220130 Historical Demography in Context (K) (WiSe 2021/2022)

This "historical contextualisation" seeks to contextualise epidemics and disease with historical demography. We will discus different approaches and methodologies to the study of populations in premodern history — historical, archaeological, genetic. We will also touch upon statistics and modelling. The main focus, however, will be case studies such as the demography of the Black Death in Europe; the "Great Dying" in the Americas following contact between indigenous populations with Europeans after 1492; the evolution of post-Columbian populations in the Americas; measures of population control (late marriage, birth control, infanticide etc). The scope of these case studies is global.
Learning objectives:
- premodern global and regional historical demography
- methodologies of demographic history (historical, archaeological, genetic)
- statistics (elementary)
- problems and uncertainties regarding past populations
- case studies

Requirements for participation, required level

Historical demography — the study of human populations and their changes in time — is as essential to understanding historical processes as ever. However, this field of study is not nearly as popular as it used to be thirty or forty years ago, when quantitative approaches to the study of history were much more established in the discipline than they are today. But obviously, it makes a lot of sense to delve deeper into historical demographics in combination with the seminar on epidemics and disease. We will study the problems and uncertainties of late medieval and early modern population history (also in relation to different parts of the world). What do we know about populations and their dynamics in the past? What are the sources of information we have and the methodologies to handle uncertainties?

Bibliography

Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, Malden, Oxford 2017.
Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, Ioan Bolovan, und Sølvi Sogner, A Global History of Historical Demography, 2016.