Population Growth and Agrarian Change
An Historical Perspective

This book, first published in 1980, suggests some ways of looking at the interrelationships between population growth and agrarian change.

D. B. Grigg (Author)

9780521296359, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 December 1980

356 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

Since the 1950s much attention has been paid to the effect of rapid population growth on the rural societies of the Third World. Yet it is often forgotten that Europe faced similar problems in the past. This book, first published in 1980, suggests some ways of looking at the interrelationships between population growth and agrarian change, and uses these approaches to consider the demographic and agrarian problems of various parts of Europe in the past – in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in the early nineteenth century. These places are then compared with rural societies in the developing world at the present time.

1. Introduction
Part I. Methodology: 2. Overpopulation: definition and measurement
3. The symptoms of overpopulation in agrarian communities
4. The possibilities of increased output in pre-industrial societies
5. Demographic adjustments to population growth
Part II. Malthus Justified: 6. European population in the long run
7. Western Europe in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: a case of overpopulation?
8. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
9. France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
10. Ireland: the great tragedy
11. Interim conclusions
Part III. Malthus Refuted: 12. Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
13. Breaking out: England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
14. France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
15. Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
16. Coda to part three
Part IV. Malthus Returns?: 17. The developing countries today: the demographic response
18. The developing countries today: the production response
19. Conclusions
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Human geography [RGC]