Research projects - Historical and Cultural Geography cluster

The list below may also include a small number of archived projects. In due course, these will be listed separately.

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure

Agrarian and demographic change in south-west Wales c. 1550-1750: The focus of much agrarian history in Britain has been lowland grain production. Regions of low productivity or pastoral production have been considered 'backward' by implicit or direct comparison with 'progressive' regions such as East Anglia. This project attempts to redress the balance by considering the traditional 'prime movers' for agricultural change in South West Wales in the Early Modern period, a region that has not previously been studied in this way.
Agrarian Change in an Industrializing County: Staffordshire, 1650-1750: The project examines aspects of agrarian change, early industrial change and occupational change in the county of Staffordshire in the early modern period. It addresses the dearth of work on pastoral regions as opposed to the much studied arable eastern and southern areas of England. Staffordshire is renowned for its precocious early population growth, and early industrial development in metal-wares, pottery and glass stemming from its varied rich mineral reserves of, amongst others, coal, clay, ironstone and limestone. It is a classic area of by-employment where, according to Thirsk, farming households took up domestic manufacture when work was slack.
An empirical base for understanding the early phase of the epidemiological transition: Short-term and spatial variations in infectious disease mortality in England 1600-1837: The 'epidemiological transition' defined by Omran as a shift through time from a phase dominated by 'pestilence and famine' to one of 'receding pandemics' has long been regarded to have been a product of socio-economic, technological and medical influences. In an English context limited success has been achieved in providing effective epidemiological explanations for a substantial diminution in the volatility of short-term death rates associated with infectious disease outbreaks between c. 1650 and c.1800. This pilot project running for one year (2012) and funded by the Wellcome Trust investigates the extent to which different locations in England shared the same short-term experience of mortality from c. 1600-1837 as the nation transformed from a predominantly agrarian society to an increasingly urbanised and industrial one with an integrated national transport systems as well as becoming embedded in an array of international trading and migration flows.
An occupational analysis of the worsted industry in England, c.1700-1851: This PhD study stems from an earlier investigation into the occupational and organizational structures of the Northamptonshire worsted and shoemaking trades, circa 1750-1821. The Northamptonshire study, a Master of Studies thesis, used a number of primary sources to determine the de-industrialization and industrialization process at play. It showed that the late eighteenth century decline of the local worsted industry began well before the introduction of mechanization. Worsted parishes depopulated, in contrast to those shoemaking parishes in which population rose. Of the primary sources used, marriage records were found to be of particular value as a proxy of economic change. The investigation suggested that they are a potential useful tool to study parishes elsewhere for which occupational data is not available.
Birth attendants and birth outcomes in the Victorian and Edwardian eras: This research page gathers together work relating to birth attendants (midwives and doctors) and their relation to perinatal and maternal mortality in Victorian and Edwardian England and Scotland.
Bridging the gap: new evidence for mortality and life expectancy spanning late medieval and early modern England: This British Academy funded postdoctoral project seeks to bridge some of the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the population history of the late medieval and early modern periods.
Determining the Demography of Victorian Scotland through Record Linkage: This project aims to extend knowledge of late nineteenth century Scottish, and hence British, demography. The results will illuminate mechanisms of change and pathways of influence and causation in patterns of fertility, mortality, nuptiality, and migration. These can then be examined in conjunction with data from other parts of Scotland, the British Isles, and further afield to comment on theories of causation and change.
Dividing the day: Gender, work and time-use in 18th and 19th century Britain: This project researches women's work prior to the 1851 census, particularly in the classic period of industrialisation (1760-1830). This is in the context of the history of women as economic actors and where these women fit within a broader picture of social and economic history.
Doctors, deaths, diagnoses and data: a comparative study of the medical certification of cause of death in nineteenth century Scotland: This project examines death certificates for individuals in the light of knowledge about the certifying doctors' backgrounds, to improve knowledge of the local and particular circumstances of death and disease in urban and rural Scotland. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of the historic relationship between doctors, their diagnoses of cause of death, and the data created from these which has informed previous interpretations of changes over time and of social and spatial differentials in health and medical provision.
Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition: This research project uses exceptional data and new econometric methods to analyse long-term, micro-level demographic decision-making in a region of southwest Germany between 1558 and 1914. This project seeks to combine the strengths of different disciplines to advance our understanding of the determinants of fertility change over the long term.
