The Problem

Abstract

BRITAIN today is a crowded country and few would doubt that the abundance of its people contributes much to the character of its society and economy. It has not always been so. When Gregory King made the first scholarly estimate of the number of inhabitants at the end of the seventeenth century there were about one-ninth of today’s numbers; at the time of Domesday there may have been a mere one-fortieth. How and why the population increased on this scale is still far from satisfactorily explained. Though we recognise that, in the long as well as the short run, population growth has tended to proceed very irregularly and no longer connect the few estimates of early population to the known totals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a smooth logistic curve, there remain many wide areas of uncertainty, even about some of the key periods of that growth.