Labor and Social Reproduction in an Industrializing English Village, ca. 1680–1780

The relationship between the historical demography and social history of early modern England is long and complex. In the early stages of their development in the 1960s and ’70s, the two disciplines were entwined, working beneficially together in a historiographical project that enriched understandings of the social consequences of population increase in the sixteenth century and its stagnation in the seventeenth. Over time, however, the two methodologies have become estranged. This essay attempts a reunification of the two subdisciplines by offering a microhistory of demographic and social change in an exceptionally well-documented rural community in England, the parish of Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire). In focusing on the changing occupational structure of this industrializing village, the discussion puts human flesh on the bare bones of demographic analysis and reconstructs the ways in which social formations were reproduced, not only through the compensated labor of adult males, but also through the informal, unpaid work of women that made such “breadwinning” work possible.