Deane and Cole on Industrialization and Population Change in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

and W. A. Cole have made impressive strides along a new path of inquiry into the still unresolved question of the relationship between industrialization and population change in eighteenth-century England. In examining regional variations in the growth and migration of population, they are surely on the right track for finding new evidence, and for formulating and testing new hypotheses about the direction and mechanism of causality which relates population increases and industrial expansion. Deane and Cole advance some very interesting hypotheses, but, to use their own words: explanations of the differences in the pattern of demographic evolution in the major industrial counties are largely speculative, and it is not at present possible to check the assumptions on which they are based.2 The purpose of this note is to examine the properties of the statistical technique they use to estimate the amount of population increase in each county which is attributable to migration and how much is due to natural increase. It is then shown that these properties of the statistical technique, rather than the body of data which is worked over by the technique, help to generate the intriguing result of Deane and Cole's work-lthat the bulk of population increase in the industrial counties commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution came from natural increase rather than from migration. It is not the defects in the underlying statistics which are the object of concern in this note, if by statistics Deane and Cole mean the raw data which they use. Rather, it is the statistical technique which they use to work the raw data into usable form which is called into question. I The raw data which Deane and Cole have for each county are estimates of baptisms, marriages, and burials as recorded for each parish in response to census inquiries. These exist for i699-I70i and I749-5I, to give benchmark figures for