An acclaimed account of family and community in medieval England and Laslett's best-known and most influential book A renowned scholar Laslett was also pioneer in bringing history to a wider audience, writing and presenting radio and TV programmes and founding the Open University in the 1960s This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Kevin Schurer, helpfully placing Laslett and his book in context

What was life like in England before the Industrial Revolution? The World We Have Lost is widely regarded as a classic of historical writing and a vital book in reshaping our understanding of the past and the structure of family life in England.

Turning away from the prevailing fixation of history on a grand scale, Laslett instead asks some simple yet fundamental questions about England before the Industrial Revolution: How long did people live? How did they treat their children? Did they get enough to eat? What were the levels of literacy? His findings overturned much received wisdom: girls did not generally marry in their early teens, but often worked before marrying at much the same ages that young people marry today. Most people did not live in extended families, or even live their whole lives in the same villages. Going beyond the immediate structure of the family, he also explores the position of servants, the gentry, rates of migration, work and social mobility.

Laslett’s classic work was crucial in causing an important sociological turn in early modern English history and remains as fresh and exhilarating today as upon its first publication.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Kevin Schürer.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Kevin Schürer

Introduction

1. English society before and after the coming of industry

2. A one-class society

3. The village community

4. Misbeliefs about our ancestors

5. Births, marriages and deaths

6. Did the peasants really starve?

7. Personal discipline and social survival

8. Social change and revolution in the traditional world

9. The pattern of authority and our political heritage

10. The politics of exclusion and the rule of an élite

11. After the transformation

12. Understanding ourselves in time

General Note

List of Authorities

Index

Multidisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship of infertility and the "historic" STIs--gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis--producing surprising new insights in studies from across the globe and spanning millennia. A multidisciplinary group of prominent scholars investigates the historical relationship between sexually transmitted infections and infertility. Untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia cause infertility in a proportion of women and men. Unlike the much-feared venereal disease of syphilis--"the pox"--gonorrhea and chlamydia are often symptomless, leaving victims unaware of the threat to their fertility. Science did not unmask the causal microorganisms until thelate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their effects on fertility in human history remain mysterious. This is the first volume to address the subject across more than two thousand years of human history. Following asynoptic editorial introduction, part 1 explores the enigmas of evidence from ancient and early modern medical sources. Part 2 addresses fundamental questions about when exactly these diseases first became human afflictions, withnew contributions from bioarcheology, genomics, and the history of medicine, producing surprising new insights. Part 3 presents studies of infertility and its sociocultural consequences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, Oceania, and Australia. Part 4 examines the quite different ways the infertility threat from STIs was perceived--by scientists, the public, and government--in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, France, and Britain, concluding with a pioneering empirical estimate of the infertility impact in Britain. Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge.

This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schurer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included in the 1911 'fertility' census, they consider the interactions between the social, economic and physical environments in which people lived and their family-building experience and behaviour. Techniques and approaches based in demography, history and geography enable the authors to re-examine the declines in infant mortality and marital fertility which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparisons are drawn within and between white-collar, agricultural and industrial communities, and the analyses, conducted at both local and national level, lead to conclusions which challenge both contemporary and current orthodoxies.

This volume is an important study in demographic history. Garrett, Reid, SchÜrer and Szreter use techniques and approaches drawn from demography, history and geography to explore the conditions under which declines in both infant mortality and fertility within marriage occurred in England and Wales between 1891 and 1911. Extensive use is made of previously unavailable census data drawn from thirteen communities in England and Wales, particularly those from the 1911 "fertility" census. The book's sometimes surprising conclusions will be of interest to all historians of Britain and of demography.