Every industrialized nation has gone through demographic transition change. The change involves four stages of population variation over time as a result of changing pattern of fertility, mortality, and hence the growth rate of human populace. According to the Warren Thompson, an American demographer, the four stages can be demonstrated through a demographic transition model. This model defines the four stages as pre-modern, urbanization or industrialization, mature industrial, and postindustrial stage respectively. Thus, the demographic Transition Model is in regard to the historical population trends of both the death and birth rate. The model also suggests that the nation’s population growth rate is influenced by the country’s economic development (lumenlearning.com, 2019).

Equally, the change of human population in a country is as a result of social and economic forces on death and birth rates. In this regard, every country falls in one of the DTM (Demographic Transition Model) stages. However, despite the suggested relationship between economic development and population growth, there are various probing issues that results in this study. One of the issues is whether the demographic and economic changes transpire through distinct or common channels. The other issue is about the causality effect. What transpires to the other between the population growth and the economic development? Further, there is a question on the causes of the various transformation. Are there other attributes that contributes to change on birth and death rate apart from industrial revolution and the population changes? Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between British industrial revolution and demographic transition in the nineteenth century. The author also intends to explore why the demographic transition in England happened in the nineteenth-century. In conclusion, the research realized that industrial evolution led to various aspects such as rising human capital, improving productivity and innovating new technologies, which consequently contributed to demographic transition (Dudley L. Poston, 2019).

In the nineteenth century, the Great Britain experienced a well-known economic development, the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was no doubt that improved the average rate of growth of per capita income. According to Malthus theory of transition, England fertility is However, recent scholars found that industrial revolution improved technologies which made the process of producing goods and providing services more efficient. But, such improvement only represented a small portion of the whole economy. Gregory Clarks and Neil Cummins (2014) discovered that technological advances before 1800 helped in the upsurge of population instead of living standard. Notably, according to Malthus theory, population growth is inevitable as conditions improved. During the demographic transition, the mortality of population fell and fertility declined in general.

The demographic transition is a model that describes the changing pattern of mortality, fertility and growth rates as the development of industrialized societies. There are four stages of transitions. Stage one, the pre-transition, is characterized by high birth rates, high death rates and low population growth. In the stages two of transition, the death rates especially childhood mortality begin to fall because the improvement of productivity and public health. As the birth rates stay relatively high, the population size begins to expand. Stage three makes the birth rates decline because continued decline in childhood mortality means that most of the parents do not need to bear so many children in order to make sure their later life will be manageable. This shows a close relationship between fertility and infant mortality. Stage four is post-transition, which is characterized by low birth rates and low deaths rates. The population size is big while the growth rate is low (Kwatiah, 2016).

British demographic transition occurred around 1890. The fertility and mortality dramatically changed the population growth and life expectancy. This change in demography enabled labor productivity and human capital to increase. The example given by Oded Galor (2011) is very important in proving that decline in population growth will increase the amount of resources per capita. His thesis suggests that reduction in fertility was caused by rising in income during industrialization and high opportunity of investing in children. Similarly, Clark and Cummins (2014) state that the wealthy English family’s fertility declined within a generation and they were paying more attention on children’s quality instead of quantity. Therefore, rising in income led to a decline in fertility and an improvement in investing of children. According to Clark and Cummins, the net fertility and wealth has a very powerful correlation which proves that number of children in a family is inversely related to their levels of income within an economy.

In the third part of the paper, discusses the influences of infant and child mortality on fertility and population growth. The purpose is to see whether infant and child mortality result in decline in population growth during the demographic transition. Galor describes that the decline in mortality occurred in the 1730s while the fertility rates kept increasing until 1800s. The decline in fertility rates occurred decades later than the decline in mortality. Therefore, the historical data Galor presented did not prove the mortality declines will lead net fertility and population growth rate to decline.

the influence of technological improvement on the demographic transition. The article begins with an introduction of the innovations during the industrial revolution such as James Watt’s improved steam engine, Kay’s shuttle and James’s spinning machine. By examining primary resource, Aubhik believes that the impact of these innovations was relatively limited in the nineteenth century British economy even though they were well applied into production in certain business. Aubhik, then, assesses the impact of technological progress on the economy by utilizing the production equation that developed by Robert Solow, which proves that technological progress was relatively minor. On the other hand, the technological progress during the industrial revolution encourages the growth of human capital. This progress associated with improvement of income and high demand of human capital. It helped relocate the resources to the children’s quality. The evidence comes from a graph which summarized British investment in human capital and the demographic transition during 1700-1910 (P.13). This is a strong evidence that investing in human capital indeed had a negative correlation with fertility. 

Galor argues that the decline in child labor and the rise in life expediency in common have a positive impact of decline fertility because of the increasing rate of return on investing human capital. An increase in life expectancy may lead to higher investment in education. Moreover, the increase in the health of children enhanced their productivity in human capital formation and thus increased the relative return to investment in children quality. The evidence comes from the comparison of productive ability between the Great Britain and India in nineteenth century. Galor argues that per capita industrialization in the Great Britain increased rapidly while per capita industrialization in India had an opposite trend because the workers in the Great Britain had more human capital than Indian labors. once children are older enough to obtain formal education and become skilled labors, their parents are more likely to invest more on their education, thus it results in reducing fertility because of increasing rate of return on human capital. As growth of skilled labors increase, the earning of each household will rise. In return, more and more parents are willing to invest on children’s education and further reduce fertility. This theory is a strong evidence that fertility reduced in the Great Britain in nineteenth century. However, this evidence does not identify the reason why mortality reduced in the same period (Caldwell, 2012).

References of Demographic Transition

·         Caldwell, J. C. (2012). Demographic Theory: a Long View. 301-320.

·         Dudley L. Poston, J. (2019). Theories of Demography. 17-34.

·         Kwatiah, N. (2016). Top 3 Theories of Population (With Diagram). Retrieved from https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/theory-of-population/top-3-theories-of-population-with-diagram/18461

·         lumenlearning.com. (2019). Demographic Theories. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-introductiontosociology/chapter/demographic-theories/