Crises and trends: Mortality in historical perspective

It is well known that mortality in the past was dominated by crises. Prior to the industrial revolution, the contours of mortality of most human populations were punctuated with prominent spikes that could not be missed by any observer scanning a parish register for a sufficient number of pages. Choosing a year at random, the series would show more births than deaths and pretty much the same over the next few years or decades. But sooner or later, suddenly, it was there: the dramatic, unpredictable upswing of mortality, pages after pages, carrying off a tenth, a quarter, or even a third of an entire community in a matter of months, if not weeks. Pestilence, famine, and the devastation of war were the main causes of these dramatic episodes, always ready to surge, lurking against the background of what is called, for lack of a better term, “usual” or “normal” mortality conditions. Crises of mortality were not only startling to the first population historians who browsed the historical archives, but were often taken to have dominated the whole of past demographic trends. Studying Scottish population history, Flinn (1977) went on to suggest that in its early stages, the general decline in mortality of the last centuries was largely due to the attenuation of the severity of crisis mortal-ity. French historical demographer Jacques Dupâquier(1976) devised a measure of “crise de mortalite” that became standard in the historical demography of mortality.Owing to these crises, large numbers of our predecessors died very early in life and their expected lifespan did not surpass 30 to 40 years in most instances. Between 1800 and 2000, however, life expectancy at birth rose to a global average of sixty-seven years (Riley 2001) and to more than 75 years in developed countries like Canada (Bourbeau and Smuga 2003). At the end of what came to be known as the epidemiological transition (Omran 1971)—a gradual shift from epidemic and infectious diseases to those of a degenerative nature—the most common age at death had jumped from infancy to old age. The articles in this special issue of