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Economics Notes British Economic History Notes

Population Growth During The Industrial Revolution Notes

Updated Population Growth During The Industrial Revolution Notes

British Economic History Notes

British Economic History

Approximately 44 pages

These were the essays I wrote during my first undergraduate year in Cambridge, reading economics. Topics range from economic issues during the industrial revolution to the late Victorian period. The essays were part of the supervision work, where your supervisor sets an essay topic and are usually around 1500 words in length....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our British Economic History Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Supervision 1: Population Growth and Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution British Economic History, Paper 5, Part I Essay 1 What conclusions can we draw from British demographic behaviour during the Industrial Revolution concerning the relationship between population and economic development? The Industrial Revolution in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century have seen an unprecedented change in the British economy: Britain was transformed from an agrarian, backward country at the European periphery to the most developed state in the world, being the centre of an empire spanning half of our planet. At the same time, we can observe an enormous rise in the population in Britain. In the time period 1701 - 1841, the British population rose from 5.2 to 14.9 million, which is an increase of 187%, never seen in British history before and by far more than its European counterparts at that time . So why did population growth take off after centuries of stagnation or even falling population numbers and what were its components? And how do the rise in population and economic growth during the Industrial Revolution relate to each other? When Thomas Malthus published his "Essay on the principle of population" in 1798, he gained much attention for his pessimistic theories. Malthus assumed that the population in a country, if unchecked, grows at a geometric rate, whereas agricultural production can only increase at an arithmetic rate. As the food supply can not keep pace with the exponential population growth, famines and a life just above subsistence level would be inevitable. But at that time, the British population 1

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