This is the first paperback edition of a classic work of recent English historiography, first published by Edward Arnold in 1981. Numerous traditional assumptions are qualified, confirmed, or overturned, and the authors marshall a mass of statistical material into a series of clear, lucid arguments about past patterns of demographic behavior. In a new short preface, Wrigley and Schofield consider the debate engendered by their Population History, the impact of which has been felt far beyond the traditional disciplinary confines of historical demography.