Nineteenth-century demography is a good illustration of historical perspective: The subject looks very different if viewed from the perspective of the early 18th century or the early twenty-first century. The life expectancy of a European male born today is seventy-two to seventy-four years; females average seventy-eight to eighty-one years. (The figures for the United States are seventy-two and seventy-nine years, respectively.) Typical rates for 1750 ranged between twenty-eight and thirty-three years. Thus, a mean life expectancy of fifty years seems short or long, depending upon one's perspective. The benefits arrived unequally, and many regions did not experience them until the twentieth century. Scandinavians already expected fifty-five to sixty years of life for a child born in 1900, while Russians still lived in a biological old regime with life expectancies of thirty to thirty-five years. Life expectancy also varied by social class; the wealthy usually lived longer than laborers did. A study conducted for the British parliament in 1842 found that in Manchester the average age at death was thirty-eight for professionals, twenty for shopkeepers, and seventeen for the working class.

A study of improving life expectancy starts with the decreasing death rate. The annual mortality rate in the 18th century was usually above thirty deaths per one thousand population; it reached thirty-five to thirty-six deaths per one thousand in England in the 1740s. This means that 3 percent of the population died each year. That rate plummeted during the nineteenth century. The lowest mortality rate in Europe on the eve of World War I was a Danish rate of 13.2 per thousand. (Rates today are near twelve per thousand.) The worst rates were in southern and eastern Europe: Spain had a death rate of 22.8 per thousand and Russia, 29.0, and both represented significant improvements over eighteenth-century rates. The unhealthy environment of cities meant that rates there resembled rural eighteenth-century rates; mortality in Moscow and St. Petersburg was 30-35 per one thousand in the 1880s. Paris (24.4), Berlin (26.5), and Vienna (28.2) also had high death rates.

The falling mortality rate chiefly resulted from declining infant and childhood mortality. A study of Dutch demography has found more than 23 percent of all deaths in Holland in 1811 were infants below the age of one; 41 percent of the dead were younger than ten. Such figures fell sharply. French rates fell from 16.2 percent of all infants dying in the year of their birth (1840) to 11.1 percent (1910); British rates fell from 15.4 percent (1840) to 10.5 percent (1910). These rates, too, were worse in southern and Eastern Europe. Russian infant mortality was horrifying--51.9 percent between 1864 and 1879 and 30.5 percent on the eve of World War I. (The U.S. rate is poor today, but it barely surpasses 1 percent for the total population.) Infant mortality rates remained high in cities. Madrid and Bucharest both had rates of 21 percent in 1909; Moscow, nearly 32 percent. In the prosperous west, rates were high in manufacturing towns. Roubaix, a French textile center, had an infant mortality rate nearly twice the national average. Death rates remained terrible throughout the years of childhood. In 1897 nearly 50 percent of the children born in rural Russia died before age five, and 68.7 percent did not reach ten. As terrible as such numbers seem, they nevertheless represented significant improvement by comparison to the 18th century. In 1750 the death rate in London for children before age five had been more than 75 percent; in 1914 only 15 percent of English children died before their fifth birthday. The important facts, therefore, are the decline of infant mortality and the consequent increase in life expectancy.

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