Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
6 - Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
from PART II - Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The modern standard of living debate has been conducted throughout the last forty years predominantly in the absence of any direct, detailed, and empirically based consideration of the mortality experience of the British working population during the industrial revolution era. This is somewhat surprising in that, when setting out the basis for a “pessimistic” view in his seminal contribution to the debate of 1957, Hobsbawm gave pride of place to evidence bearing on mortality and health, which he envisaged as ideally including “mortality rates … morbidity rates and anthropometric data.” The last category of evidence, in particular, has certainly been brought into the debate with great ingenuity and to great effect during the past ten years, as will be considered below. But where the study of mortality in British towns and cities is concerned, Armstrong's valuable work on Carlisle has remained until very recently a lone contribution; and even now, with the addition of Huck's work, information is available on only a handful of small towns.
This is almost certainly because of the relative paucity and inaccessibility of reliable, relevant demographic evidence for this particular period, the “dark age” of Britain's modern historical demography, 1780–1850. As a result, the only publication that has attempted to construct a general demographic measure of urban mortality trends for this period with which to inform the standard of living debate, has in fact deployed a primarily conjectural, rather than an empirically grounded model.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health and WealthStudies in History and Policy, pp. 165 - 202Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005