ABSTRACT
Around the middle of the eighteenth century, after two decades of stagnation, the population of England entered a new phase of growth. Steady at first, the annual rate of increase from 1741 to 1771 was around 0.5 per cent. Growth then accelerated so that from 1771 to 1811 the annual average was over 1 per cent. The meaning of these percentages is revealed in the outcome. The Hanoverian dynasty began its rule in 1714 over 5.25 million English subjects. By the time of Waterloo, a century later, George III had 10.5 million. Growth had continued, unchecked, through the forebodings of Malthus and the hyper food crises of the 1790s and 1800/1. The economy was discovering new supportive powers and although around the turn of the century the Malthusian trap threatened to snap, its jaws did not close. The escape was in part due to the agrarian sector very nearly managing to feed an expanding population, despite the fact that most of the working population no longer farmed; but more significant in the long term was the emerging ability of the economy to export manufactured goods to pay for imported cereals. 111 short, the industrial revolution broke through age-old constraints which had until then imposed a population ceiling of around 5 million. l
Economic historians have tended to regard the rate of population growth in eighteenth-century England as 'optimal' for economic progress. There is much truth in this. A slower rate would not have expanded the market to the necessary extent, nor supplied the labour for a significant increase in total employment. A more quickly growing population, anywhere near the rates of much of the
underdeveloped world of our time, would have pressed too hard on the resources of the economy. Increasing output would have been unable to keep even marginally ahead of demographic increase and income per head would have fallen, bringing widespread poverty and, for much of the population, destitution.2 All this may seem clear to the hind-sighted historian, but how does a society experience changes of this kind?
