Dying with style: infant death and its context in a rural industrial township 1650-1830

The literature on the demographic impact of rural industrialization in England has lagged somewhat behind continental inspired historiography. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sphere of infant mortality, where commentators have failed to balance the effects of rural industry on health and welfare--such as higher earnings and the existance of more dense kinship networks--with the negative effects--proximity of rural industrial areas to rapidly growing towns, poor public health and rapidly increasing population density. Using the results from a very detailed analysis of a proto-industrial township in the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1650 and 1830, this article contends that rural industrial areas had a distinctive experience of infant mortality. In line with much of the existing literature on England, rates of infant mortality in this township were modest. However, concentration on bald figures without wider contextualization, masks the fact that infant mortalitiy visited itself most intensely on a narrow range of families and a narrow range of spatial areas. Those most susceptible were in-migrants living on common land, and the wider linkage of family reconstitution data to poor law evidence suggests that the defining characteristic of concentrated infant mortality was recurrent parental illness, leading to inadequate child care and breast-feeding.