The mortality rates for London parishes which have been presented so far refer to the background level of mortality and do not include the effect of the plague epidemics. There were very serious plague crises in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 and 1665, and a lesser outbreak in 1636. There were relatively few plague deaths outside these years, but in the worst crises the annual death rate was well over 200 per thousand. In this chapter it will be argued that it is easy to misunderstand the effect of plague. The continuous supply of migrants from the countryside meant that even when the crisis mortality rate was so high, the population was replenished very rapidly after the end of the outbreaks. Outside these plague years, the great majority of deaths in London may be attributed to other diseases, and the disappearance of plague did not necessarily lead to a significant narrowing of the gap between deaths and births. The crises themselves, however, were very serious for their duration, and, as with mortality in general, their impact was unequally distributed between the different areas of the city.

Despite the social dislocation caused by its occurrence, plague was a relatively infrequent epidemic disease, although it was also endemic for much of the period in some of the poorer parts of the city. As T. McKeown has recently written:

So far, I have concentrated on the examination of population trends in London as a whole. However, it is well known that in early modern times there were wide variations in demographic experience between places which were situated near each other. In the very long term, one of the more important themes in population history has been the gradual elimination of these local differences, so that by modern times the range of variation in population trends within a country, city or area and between city and countryside has become very much smaller than at the beginning of the parish register period. The magnitude of local demographic variations depends of course on the size of the area under consideration. The smaller the area and population being observed, the sharper the contrasts. The demographic performance of any area must therefore be a weighted average of the many different local variations within its boundaries. These comments apply equally well to the study of a city and of the countryside, especially in a city like London which was as large, or even larger, than important country regions. Just as there were marked contrasts between the demographic experience of urban and rural areas in the early modern world, so there were equally wide variations within each sector.

We have seen that the most accurate way of obtaining reliable demographic rates from parish registers is by the technique of family reconstitution, and that the success of this method depends on the study of relatively small areas in depth.

It is well known that mortality rates were invariably high in the preindustrial city, but little attention has been concentrated on assessing how high these rates actually were. In this chapter it will be shown how life tables may be calculated for children of London parishes in the period before the establishment of civil registration in 1653, by the method of partial family reconstitution outlined in Chapter 2. This technique has the advantage over the reconstructions pioneered by M. F. and T. H. Hollingsworth because it may be applied to all those parishes with registers that are sufficiently complete for the normal process of family reconstitution, and not simply to those three parishes for which ages at death are given in the burial registers (St Peter Cornhill from 1579 to 1604, Allhallows London Wall between 1578 and 1598, and throughout the period from 1600 in St Botolph Bishopsgate). The subject of this chapter will be the normal background level of mortality which prevailed. In the next chapter, attention will be turned to the impact of the plague crises. Because of the unusual age-incidence of plague mortality, where the victims were more likely to be children than adults, the tables presented here eliminate plague deaths in order to obtain estimates of the normal levels of mortality in London.

It is difficult to measure short-term fluctuations in mortality rates within a period of less than about fifty years by family reconstitution methods – a further reason why epidemic plague mortality requires separate treatment.

The population history of London was the subject of the first major demographic treatise in English, John Graunt's Natural and political observations and conclusions made upon the bills of mortality, first published in 1662. Thus the London statistics have always been closely connected with the origins of historical demography in England. The bills of mortality consist of aggregate totals of baptisms and burials for the whole of London, compiled weekly from the individual Anglican parish registers by the Company of Parish Clerks to advise the city authorities of the onset of plague epidemics. The main series which now survives is of annual totals and these were used by Graunt. He explained that the object of his enquiry was:

Graunt was a relatively ordinary London tradesman, and he tried in his book to convey his understanding of what was happening in his native city during the first half of the seventeenth century. The book was published only three years before the last plague epidemic, and so it appeared at the end of the period for which its conclusions were valid.

The population of London was growing continually throughout the two and a half centuries before the first national census of 1801. Since no census-type listings of inhabitants existed for large areas of the city before 1695, numbers have to be estimated from other sources, principally the bills of mortality. The current opinion about the population of London is indicated by the estimates given in Table 3.1 which are based upon a careful examination of most previous authorities. Nothing is claimed for them other than that they provide a good general guide to the course of population change in London over three centuries, and they show that it was a very large city indeed and that it was growing especially rapidly after 1550. London more than doubled in size during the second half of the sixteenth century, from about 70,000 in 1550 to around 200,000 by 1600. It doubled in size again in the first half of the seventeenth century, from 200,000 in 1600 to 400,000 in 1650. The city's population grew nearly threefold during the seventeenth century, and almost tenfold between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. However, the most rapid changes occurred during the period considered in this book, from 1580 when London numbered just 100,000 inhabitants to 1650 when it contained 400,000 people. This fourfold growth in seventy years was faster than in any other period before modern times.