English Peasants and the Provision of Civil Justice 1275-1400: This project aims to find out what legal jurisdictions were used when one fourteenth-century villager sued another in a private dispute concerning a debt, trespass or broken agreement. More specifically, how often and in what circumstances did the plaintiff choose to sue not in the local manor court situated in his or her home village, but to opt instead to go further afield to seek justice in an alternative jurisdiction, such as, perhaps, a church court, or one of the king's courts? This question matters for several reasons as explained in greater depth in this project page.
English welfare practices and their demographic correlates c. 1600-1834): This broad area of research brings together a number of concepts and empirical investigation relating to the operation of the English Old Poor Law. The focus of this work is on the period c. 1650-1834 in England but it attempts to be comparative in considering welfare provisioning in the centuries prior to the formal establishment of the Poor Law in 1601 and the period following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Some research comparing the interconnections between welfare practices and demographic behaviour in England and France is also undertaken within this research area.
Housing, mobility and the measurement of child health from the 1911 Irish census: This project investigates short-term residential mobility in an Edwardian industrial city, examines the influences in infant and child mortality in this context and considers the validity of trying to measure the impact of cross-sectionally measured characteristics, such as housing, on infant mortality measured using the retrospective census questions in the 1911 census on ‘children ever born’ and ‘children surviving’. It is suspected that using time-specific data with longitudinal data creates biases in certain dimensions of the health-housing relationship and the study hopes to identify the nature and extent of these and, accounting for them, to re-assess current knowledge.
Illegitimacy and the poor law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England: This research concerns the treatment of unmarried mothers and fathers under the Old and New Poor Law in eighteenth- and nineteenth century England. Whilst there are extensive historiographies of both illegitimacy and the poor law in this period, few historians have systematically examined the operation of this system (under the Old Poor Law) that not only afforded unmarried mothers an implicit right to welfare relief for their illegitimate children, but also expected putative fathers to be financially responsible for the cost this support. Little is also known about the practical effects brought by changes to the law instituted under 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. The research thus examines the operation of this system at a number of levels.
In search of work. Labour migration and economic performance in England and the Netherlands, 1600-1900: The planned project analyses how in England and the Netherlands over a period of 300 years (1600-1900), geographical mobility changed as a result of the changing economic performance, demographic structure and legislation affecting the free movement of labour in the two countries. In doing so, it aims to explore the link between economic development and geographical mobility in two countries that followed diverging economic paths, had a different demographic development and a diverse institutional approach towards immigrants.
Infant mortality by social status in Georgian London: This project will address two key questions in population history: how were cities transformed from demographic sinks into self-sustaining populations; and when and why did class differences in mortality emerge? The late eighteenth century constitutes a watershed in epidemiological and population history, and marks the beginning of the demographic transition in England.
Long-run cause of death series for national populations: The proximate causes of the extraordinary increases in life expectancy since the late nineteenth century are changes in the causes of death, the most significant being the shift from infectious diseases of childhood and early adulthood to chronic diseases of late adulthood. To understand these changes we need long-run and comprehensive series of death rates by cause of death and age at death, that allow analysis of changes in the levels and age structure of cause-specific mortality. Cause of death data are inevitably problematic, as diagnoses and nomenclature are historically specific. However the use of complete cause of death series makes it possible to detect shifts in the distribution of deaths between categories, and to estimate the effects of such changes in nosology on observed rates.
Longevity changes and their determinants in England and her European neighbours c.1600-1900: In the analysis of contemporary adult longevity there has been a shift away from explanations that focus on adult life-style determined risk factors towards an emphasis on biologically programmed influences in utero or in very early infancy. This project uses historic data sets to assess the relevance of the aforementioned approaches under conditions primarily of natural (uncontrolled) fertility and mortality regimes dominated by a high incidence of infectious or epidemic disease. Economically modestly situated individuals in parish-register based family reconstitutions are compared with aristocratic elites whose life courses are constructed from genealogies. Contrasts are also made between persons on the basis of their sex, marital status and exposure to childbearing as well as the degree of correlation between their fertility and mortality.
Measuring infant health in late-Georgian Northern England: Research on infant mortality in the 70 years before civil registration (and particularly in the period before 1813) has been largely neglected - especially with regard to northern communities. This project combines micro-familial analysis of parish registers with a more aggregate approach to demonstrate how different methods of analysis can lead to the creation of different rates of infant mortality.
