Britain's first demographic transition: an integrated geography

This project will present the first historic population geography of Great Britain during the late nineteenth century. This was a period of unprecedented demographic change, when both mortality and fertility started the dramatic secular declines of the first demographic transition. National trends are well established: mortality decline started in childhood and early adulthood, with infant mortality lagging behind, particularly in urban-industrial areas. The fall in fertility was led by the middle classes but quickly spread throughout society. Urban growth was fuelled by movement from the countryside to the city, but there was also considerable migration overseas, particularly from Scotland, although to some extent outmigration was offset by immigration. There was local and regional variation in these patterns, and a contrast between the demographic experiences of Scotland and of England and Wales. Marriage was later in Scotland but fertility within marriage higher, and the improvement in Scottish mortality was slower than that south of the border. However, while there has been research on local and regional patterns within each country, these have mainly been pursued separately, and it is therefore unclear whether there were real national differences or whether there were local demographic continuities across borders, and if so whether they followed economic, occupational, cultural or even linguistic lines. Understanding population processes involves a holistic appreciation of the interaction between the basic demographic components of fertility, mortality, nuptiality and migration, and how they come together, interacting with economic and cultural processes, to create a specific demographic system via the spread of people and ideas. This project is the first to consider a historical population geography of the whole of Great Britain across the first demographic transition, drawing together measures of nuptiality, fertility, mortality and migration for small geographic areas and unpacking how they interacted to produce the more readily available broad-brush national patterns for Scotland and for England and Wales.

We will build on our immensely successful project on the fertility of Victorian England and Wales, which used complete count census data for England and Wales to calculate more detailed fertility measures than ever previously possible for some 2000 small geographic areas and 8 social groups, allowing the investigation of intra-urban as well as urban-rural differences in fertility. The new measures allowed us to examine age patterns of fertility across the two countries for the first time. We were also able to calculate contextual variables from the census data which allowed us to undertake spatial analysis of the influences on fertility over time. As well as academic papers, our previous project presented summary data at a fine spatial resolution in an interactive online atlas, populationspast.org, a major new resource which is already being widely used as a teaching tool in both schools and universities.

In this new project we will calculate comparable measures of fertility and contextual variables using the full count census data for Scotland, 1851 to 1901 inclusive, to complement those for England and Wales. However, our new project will go considerably further and will integrate place-specific measures of mortality and migration, for both Scotland and for England and Wales. We will provide new age-specific data on fertility, mortality and migration for the whole of Great Britain using existing datasets, at a finer geographic level than has previously been possible, and will analyse these spatially and temporally to gain a panoramic understanding of the forces driving this crucial period of demographic and social change. We will expand populationspast.org to bring our new findings to a wide academic and non-academic audience and will provide the data for others to explore interactively.

Our main beneficiaries include: secondary school teachers and their pupils; curriculum development bodies; university lecturers and students; local and family history societies; genealogy organisations (including media companies); archives; the 'general public'; and policy makers.

School teachers will benefit from targeted classroom resources (both off-the-shelf and adaptable) to enhance their teaching of how the demographic, socio-economic and cultural characteristics of places change and are shaped by shifting flows of people and resources. A direct link between teachers and academic research will enable teachers to connect research findings with classroom practice. School pupils will develop their geographical, mathematical and graphical skills through use of the choropleth maps and quantitative data provided by the website. They will gain a keener awareness of place at a variety of scales and see the connections between local, regional, and national history. They will also develop a deeper understanding of the causes and impact of changing demographic and socio-economic factors, and the relevance of a statistical and graphical approach to the understanding of patterns and trends in the past and present, and the spectrum of experiences across Great Britain. Curriculum development bodies will be provided with information to feed into, and resources to support, their curricula at particular school stages. Following consultation with a network of teachers (already established as part of our previous project), we will align resources to the curricula for Key Stages 3, 4 and 5 in England and Wales and Third/Fourth Level and Senior Phase in Scotland. The new project will expand the range of worksheets, and develop further ideas for new resources, which will be made available via an extended version of our existing interactive website, populationspast.org.

Our databases and GIS will benefit university teachers and students. Academics elsewhere are already producing GIS training material using the resources from our current project, to enhance the skills training of their undergraduates and postgraduates in GIS, statistics, and spatial reasoning, as well as their geographic and historical knowledge. The extended version of populationspast.org will form a tool which will support both teaching and independent learning.

The extended version of populationspast.org will allow local and family history societies, who have already shown considerable interest in the website, even more insight into the broad contexts for local research and the local contexts for individual level research, and those in Scotland will benefit for the first time. Local, national and international archives, and local studies libraries, will also benefit from the provision of contextual information, generating greater interest in their holdings and resources.

A wide spectrum of the 'general public' will benefit from the extension of populationspast.org: users will be able to visually explore the coincidences between socio-economic and demographic measures at a variety of spatial levels across Great Britain. This will provide an accessible way to understand the historical antecedents of current geographical and social differentials.

Policy makers interested in demographic issues at international, national or local levels will benefit from the proposed research. Understanding of the processes leading to fertility decline and improvement in child survival rests on relatively insecure foundations, even in developed countries, due to data limitations. Knowledge of the forces that create population dynamics is crucial to the understanding of ageing populations, issues related to pension provision, national accounting and human capital, and this study will offer the opportunity to re-examine and reinforce, or remodel the foundations of the theories which underlie many social and health policies, both at home and abroad.