During the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, the most characteristic features of the demographic experience of London was high mortality, due mainly to endemic infections but added to significantly by epidemic plague crises. Diseases spread easily through a large urban population where individuals lived in close proximity to each other. However high fertility may have been, and marital fertility in London was high, the birth rate could not keep pace with the death rate, but migration prevented the population from falling. Economic circumstances in London must have been favourable relative to other places because the capital was growing very rapidly, attracting many more migrants than were necessary to make good the shortfall of births. Because London was so large compared with the country as a whole, accounting for over 5 per cent of the population of England, the connections between the capital and the country through the process of migration were inevitably close. Any interpretation of the population of pre-industrial England must therefore take account of the internal demography of London.

There was a very marked contrast between the pattern of population change in the metropolis and in the remainder of the country. Elsewhere in England, the population was growing, indicating that the birth rate was exceeding the death rate. The chief factor influencing the rate of growth is the incidence of marriage, since marriage controls the formation of new families.

Graunt's ambivalent view about the level of fertility in London provides a good starting point for our analysis. First, he argued that there were more burials than christenings in London, so that the birth rate was lower than the death rate. This interpretation of low urban fertility was shared by all the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pioneers of demography including Petty, King and Short. They suggested that fertility was lower in urban areas than in the countryside because rural areas were healthier than towns and because relationships outside marriage were so commonplace in London. But, although they were correct in detecting a lower urban birth rate than death rate, their arguments about the causes of differential fertility are unconvincing. Secondly, Graunt commented that within marriage women had children about every two years (1662: 60), which suggests that fertility was very high indeed. Graunt did not draw a connection between the two conflicting passages of his book, and he therefore missed one of the main points about fertility in London: that marital fertility was high but overall fertility was lower, probably because marriage was far from universal. Thus the birth rate could be low even though married couples usually had large numbers of offspring.

Reliable estimates of the London birth rate cannot be obtained because the total population is not accurately known. The ratio of the number of baptisms to the number of burials is very close to the ratio of the birth rate to the death rate, so that if the numbers of baptisms recorded are similar to the numbers of burials, and since the death rate is known to be high, it is difficult to substantiate a viewpoint that the birth rate was low.

Frontier expansion was interpreted in the last chapter as a process of integration into the national economy. This integration was seen to proceed through interrelated changes in both production and market relations: the integration which occurs through the progressive change to commercial production in response to the national market is simultaneously a transition from non-capitalist to capitalist production. This interpretation illuminates the process itself, but does not yet pose the question of the relationship between frontier and national economy; in effect, it suggests what occurs in frontier expansion but not why it occurs. Nevertheless, in proceeding to answer this latter question, it is apparent that the prior investigation of the process has revealed the principal dimensions of the determining structure – at least in the economic realm. Thus the question of the relationship between frontier and national economy is made two-fold: on the one hand, what are the production and property relations which determine frontier expansion and accumulation; on the other, what are the market relations which determine the transfer of value from frontier to national economy? In no sense are either or both sets of relations, which in the reality are not easily separated, to be taken as uniquely ‘determining’: their separate investigation here is simply intended as one step in the presentation of the political economy of the frontier.

This step aims to establish the structural conditions of frontier expansion, and so rejects any idea of ‘natural or ideal determination’ of the process.

The pioneer frontier: specificity and generality

The aim of this book is to reach an understanding of the pioneer frontier in Brazil. The object of study is conceived as the particular process of frontier expansion occurring in the country over the last half century. This concept of frontier in no way corresponds to the so-called cyclical character of economic growth and occupation of land in Brazil. There is, therefore, no intention here of following precedent (Normano 1935; Castro 1969) and presenting the entire economic history of the country in terms of its ‘frontier’ experiences. These growth cycles have been observed to follow the economic booms in different products for export to the world market – such as sugar, gold, coffee and rubber – and have depended on new demands arising within that expanding market over the centuries (Prado 1962a; Furtado 1963). The pioneer frontier, on the contrary, has expanded in response to the demands of the national market and in function of economic accumulation within the national economy since 1930.

It is to be expected that as the concept of frontier gains currency it will lose content. There is already an account which assimilates most of Latin American history to the idea of ‘frontier’ (Hennessey 1978). So it must be clear at the outset that the pioneer frontier is a process of occupation of new lands which is historically specific.