What is historical demography and what can demographers learn from it? In this research spotlight, we catch up with Dr Romola Davenport, Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and member of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science.
What is historical demography?
All demography is historical demography, because the human lifespan is long and because demographic behaviours are influenced by past experiences and by longstanding cultural norms.
In my research at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, I use slightly different analytical tools to contemporary demography alongside census data from the past 200 years. I currently specialise in European historical demography and use a rich source of demographic data from various datasets across countries, especially England.
Unlike today, these data sources are sporadic and were not created for demographic purposes. A lot of digging for sources, repurposing and digitising is needed to create these datasets. I have for example, created publicly available datasets for England based on historical censuses, parish registers, burial and baptism information, and tax and church records. Thankfully, machine learning is speeding up the time it takes to digitally transcribe these handwritten materials!
How did you become interested in historical demography?
While I would have loved to have studied demography (sadly it wasn’t an option during my time as an undergraduate), a background in history, botany and population studies enables me to approach historical demography from diverse angles. I can for example, interpret biological data when reading about flu in historical records, and am currently applying my science and evolutionary background in an LCDS-funded study to understand changes in disease patterns over the past 500 years.
What exciting research are you working on?
LCDS funding has been instrumental in my research over the past three years which has focused around three main areas:
- Water sanitation and health: While funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I wrote a successful grant proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to re-evaluate the relationships between investments in water and sanitation in British cities during the 19th century (the so-called ‘Sanitary Revolution’) and mortality improvements. The project challenges the orthodox view that the British experience provides a blueprint and a yardstick to measure global sanitary and health improvements as well as the success of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) projects in low- and middle- income countries today.
Source: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
- Malaria and Europe: It is widely claimed that endemic malaria caused high mortality in low lying areas of northern Europe before the twentieth century. Despite little evidence in this field, the fear of malaria is returning in low lying areas with rewetting projects such as Cambridge and Essex. A funding proposal developed with the Leverhulme Trust, and funded by the ESRC, is enabling me to test whether malaria was a major cause of ill health in low lying areas in England and Denmark. The project is also exploring the subjective component of why people think this and whether it has been exaggerated by historians and contemporary observers. Pilot research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, indicates that historic wetlands have been caricatured in historical literature and research.
Source: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
- Understanding historical mortality change: While the demographic transition is usually assumed to have started in the late 19th century in European populations, in fact there were huge changes in European mortality patterns in the preceding centuries. An ancien regime pattern of high and volatile mortality, relatively undifferentiated by social status, was replaced by the mid-19th century by a novel pattern of relatively stable mortality concentrated at the extremes of the lifespan and with a marked (inverse) social gradient. Towns and cities became less lethal, and childhood and chronic infections replaced highly lethal epidemic diseases as the main causes of infectious disease mortality.
I am currently developing an evolutionary explanation to why relatively lethal diseases such as plague, typhoid, cholera, and potentially malaria had disappeared or diminished in Britain by the late 19th century. One explanation is that these diseases are easier to control by ’traditional’ preventive public health interventions. For example, bubonic plague disappeared from western Europe in the early 18th century apparently as a consequence of maritime quarantines and cordon sanitaires. Similarly, early non-pharmaceutical public health interventions during COVID, were sufficient to reduce transmission in the early stages of the pandemic. In comparison, preventative measures that reduce contacts between people or vectors are less effective for less lethal but highly transmissible diseases such as measles, where very high levels of immunisation are required to break the chain of transmission. This is explicable within an evolutionary framework, because pathogen lethality is related to modes of transmission, and the transmission pathways of more lethal diseases are often easier to break with basic interventions.
How has your research benefitted historical demography?
I believe that the biggest strength to my work is that it intersects and opens a dialogue between historical demography and other fields such as evolutionary biology and epidemiology. This interdisciplinarity is also transforming historical demography, with ancient DNA and pathogen changes replacing speculation.
The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) is mind expanding for demography, enabling interdisciplinarity among contemporary and historical demography and new ways to integrate novel data sources. Advances in sociogenomics and the exciting future of ancient DNA opens up new opportunities for historical demography.
These are exciting times for the future of historical demography and I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues at LCDS to expand this field for the benefit of future populations.
