History Workshop Journal

Most historical sub-disciplines are pursued within structured periodizations inherited from, or imposed by, practitioners of political and constitutional history. Our basic temporal units hence often assume the form of apparently neutral time 'blocks', such as parts, wholes, or amalgams of centuries. They are also identified with the time between noted political events, such as the beginning and ending of a monarch's reign or of a prime minister's time in office.

At a higher level of aggregation, the conventional division between medieval, early modern and modern periods is often drawn more from habit than by premeditation. Teaching programmes and job advertisements continue, largely, to be couched in such terms, even though we all know that specialists find this categorization largely inadequate. For economic and social historians working within a social-scientific framework, it has been tempting to rely on quantifiable data to delimit chronologies. The proportion of the work-force in secondary employment, for instance, has been taken as the key criterion for differentiating between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies or economies.¹

This essay focuses on how demographic historians have coped with, amended, adapted and sometimes even jettisoned such categorical conventions in their attempts to periodize the demographic regimes and family systems of the past. It concentrates on the sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, for these years have been central to both English and French historical demography, and argues that the prominence given to these centuries is rooted in classical political economy, especially as formulated by Malthus. In both England and France, this heritage has had an unacknowledged impact on our analysis of historical demography.

When we confront the problem created by periodizations, we see that historians have given a privileged position to the analysis of change in past societies. Furthermore, the primacy of politics in the modern study of history has produced the assumption that there is a single pace of change in collective activities – the political pace of change. (For example, we speak of 'Jacobean' and of 'Restoration' England as if they are self-evidently different in all respects.) The traditions of historical inquiry being so closely bound up with political events and change, and political time being so similar in pace to personal time, it is hardly surprising that historians should often make the error of attributing a political time scale to other categories and to other activities. The most serious of these misapprehensions has been [End Page 202] to attribute the time-scale of political change to social structural change. The fastest pace of change has been assigned to a category which might be assumed, a priori, to be the slowest. Social structure has been treated as if it could shift as quickly as political opinion or literary taste. Yet when political change and social-structural change are explicitly compared, the pace of events proves relatively easy to conceptualize in the former, but not in the latter. This is because there is no such thing as a social structural event.²

The stress in this paper will be on some of the unbridgeable differences between political and demographic historians in their respective approaches to time and period. The first part of the paper attempts to explain this dichotomy by evaluating the notion of stasis that has derived from emphasizing the constraints imposed by (what some have termed) the 'organic economy'. This section of the paper links its account of an organic economy in pre-industrial societies to the interrelated notion of the 'demographic regime' as a structural continuity. Both, we have been told, meant that patterns of behaviour were fundamentally unchanging over long sweeps of time and space.

In the second part of the paper, an attempt will be made to expose some of the limitations of this framework through contrasting the demographic patterns and timings of change in France and England. Many historians have regarded both France and England as constrained within organic economies before the late eighteenth century: both display characteristics – such as patterns of family and kinship, and susceptibilities to infectious disease – that signal membership in a single demographic regime. Yet differences indisputably exist. To explain...