Early Statistical Populations
A key date in historical demography is 1532, when it was mandated that London parish priests compile weekly “Bills of Mortality,” which were in turn the primary source of the first known life table (Graunt 1662).
As this ecclesiastical registration system expanded, it provided the basis for Thomas Short’s early study (1750) of geographic variation in British mortality. Not until 1837, however, was a national civil vital registration system established in England, and not until 1875 did registration of vital events become mandatory.The English system was antedated by compulsory national civil vital registration systems in Scandinavia: Finland (1628), Denmark (1646), Norway (1685), and Sweden (1686). In Sweden the ecclesiastical registration system dates from 1608, slightly antedating the English Bills of Mortality. By the end of the nineteenth century, civil registration was compulsory in virtually all European countries, North America, Japan, and a host of other countries such as Egypt (1839), Mexico (1859), and Brazil (1885). Unfortunately, not all of these early registration systems, enumerated by Henry Shryock and Jacob Siegal (1980), contain cause-of-death data.
In addition to the registration systems, a number of important compilations and secondary sources exist. The International Statistical Institute of the League of Nations published its Annuaire international de Statistique in 1916, 1917, 1919, 1920, and 1921 and its Aperςu de la demographie des divers pays du monde in 1922, 1925, 1927, 1929, and 1931. Publication of the latter series was suspended until 1939, when a volume covering 1929-36 was published. The U.S. Bureau of the Census and Library of Congress collaborated on a compilation of interwar European demographic statistics (U.S. Bureau of the Census and Library of Congress 1946), and to this may be added an earlier effort of the U.S.
Bureau of the Census and Library of Congress (1943a,b). The standard compilation of historical mortality statistics for Latin America is that of Eduardo Arriaga (1968). Other national and international data compilations, as well as secondary studies of pre-World War II (mostly European) vital rates, are cited by Shryock and Siegal (1980) and, in the European case, by E. A. Wrigley (1969).In the United States, although the availability of early church records, genealogies, and epigraphic evidence is impressive, particularly in New England (Vinovkis 1972) and Mormon Utah, vital registration got off to a late start. Beginning with the seventh census of the United States in 1850, questions regarding deaths in the household during the previous year were included in the compilation (a similar system was adopted in nineteenth-century Canada). The decennial U.S. Censuses of Mortality are the main source of nationwide mortality data from 1850 to 1890, but they are seriously incomplete (Condran and Crimmins 1979). This is in contrast to the situation in the United Kingdom, where civil registration data, including cause-of-death and limited socioeconomic data, are quite accurate from the mid-nineteenth century forward. A few states, such as statistically precocious Massachusetts, initiated state registration systems during the nineteenth century, and some cities published local mortuary records. In 1900 the federal government began collecting and publishing mortality data from a Death Registration Area consisting of the 10 states (plus the District of Columbia) in which it was judged that at least 90 percent of all deaths were registered. Under federal urging, more and more states initiated and improved compulsory registration systems, until by 1933 all of the present states except Alaska were included in a national vital registration system.
Among a number of compilations of U.S. vital statistics, the most noteworthy are volumes prepared by the U.S.
Bureau of the Census (1933, 1943a,b); the U.S. Public Health Service (1961) has also published in a single volume comparable U.S. life tables for 1900-59. The fifteen volumes of the Vital and Health Statistics Monograph Series of the American Public Health Association, together with the final summary volume, Mortality and Morbidity in the United States (Erhardt and Berlin 1974), present a comprehensive view of the U.S. case. The emphasis of the series is on the 1960s, but a wealth of twentieth-century statistics, as well as some comparative international data, are presented in many of the volumes.Statistics collected and special studies prepared by life insurance companies represent an underutilized body of data for nineteenth-century mortality in the United States and Europe. Because of the financial incentive to maintain accurate death records, these data may be quite accurate, and they contain considerable cause-of-death detail. The greatest drawback is that, because such data deal with only the insured population, they may underestimate the true extent of mortality among the broader population. To these data sources should be added the life tables calculated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actuaries such as Edward Wigglesworth, the accuracy of which has been the subject of intense scrutiny (Vinovkis 1971; Haines and Avery 1980).
One straightforward approach to setting a lower bound on the availability of early mortality data is simply to enumerate the pre-World War II multipledecrement life tables in the work of Samuel Preston, Nathan Keyfitz, and Robert Schoen (1972). The criteria for inclusion in this authoritative compilation were stringent: Only populations for which accurate mortality statistics, including cause-of-death detail, and accompanied by reliable population data, are represented. These are daunting barriers to entry, but nevertheless the number of pre-World War II populations included is quite large: Australia (1911, 1921,1933,1940); Canada (1921,1931); Chile (1909, 1920, 1930, 1940); Czechoslovakia (1934); Denmark (1921, 1930, 1940); England and Wales (1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1940); France (1926,1931, 1936); Greece (1928); Italy (1881, 1891, 1901, 1910, 1921, 1931); Japan (1899, 1908, 1940); the Netherlands (1931, 1940); New Zealand (1881, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1926, 1936); Norway (1910, 1920, 1930); Portugal (1920, 1930, 1940); Spain (1930, 1940); Sweden (1911,1920,1930,1940); Switzerland (1930); Taiwan (1920, 1930, 1936); and the United States (1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940).