Abstract
Abstract In contrast to the ‘modernization’ model of demographic change, popularized by the publications of the European Fertility Project, this paper sets the revolution in family life in an historical perspective. First, I briefly consider the creation of a distinctly north‐west European system of production and reproduction; second, I discuss how this regime led to the emergence of a revolutionary solution to the population/resources squeeze in early modern England; third, I consider how it came to be severely dis‐equilibrated in the period of industrialization, urbanization and improvements in life‐expectation which became generalized in the age of the Industrial Revolution; and, fourth, I propose that the re‐equilibration that we celebrate within the rubric of the Demographic Transition can perhaps be more effectively understood as both an innovation and an adjustment which occurred in response to the historical ruptures ‐ demographic and economic, cultural and political ‐ engendered by the twin processes of material change and state formation.
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