ABSTRACT
The agricultural capitalism of the south-east of England and Scotland, hitherto so thoroughly documented, was peripheral in popular experience, and the peasant agriculture of the north and west of the British Isles was at the core of that experience. During the period of national registration, the trends in the crude death rate in England and Wales and in Scotland are both downward, indeed spectacularly so between 1870 and 1920. Ireland an inextricable tangle of agrarian problems was helping to bring the Irish rural economy to a state of extreme fragility. The chapter considers some of the links between the recruiting grounds and other industrial centres in Britain. The pattern of poverty thus predicted would be consistent, through the mechanisms mentioned earlier, with relatively severe and prolonged health problems, possibly in the peasant areas themselves, but more probably, because of the serial accumulation of adverse circumstances, in the cities to which peasants emigrated.
