Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 417kept up with Britain. France, which pioneered modern
birth control practices, did not experience such a dra-
matic population explosion, and the nineteenth-century
growth rate there (45 percent) was lower than that of
the eighteenth century (55 percent).
The beginning of this population explosion so
shocked one English economist, the Reverend Thomas
Malthus, that he wrote the most famous book about
population ever published, An Essay on the Principle of Pop-
ulation(1798), warning about the dangers of this trend.
Malthus argued that unchecked population growth
tended to increase at a geometric rate (one, two, four,
eight, sixteen, thirty-two), while the means of subsis-
tence to support those people increased only at an
arithmetic rate (one, two, three, four, five, six). The
contrast between these two rates, known as the
Malthusian principle, prompted the pessimistic conclu-
sion that, without some preventive restraints on popula-
tion increase, the future of humankind would be a story
of catastrophic checks on population.
The Vital Revolution
The conquest of the biological old regime, through the
improvement of diet and the conquering of disease,
amounts to a great vital revolution. The vital revolution
that began in the late eighteenth century and extended
through the twentieth century is arguably the most im-
portant revolution in modern history, even when com-
pared with famous political and economic revolutions.
Demographers measure the vital revolution with a vari-
ety of statistics, but the most important are straightfor-
ward: the birthrate and the death rate. The population
of Europe had grown very slowly for centuries for the
simple reason that the birthrate and the death rate re-
mained similar. If one studies the birth and death data
for early eighteenth-century Britain, the balance of the
biological old regime becomes clear. In 1720, the birth-
rate per ten thousand people (314) and the death rate
(311) were almost identical. Then in 1730, the death
rate (349) exceeded the birthrate (339) and that pattern
continued in 1740. Thus, for the first generation of the
century, the biological old regime kept a virtually even
balance between births and deaths. Beginning in 1750,
however, British birthrates remained steady at a high
level (between 366 and 377 per ten thousand) for
decades, while the death rate plummeted, hitting 300
in 1770, then falling to 211 by 1820. The huge gap be-
tween 366 births and 211 deaths per ten thousand pop-
ulation is the demographer’s measure of the vital
revolution, the source of the population explosion, and
the pattern that frightened Malthus.
The European death rate, especially the infant mor-
tality rate, had remained frightfully high during the
eighteenth century, and in many years the death rate
surpassed the birthrate. Studies of regions of Europe
that had higher birthrates than Britain did—such as
Lombardy in northern Italy—have shown that great in-
creases in the number of births did not necessarily pro-
duce a significant population increase. If the twin
guardians of the biological old regime, diet and disease,
were not beaten, the death rate simply consumed the
higher birthrate. The vital revolution of the late eigh-
teenth century owed more to the improvement of diet
than to the conquest of disease: The benefits of the
Columbian exchange, such as the potato and the agri-
cultural revolution meant that Europe could feed a
larger population. The great medical advances of the
vital revolution mostly came in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, although the slow conquest of
smallpox had begun with Mary Wortley Montagu and
Edward Jenner in the eighteenth century.The Urbanization of Europe
The vital revolution led to the urbanization of Euro-
pean civilization. For more than two thousand years,
the greatest centers of European civilization—from an-
cient Athens and Rome through the Italian city-states
of the Renaissance to London and Paris in the Old
Regime—had been its cities. By 1750 European cities
had been growing in size and numbers for centuries.
But the eighteenth century was not yet an urban soci-
ety; in every country, the majority of the population
lived on farms and in small villages.
The British census of 1850 found that more than
50 percent of the population lived in towns and cities,
making Britain the first predominantly urban society in
history. The early nineteenth century was consequently
a period of remarkable urban growth. Between 1750
and 1800, nineteen towns in Europe doubled in size,
and fifteen of them were located in Britain. No town in
France, none in the Italian states, nor any in Russia
grew so rapidly, but in northern England—from Lan-
cashire in the west, across the midlands to Yorkshire in
the east—seven towns doubled in size. And the impact
of the population explosion was just beginning. During
the next half-century, 1800–50, seven British cities (five
of them in northern England) tripled in size, some
nearly quintupling.
British cities were not huge by twenty-first century
standards, but they were astonishing by contemporary
standards because the population explosion had not yet
transformed the continent. The port of Liverpool, a