New methodologies for the estimation of urbanisation in England c.1670 and c.1761

The United Nations estimates that the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas exceeded the population in rural areas by 2008 (United Nations, 2007). In Britain conventional estimates of the urban population of England and Wales and of Scotland indicate that this benchmark was reached by the mid-nineteenth century, the first national populations to achieve this level. This precocious urbanisation was in marked contrast to most of continental Europe, where urbanisation levels stagnated across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bairoch & Goertz, 1986; de Vries, 1984; Wrigley, 2014). It is also especially remarkable because the British Isles, like the other fringes of Europe, lagged behind the continental average before the late seventeenth century. De Vries estimated that only 5.8 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in towns of 10,000 or more in 1600, compared with 7.6 percent for western Europe as a whole. By 1700 the comparable figures were 13.2 percent and 9.2 percent, and by 1800 a fifth of the population of England and Wales lived in such towns, compared with a tenth of the European population (de Vries, p. 39,64).