This book is an excellent summation of knowledge and a thoughtful attempt to interpret a thousand years of European history. It will provide useful reading material for students of European population, for experts in the field and for readers everywhere interested in understanding just how Europe came to be the way it is. Journal of Population Research

In this book, Livi-Bacci manages to link factors which direct the demographic system of a population, and thereby its development, with cultural as well as environmental conditions in a lively and narrative fashion. It is in this way that Livi-Bacci succeeds in giving a complex picture of culture in Europe, customs, behaviours, values and norms. Thus the book is of interest not only for population geographers but for all readers with an interest in Europe. International Journal of Population Geography

Good Synthetic treatments of European historical demography are scarce, and the publication of Massimo Livi-Bacci's Population History of Europe is much to be welcomed ... the book can be highly recommended as an introductory/intermediate level student text on European population history, and to non-specialists as a point of entry to the discipline of historical demography. English Historical Review

A stimulating book, which offers an effective introduction to demographic history for the non-specialist. History

He has provided an accessible and eminently readable introduction to the population history of Europe ... with a level of insight and penetration that few introductory texts can match ... the work will also attract many historians to the otherwise dauntingly quantitative world of demography. Population Studies

The Population of Europe provides a masterly volume for the 'Making of modern Europe' series... a work of great scholarship, drawing extensively from the bulk of demographic research published over half a century or more... Progress in Human Geography

Massimo Livi Bacci is Professor of Demography at the University of Florence. From 1989 to 1993 he was President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He has taught or held research fellowships at universities all over the world, including the College de France, the Colegio de Mexico, Princeton University, University of California at Berkeley, and Brown University. His previous books include A Concise History of World Population (Blackwell, 2nd edition 1996).
Cynthia and Carl Ipsen live in Bloomington, Indiana. Carl Ipsen has also published Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (1996).

Part I: Numbers:.

1. Factors of constraint and factors of choice.

2. A millenium of demographic development.

3. Slow change in old regime societies.

4. Interpretive choices.

Part II: Space:.

5. Geography and environment.

6. The conquest of space before the Black Death.

7. Again eastward and southward.

8. Settlement intensification and land reclamation.

9. Consolidation.

Part III: Food:.

10. Population and nutrition.

11. Nutrition, infection, and mortality.

12. Bread and its accompaniments.

13. Famine and hunger.

14. Long-term nutrition and mortality.

15. Paradoxes and reality.

Part IV: Microbes and Disease:.

16. Lives on the brink.

17. A world in motion.

18. The plague: a four-handed game.

19. The final match.

20. Demographic losses.

21. Other factors and the road to normalcy.

Part V: Systems: .

22. Demographic systems.

23. England, France, and Germany.

24. Marriage.

25. Fertility.

26. More on infant mortality.

27. Migration.

28. Equilibrium and transformations.

Part VI: The Great Transformation (1800-1914):.

29. A frame of reference.

30. Demographic expansion: numbers and interpretations.

31. Two months per year: increasing life expectancy.

32. Infant mortality.

33. The advent of birth control.

34. Outside of Europe.

Part VII: The End of a Cycle:.

35. Demography in the twentieth century: mortality and fertility.

36. Demography in the twentieth century: migration, structures, models.

37. Politics.

38. Economics.

39. Values.

Index.