ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses demographic transitions and implications for the aged. The era of the French Revolution also marked an inflection point in the demographic history of Europe, with important implications worldwide. Demographers focus principally on rates of birth, marriage, and death; they also examine rates of migration. The international history of the demographic transition is characterized by differences in timing. In some places, birth rates declined first and death rates followed. Despite the failure of large quantitative studies to confirm one model of demographic transition, historians have explored the experience of falling fertility in particular cultural settings. An important 1992 collection of studies of European fertility decline covers the period 1850-1970 but concentrates on 1890-1920, and it calls the process 'the quiet revolution'. It describes a world in which people practiced contraception of one sort or another. Henceforth, the social science of demography developed in a context of international strength and weakness.