Mortality and epidemiological change in Manchester, 1750-1850: This study will examine both the dramatic improvements in urban mortality after 1750, and the apparent reversals in the period 1820-1850, using evidence from the burial records of the pre-eminent manufacturing city of the nineteenth century, Manchester.
Mortality and life expectancy: King’s College, Cambridge c. 1441 – c. 1540: This research examines mortality and life expectancy for the late medieval period, using the scholars of King’s College as a case study sample.
Private Law and Medieval Village Society: Personal Actions in Manor Courts, c.1250-c.1350: Researchers working in a wide range of academic disciplines have expended a great deal of effort over a long period in investigating the two-way relationship that exists between law on the one hand, and social and economic change on the other. Our research project springs from the conviction that this relationship offers a fruitful way of looking at history in general, and at the history of rural England in the middle ages in particular.
Reconstructing fertility and child mortality in Tanzania 1883-1961: Knowledge about past population trends in Tanzania and across sub-Saharan Africa is substantially lacking because of the paucity of data relating to the pre-1950 period. This project aims to improve the evidence base for historical demography. This project aims to show how making the effort to find and process the data that does exist to take a 'long-view' of population history in sub-Saharan Africa would similarly illuminate current cultures of demographic behaviour in the region.
Studying the Stayers – an investigation of the immobile population of Long Melford, Suffolk 1550-1861: Mobility and migration are crucial aspects of economic and demographic history and historical geography and they have been much studied, but some people spent their lives in the area where they were born. Until relatively recently, little attention has been paid to the immobile, those who were life-time stayers. There is now more interest in residential and geographical stability but most studies have concentrated on either the local elite or the poor. This project aims to study all the people from long established families in Long Melford, looking in detail at the later seventeenth century, the mid-late eighteenth century and the period 1830-61. What can be discovered about their social status and about their role in the community? Is that community always that of the individual parish or township?
The contribution of the National Health Service to gains in quality adjusted life expectancy: lessons from the past and implications for the future: Despite prodigious gains in the health of the population of England and Wales during the twentieth century there have been increasing accusations of inefficient and costly health delivery under the NHS. The aim of this project is to provide a substantiated estimate about the contribution of the NHS to the health and welfare of the population over the twentieth century. This will be achieved through the creation of a quantitative methodology that can value health gains attributable to healthcare. In the process of generating the most meticulous results to date about the performance of the NHS and its contribution to the improved health of the population the project will evaluate different approaches to healthcare delivery (in England and the United States over the twentieth century) in order to generate justified policy recommendations about the most efficacious future approach of the NHS.
The Demography of Early Modern London circa 1550 to 1750: London in the early modern period was a rapidly-expanding pre-industrial metropolis, growing from c. 80,000 to over 700,000 inhabitants between 1550 and 1750, coming to contain a tenth of the country's population and perhaps half of its urban population. This growth was fuelled by high levels of in-migration from elsewhere in England, for very high levels of infant and child mortality precluded the possibility of growth through natural increase. While early modern London was unique for its time, developments there came to have wider significance, for they pre-dated, and to some extent prefigured, the experience of provincial cities that mushroomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The historical geography of illegitimacy in Carinthia, Austria, from 1880 to 1950: This project regards bastardy not as a proxy, but as a demographic, structural and geographically-mediated phenomenon in its own right, and seeks to contextualise it in the most extreme of circumstances. Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost province, has long been acknowledged as the area with one of the highest illegitimacy ratios in the continent.
The Land Tax in England and Wales 1798 and landownership and tenancy distribution: This project aims to provide the earliest accurate figures for the distribution of landownership in Britain, using the national coverage of the Land Tax assessments for 1798, held by the National Archives. The methodology involves the digitisation of the complete set of records, providing facilities for GIS mapping, and nominal data linkage, and using contemporary comparators to compensate for inter-parish liability differences.
The nature of parochial registration in England, 1538-1837: A series of varied research projects, united by a desire to further our understanding of parochial registration, are being pursued. At the same time, they seek to demonstrate that parish registers can be exploited successfully for religious, social and economic history.
The occupational context of family formation in England, c.1600-1850: This ongoing research project seeks to deepen our understanding of demographic change in pre- and early industrial England, by exploring the relationships between male occupation and family formation using information from parish registers, probate inventories and census material for a series of English communities before and during the Industrial Revolution.
