Historical Event-History Demography

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.