Demographic Transition and the Industrial Revolution in England: Inverse Rural and Urban Processes

Abstract

We present a model of 19th Century population change in England & Wales. The model highlights contrasting demographic and economic processes in rural and urban sectors as core explanations for rural to urban migration, stemming from labor surpluses in the former and labor shortages in the latter. This massive migration transformed the geographic distribution of the population, in tandem with the economic transformation caused by the Industrial Revolution. We argue that demographic literature on historical population processes in England & Wales in the 19th Century has paid insufficient attention to the role of internal migration.