HIST 347 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Anthony Comstock, Partible Inheritance, Contagious Diseases Acts
Document Summary
In britain dramatic increase in fertility, leading to fears to population would out weight resources; -thomas malthus, essay on the principle of population (1798): fear of population outstripping resources, leading to malthusian checks ; need of moral restraint . Predicted food production might increase (crop techniques, etc), population would rise exponentially. To prevent the birth of too many babies; -great britian birth rate: over 5 surviving children per marriage, 1850s; 3 in 1900s; delayed age of marriage, numbers that never marriage, declining illegitimacy. France contrast population stagnation in c19th france, through the century birth control was much more widely practice. They practiced partible inheritance; problem for french state, seen esp. Plot of land available to each family would get smaller and smaller through generation, this was a incentive to limit family sizes. State then became concerned about birth control and population. Acutely at the time of the franco-prussian war, 1870, and after); for france.
