Reviewing the course of English population history from 1066 to the
eighties, this book challenges orthodoxies about the evolution of
English family forms, and offers a bold interpretation of the
inter-connections between social, economic, demographic and family
history. Taking as the point of departure the well-known observations
that England was the first industrial society, that it was the first
society to have its peasantry replaced by proletarians and that it was a
society that was always dominated by nuclear family households, the main
question David Levine asks is how these elements were connected in time
and space. In answering this, he looks to contemporaneous changes in the
labour process, and, in particular, to the disposition of labour within
the family. His central theme is the impact of proletarianisation on
family formation. He argues that the explosive transformations of family
and demography that occurred between 1780 and 1815 were the culmination
of a protracted transition from a feudal to a capitalist social
structure; and that the post-1870 decline in marital fertility took
place within a context of demographic, familial, social and political
adjustments which were themselves a response to the earlier population
explosion.