436Chapter 23
eighteenth century or the early twenty-first century.
The life expectancy of a European male born today is
seventy-two to seventy-four years; females average
seventy-eight to eighty-one years. (The figures for the
United States are seventy-two and seventy-nine years,
respectively.) Typical rates for 1750 ranged between
twenty-eight and thirty-three years. Thus, a mean life
expectancy of fifty years seems short or long, depend-
ing upon one’s perspective. The benefits arrived un-
equally, and many regions did not experience them
until the twentieth century. Scandinavians already ex-
pected fifty-five to sixty years of life for a child born in
1900, while Russians still lived in a biological old
regime with life expectancies of thirty to thirty-five
years (see table 23.1). Life expectancy also varied by
social class; the wealthy usually lived longer than labor-
ers did. A study conducted for the British parliament in
1842 found that in Manchester the average age at death
was thirty-eight for professionals, twenty for shopkeep-
ers, and seventeen for the working class.
A study of improving life expectancy starts with
the decreasing death rate. The annual mortality rate in
the eighteenth century was usually above thirty deaths
per one thousand population; it reached thirty-five to
thirty-six deaths per one thousand in England in the
1740s. This means that 3 percent of the population
died each year. That rate plummeted during the nine-
teenth century. The lowest mortality rate in Europe on
the eve of World War I was a Danish rate of 13.2 per
thousand. (Rates today are near twelve per thousand.)
The worst rates were in southern and eastern Europe:
Spain had a death rate of 22.8 per thousand and Russia,
29.0, and both represented significant improvements
over eighteenth-century rates. The unhealthy environ-
ment of cities meant that rates there resembled rural
eighteenth-century rates; mortality in Moscow and St.
Petersburg was 30–35 per one thousand in the 1880s.
Paris (24.4), Berlin (26.5), and Vienna (28.2) also had
high death rates.
The falling mortality rate chiefly resulted from de-
clining infant and childhood mortality. A study of
Dutch demography has found more than 23 percent of
all deaths in Holland in 1811 were infants below the
age of one; 41 percent of the dead were younger than
ten. Such figures fell sharply. French rates fell from 16.2
percent of all infants dying in the year of their birth
(1840) to 11.1 percent (1910); British rates fell from
15.4 percent (1840) to 10.5 percent (1910). These
rates, too, were worse in southern and eastern Europe.
Russian infant mortality was horrifying—51.9 percent
between 1864 and 1879 and 30.5 percent on the eve of
World War I. (The U.S. rate is poor today, but it barely
surpasses 1 percent for the total population.) Infant
mortality rates remained high in cities. Madrid and
Bucharest both had rates of 21 percent in 1909;
Moscow, nearly 32 percent. In the prosperous west,
rates were high in manufacturing towns. Roubaix, a
French textile center, had an infant mortality rate nearly
twice the national average. Death rates remained terri-
ble throughout the years of childhood. In 1897 nearly
50 percent of the children born in rural Russia died be-
fore age five, and 68.7 percent did not reach ten. As
terrible as such numbers seem, they nevertheless repre-
sented significant improvement by comparison to the
eighteenth century. In 1750 the death rate in London
for children before age five had been more than 75 per-
cent; in 1914 only 15 percent of English children diedMale life Female life
expectancy expectancy
at birth at birth
Country Period (in years) (in years)
England and Wales 1838–54 39.9 41.8
1901–10 48.5 52.3
1989 72.0 78.0
Denmark 1835–44 42.6 44.7
1911–15 56.2 59.2
1989 72.0 79.0
France 1817–31 38.3 40.8
1908–1 348.4 52.4
1989 72.0 80.0
Germany 1871–81 35.5 38.4
1910–11 37.4 50.6
1989 71.5 78.1
Italy 1876–87 35.1 35.4
1901–11 44.2 44.8
1989 73.0 80.0
Russia 1896–97 31.4 33.3
1989 64.0 74.0
Spain 1900 33.8 35.7
1910 40.9 42.5
1989 74.0 80.0
Sweden 1816–40 39.5 43.5
1901–10 54.5 56.9
1989 74.0 81.0
United States 1989 72.0 79.0
Source: André Armengaud, “Population in Europe, 1700–1914,” in The
Industrial Revolution,edited by C. Cipolla (London: Collins, 1973), p. 36;
The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1991(Mahwah, N.J.: World Al-
manac Books, 1990) pp. 684–770.TABLE 23.1Life Expectancy in the Nineteenth Century