith, Ricardo --- all simply did not believe that what was happening could happen. It was still true of John Stuart Mill. I think the first generation that saw it was really a big difference was the generation of Karl Marx, and the moral indignation and fury that Marx displays in his writing stems from the fact that he said, yes, we have got what we now call exponential growth but all the benefit is going to a tiny minority. If you like, you can say the same prospect is beginning to surface again today. Well, you know better than I do, but I believe it true to say that the real income of the vast majority of people in the United States is roughly where it was in the 1970s. GNP has doubled but in a rather Marxian way, the benefits are being restricted to a tiny minority. All these are a range of issues that, making reference to the Greek myth, so to speak, can be highlighted, which is why I did so.
TG: Okay, well thank you very much.
Books by Tony (E.A) Wrigley:
Industrial growth and population change (Cambridge 1961).
Population and history (London, 1969).
with R.S. Schofield, The population history of England 1541-1871 (London, 1981).
People, cities and wealth (Oxford, 1987).
Continuity, chance and change (Cambridge, 1988).
with R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and R.S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997).
Poverty, progress, and population (Cambridge, 2004).
Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2009)
The early English censuses (Oxford, 2011).