Compare methods

	Historical Life Table Construction	Historical Event-History Demography
Field	Historical Demography	Historical Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1662	2004
Originator	John Graunt (origins); Coale, Demeny, Ledermann (model life tables); applied by Wrigley-Schofield and Bengtsson	Eurasian Population and Family History Project (Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, James Lee and collaborators)
Type	Mortality estimation and survivorship modelling	Hazard regression on longitudinal micro-data
Seminal source	Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1981). The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. Edward Arnold / Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674690073	Bengtsson, T., Campbell, C., & Lee, J. Z. (2004). Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262025515
Aliases	Historical mortality table building, Model life table fitting, Survivorship reconstruction, Paleodemographic life tables	Historical hazard analysis, Eurasian Project event-history, Survival analysis of vital events, Micro-level demographic response models
Related	4	4
Summary	Historical life table construction is the craft of converting the patchy mortality evidence of the past—burial registers, family genealogies, monastic obituaries, even skeletal age-at-death distributions—into the formal apparatus of the life table: age-specific death rates, the probability of dying within each age interval, the number of survivors to each age, and expectation of life. The life table descends from John Graunt's 1662 reading of London's Bills of Mortality and Halley's Breslau table, but applying it to historical populations demands special care, since exposures are rarely known and deaths are often recorded without reliable ages. Historians therefore lean heavily on families of model life tables to smooth noisy data and fill missing age bands. Whether built as period tables capturing a single era's mortality or cohort tables following one birth-year group through life, these reconstructions are the indispensable summary of how, and how long, people lived in the past.	Historical event-history demography applies the statistical machinery of survival and hazard analysis to longitudinal individual-level historical data, modelling the risk that a person experiences a demographic event—death, marriage, migration, or a birth—as it varies with their changing circumstances. Pioneered by the Eurasian Population and Family History Project, whose comparative findings Bengtsson, Campbell and Lee synthesised in Life under Pressure (2004), the approach exploits population registers and reconstituted families that record events with precise dates alongside time-varying covariates such as grain prices, household composition and social standing. Its signature contribution is measuring the short-term demographic response to economic stress: how mortality, fertility and marriage reacted, differentially by class and household position, to harvest failure and price spikes. By moving from aggregate correlations to individual hazards, it reveals who bore the brunt of subsistence crises and how families buffered, or failed to buffer, their most vulnerable members.