The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911: This research program run by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the late nineteenth century.
The Occupational Structure of Nineteenth Century Britain: This project is part of a larger ongoing programme of research, The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911.
The origins and significance of Catalan industrialisation, c.1680-1829: This research investigates the origins and development of Catalan industrialisation over the long eighteenth century, using a case study of a textile town, Igualada. The project uses land transactions and inventories post mortem to investigate further the impact of proto-industrialisation, and to address key questions in the literature on the European industrial revolution that have yet to be examined in detail by historians of Catalonia.
The statistical state: knowledge, numbers and population in Britain, c. 1780-1837: While information technology is a relatively modern concept, the disruptive power of information has a much longer history. This research project is concerned with exploring one specific aspect of that history: the development and implementation of new state-sponsored, nation-wide information gathering technologies in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain.
The transformation of the urban epidemiological regime, 1750-1850: This transformation of the urban epidemiological regime is the subject of a long-run research project which uses a variety of sources to investigate mortality change in northwest Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The urban back garden in England in the nineteenth century: Gardens and gardening are considered today to be central to English culture, but when did this cultural association begin? At what point in history were most English urban houses provided with their own private back gardens? While the large and lavishly-planted gardens of the urban and rural elites have received plenty of attention, the smaller back gardens or yards of the urban working and middle classes have been largely ignored by historians. This doctoral research project redresses this balance. It assesses the number of houses which had gardens or yards in the nineteenth century, examines the private plot as it appears in public discourse and legislation in the period c.1830-1909, and explores the changing uses and values of the private back garden in urban England across the nineteenth century.
The Wake Visitation and social and religious structures in the East and South Midlands c.1710: This project uses the detailed information in Bishop Wake’s pioneering printed questionnaire returns for the diocese of Lincoln (stretching from the Thames to the Humber) to analyse demographic, social and religious structures in the diocese.

Contemporary Demography and Health

Centre for Longitudinal Study Information and User Support (CeLSIUS): CeLSIUS is the support team for UK university based users of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (the 'LS'). It is based at University College London (UCL). CeLSIUS is one of the services funded by the ESRC Census Programme.
Demographic change, intergenerational exchanges and the family, household, kin and social networks of older people: A summary of this project will be online shortly.
Family life courses and later life health and mortality: In continuing work undertaken as part of the Pathways programme we are working on unpicking the mechanisms whereby various life course factors link to later health, investigating, for example, the extent to which they are mediated by health related behaviours and by social support.
Pathways: Identifying and measuring causal pathways from social to health disadvantage: The Pathways project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council 2011-2014 as a node of the National Centre for Research Methods. Pathways aims to identify pathways that link socio-demographic circumstances and biological disadvantage to adult health, and parental family and socio-economic circumstances to infant mortality, with a particular emphasis on the mediating factors that lie on these pathways.
Trends and differentials in later life health and mortality: Population ageing means that investigating and understanding the underlying determinants of health among older people is an important priority, especially for Europe, the world region in which population ageing its most advanced. Recent and current research on this topic includes work on the influence of socio-economic position on later life health in England and other European countries.

Historical and Cultural Geography

Colonial Medical Practice in Nineteenth Century Ceylon: This project focuses upon the role of colonial medicine and public health in the rationalization of the plantation system in mid-nineteenth century Ceylon. The project explores how rational theories of reproducing labour in the tropics were intertwined with strong bodily reactions of abjection that served to undermine the self-confidence of imperial modernity.
Colonialism and Cultural Change in Mid-Nineteenth Century Highland Ceylon: This project examines the cultural change that took place in the Kandyan Highlands of Central Ceylon during the nineteenth century. Whilst at one level this study is informed by the relation of modernity to colonialism, at another level it is the story of the rise and fall of a commodity, coffee, which was introduced as a plantation crop to the highlands in the late 1830s.
Culture and Politics in Suburban New York: This project explores the ways people produce their identities in and through places, especially homeplaces: houses, gardens and home communities. The research is focused on the affluent New York City suburb of Bedford, New York.
Geographical processes and disease emergence: Scientific concern over the global threat of emerging and re-emerging infections has escalated during the last quarter century. This project aims to understand the processes which appear to have underpinned disease emergence and re-emergence down the ages, and to examine the operation of these factors in particular regional and temporal settings.
