Handbook on Historical Demography

This comprehensive Handbook explores historical demography, analysing how populations adjusted to the environment, how mortality crises disrupted this balance, and how economic and cultural factors interacted. It presents the main topics and debates, with special attention given to the principal processes that explain the development of the world’s population.Contributing authors analyse historical demography through a range of time periods, spanning early civilisations where populations lived in precarious balance with natural resources and agriculture, through to the latest centuries where global revolutions have allowed for unprecedented growth. The Handbook moves away from country-specific studies to focus on macro regional perspectives. It deals with the key relationship between historical demography and other disciplines, the universal nature of many of the demographic processes in the past, epidemiological change, the importance of contemporary perspectives, and the links between past and present around the world. The authors examine current challenges such as mass migration which leads to varying regional responses around the globe as well as opportunities for research offered by the data revolution.The Handbook on Historical Demography is a necessary resource for students and scholars of demography, history, and development studies. Practitioners and researchers of politics, public policy, social policy, and migration will also find this an essential read.