4.4 18th-Century Society and Demographics

Historians estimate Europe's population rose from roughly 120 million around 1700 to roughly 180–190 million by 1800. This was the first sustained growth that didn't end in a crash.

• Food: the Agricultural Revolution and American crops like the potato and maize raised harvests (see 3.3).
• Transport: better roads and canals moved grain to places with poor harvests, and some governments stored grain, so local crop failures killed fewer people.
• Plague: its last major outbreak in western Europe struck Marseille in 1720. Quarantines and the Habsburg military border with the Ottomans may have helped.
• Inoculation: deliberately infecting a person with a mild case of smallpox to give immunity. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu promoted it in England after seeing it in the Ottoman Empire. Edward Jenner's safer cowpox vaccine came in 1796.

The European marriage pattern continued in the northwest. People married in their mid-twenties, set up nuclear households of parents and children, and often worked as servants first to save money. Late marriage limited family size, and some couples, especially in France by the late 1700s, deliberately limited births.

Some historians argue that marriage became more companionate, based on affection and partnership, especially among the middle classes, though economic considerations still mattered a lot. In the later 1700s, births outside marriage rose in many places, perhaps because more young people moved for work away from village oversight.

Death rates for babies stayed high; in many places about a quarter of infants died before their first birthday. As survival improved, parents invested more time and money in children. Rousseau's Emile (1762) urged mothers to breastfeed their own babies and to let children learn through experience. Historians debate how much feeling parents had for children earlier; most now think parents always loved their children but that ideas about childhood changed.

Poor families faced hard choices. Many babies were sent to wet nurses, women paid to breastfeed other people's children, and abandonment rose. Cities opened foundling hospitals, like London's in 1739, but many abandoned infants died there.

Cities grew mostly through migration from the countryside. The Agricultural Revolution produced more food with fewer workers, so many rural people left to look for work in towns. London reached about a million people by 1800, and Paris had more than half a million. Cities offered work but also crowding, disease and poverty.

Crime and disorder became visible public concerns. In London's Gin Craze (about 1720–1751), cheap gin fed widespread drunkenness until Parliament passed laws in 1751 to limit it; William Hogarth's print Gin Lane showed the damage. City governments struggled to provide clean water, safety and order, and the close community controls of village life weakened. Crowded poverty made crime, begging and prostitution more visible, so authorities policed the poor and other marginal groups more closely. Governments and charities built workhouses and poor relief systems and tried to separate the deserving poor from those they saw as idle.