Historical Geographies of the Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire: In the nineteenth century many European states attempted to regulate prostitution in order to combat the spread of venereal diseases. This project involves a reconsideration of British involvement with the regulation of prostitution through an analysis of its distinctive geographies.
Historical geography of Sámi hunting society in northern Sweden: Although connected to the outside world by the fur trade for more than 2,000 years, Sámi life styles were transformed more by the transition from hunting to reindeer pastoralism after 1600 than by colonialism and capitalism as such. This research project concentrates on the medieval period when reconstructions of the historical geography of Lapland can draw upon a few written sources but mainly still depend on archaeological and palaeo-environmental data and ethnographic analogy. Our research topics include hunter-gatherer settlement patterns, reinterpretation of archaeological finds from Sámi sacrificial sites, and documentation of a Sámi rock art site in Padjelanta.
Historical geography of war and disease: This project examines the historical occurrence and geographical spread of infectious diseases in association with past wars. It addresses an intrinsically geographical question: how are the spatial dynamics of epidemics influenced by military operations and the directives of war? The primary thrusts of the project are to combine qualitative analyses of archival source materials over a 150-year time period from 1850 with quantitative analyses less frequently associated with historical studies.
Imperial Subjects: Geography, Geopolitics and Halford Mackinder: This research aims to develop a contextual and a comparative approach to the work of Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). In both the United States and in Russia neo-Conservative thinkers are making regular use of Mackinder’s geopolitical ideas. A contextual approach tries to understand Mackinder’s ideas with reference to their political, institutional and intellectual settings. A comparative approach explores the work of Mackinder's contemporaries to highlight the distinctive moral and political emphases of Mackinder.
Social Relations between Humans and Other Animals in Victorian Britain: This project is conceived as a contribution to the 'animal turn' in Geography: that is, a reconsideration of the intertwined geographies of humans and animal relations. This project concerns a particular aspect of human-animal relations: the development of practices of pet keeping in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marginal as pet keeping might seem to the great narratives of social and political development in the modern era, its history and geography can be used to analyse the nature of the modern city and modern society. The project will assert the significance of these affective and material relations, to explore their significance and their ramifications down to our own day.
Technologies of Biopower and Discipline in Nineteenth Century Ceylon Prisons: This project builds upon Dr Jim Duncan's recently completed monograph on climate, race and biopower in nineteenth century Ceylon. Of central concern to that monograph was the management of the bodies of “free” labour by the colonial government and plantation owners in the interests of capital and the colonial state. The present project, which is undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Nancy Duncan, narrows the focus of enquiry to the colonial management of bodies in the Ceylon prison system in the years 1860-1914.
The depopulation of Melanesia: an assessment of epidemiological versus psychological factors, and the work of W.H.R. Rivers: Melanesia was one of the last regions of the world to be affected by the process of global integration that, arguably, began in 1492 with European colonisation of the New World. The project involves an attempt to reconstitute the demographic statistics generated for Simbo Island by William Rivers, using his own primary sources, in order to test his suggestion that rapid population decline was more the result of declining fertility rather than catastrophic mortality from introduced disease.
The Geographical Imaginary of Irish Identities: Nation, Diapsora and Cosmopolis: This project examines the geographical imaginaries at the heart of Irish identities. It explores three distinct geographical models around which an Irish identity could shape itself. These three models combine in quite different ways the three elements that can be seen at the heart of identity: people, place and past.
The Geography of Bare Life: The discussion of the work of Giorgio Agamben has highlighted again the ways that sovereignty is tied up with questions of life and death. The project explores the notion that certain categories of individual lose their politically qualified status and become reduced to no more than bare life and that in that condition the decision to let them live or die is a matter of tolerance and not of any right to life. The project explores these ideas in two ways: first in terms of colonialism and secondly in terms of the HIV pandemic.
World Geography of poliomyelitis: For parents, few infections scored higher than poliomyelitis on the 'dread' factor from the early years of the twentieth century as each successive wave of the disease outdid its predecessor in the number of children it crippled and killed. This project aims to reconstruct the historical geography of poliomyelitis to the present day. The evolution of poliomyelitis to global epidemiological significance from the 1920s marks it out as one of the world's major emergent infections of the twentieth century. What causes diseases to wax and wane in time and space is a theme of contemporary scientific interest as we seek to understand the appearance of new conditions such as Ebola fever, Legionnaires' disease and HIV, and this project will contribute to our comprehension of likely causes.