1. See Laslett 1989 and the writings of Matilda White Riley (e.g., Riley 1987). On Europe, see particularly Laslett, "The aging of European populations and its social effects" (in press). [BACK]

2. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 indicate that the original claim is nearer the truth for eastern Europe (including Germany) and also in some respects for southern Europe but is likewise too high for Britain's neighbors in western and northern Europe. If the whole depth of time before the 1880s is taken into account for England, however, longevity at birth has indeed doubled, and proportions of elderly have in fact trebled. [BACK]

3. Nevertheless, they have been assembled under one heading and described as "The Second Demographic Transition," continuing falls in fertility and mortality being the leitmotiv. See van de Kaa 1987 and Lesthaeghe 1991-1992. It is interesting that demographers seem to have hesitated to include aging in the second demographic transition, though it is surely more clearly demographic than some of the other developments. [BACK]

4. The terms "secular shift in aging," "lower and higher aging plateau," and "the Before'' and ''the After" were introduced in an attempt to distinguish aging from the other constituents of "modernization" and the aging process from the demographic transition or transitions. It was hoped to refer aging to the appropriate dates, periods, and stages of national development. See Laslett [1976] 1985 and 1984. [BACK]

5. It is this which makes it inadvisable to use for properly historical purposes the demographic statistics ingeniously worked out by students of contemporary tribal communities. The remarkable results published in 1979 by Nancy Howell, Demography of the Dobe !Kung , for example, include aging estimates (see her chaps. 2 and 5) for an extant hunter-gathering society. But they do not necessarily indicate the situation during that era of universal hunter-gathering supposed to have preceded the agricultural era in which our own peasant ancestors lived. [BACK]

6. For archaeodemography, see Acsádi and Nemeskéri 1970. Its inaccuracies and limitations are discussed in Petersen 1975. [BACK]

7. For a specifically demographic work citing Ulpian's life table (considered by other demographers as lacking all basis in observation) and other historical fragments, see Dublin, Lotka, and Spiegelman [1936] 1948. It could be claimed that the parish registrations that yield the data for the demography of aging before the statistical era (see below) were likewise innocent of any demographic intent (see Laslett 1966) as were such sources as the censuses of China. It is the much more systematic character of the parish registers of the Christian church in European and Europeandecended societies and their persistence over long periods of early recordings that make them susceptible to satisfactory numerical analysis. [BACK]

8. See my review of Georges Minois's History of old age (1989), ending "the hell with the Seven Ages of Man" (Laslett 1990). [BACK]

9. Countries vary in this respect: the official U.S. census is closed for 50 years after being carried out, the British for 100 years. The Scandinavian countries are the most generous of access and their state-collected records go back as far as any of those elsewhere. Unfortunately, the original documentation for the censuses, even in countries like these, is very unevenly preserved. As for census-type documents drawn up before the statistical era, the situation is extremely uneven. In England, for example, whereas parochial registration of births, marriages, and deaths goes back to the 1530s and has made it possible to estimate age composition and life expectation, only about a dozen reliable census-type documents specifying ages are available before the official census began to record ages at the decennial census of 1831. [BACK]

10. For examples, see Kertzer and Hogan 1989, Janssens 1993, and Bulder 1993. [BACK]

11. These results are contained in Wrigley and Schofield [1981] 1989. [BACK]

12. For an explication of demographic aging, particularly in relation to the demographic transition, see Chesnais [1986] 1992, esp. 274-289, and 1990. In accepting for the purposes of explanation the well-established model of the demographic transition, I have no wish to underwrite the functionalist theoretical framework or the assumption of inevitability as part of the modernization process which so often attaches to it. See the perceptive study by Simon Szreter (1993). [BACK]

13. The recordings of baptisms, marriages, and burials from which the data used by Wrigley and Schofield [1981] (1989) for their monumental reconstruction were collected by several hundred volunteers (see their preface). Because gender is unspecified in the English parish registers that these volunteers used, they would have had to rely on given names and other clues to decide it. This was too laborious and uncertain a procedure to be worthwhile. [BACK]

14. See the discussion in Laslett 1989, rev. ed., chap. 4, where possible projections for the twenty-first century in western Europe are considered. If substantiated, the more extreme of these forecasts would put life expectation at a maximum of 100 years at the end of that century rather than 85 years as indicated in figure 1.1. Under these extraordinary conditions, nothing like a plateau of the kind shown before the secular shift could be supposed. [BACK]

15. Jacques Vallin (see Schofield, Reher, and Bideau 1991) suggests that the English evidence is not as reliable as the French because it depends to such an extent on model life tables, whereas the French is based on family reconstitutions. The English figures are, however, at present being checked against similar reconstitutions for English parishes. They are in general well confirmed. But it has to be accepted that English reconstitution evidence is never as reliable for this purpose as the French because English parish registers are less detailed in their descriptions of baptisms, marriages, and burials. [BACK]

16. As has apparently been done by Vallin (1991: 48, fig. 3.3). The impression given by this figure is of a considerably less impressive climb at the end of the nineteenth century, and the appearance is more of a steady slope upward toward a substantial rise in the earlier 1900s. If the archaeodemographic evidence had been included in the analysis of longevity and a very much longer lapse of time thus taken into account, the impression of unceasing constancy would be very strong indeed. [BACK]

17. See, for example, Kertzer and Schaie 1989, which includes historical studies of retirement both in Europe and America (Plakans 1989 [Europe], Vinovskis 1989 [America]). [BACK]

18. Studies of these effects are particularly associated with Glen Elder and Tamara Hareven. See Hareven's chapter (with P. Uhlenberg) in this volume, with its references, and Elder 1974 and Hareven 1978. [BACK]

19. See Fries 1980 and Fries and Crapo 1981. The critique in Laslett 1989, rev. ed., cites other discussions of their position, mostly dissenting from the claims made for the progressive compression of mortality and of morbidity in the final years. For the distribution of episodes of illness over the life course in the past as in the present and the drift toward their clustering in the later years, see the recent work of James C. Riley and others (e.g., Riley 1989). A research project on the statistical, demographic, and especially the historical aspects of life and death at the latest ages, concentrating on maximal length of life, is in progress at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. It is working in conjunction with the Oldest Old Data Archive in Odense, Denmark, using the data so far assembled there. It has been incontrovertibly established that survival is decidedly improving at the latest ages at the present time, a circumstance not easy to reconcile with current compression of mortality in the oldest age group. See Kannisto 1994. [BACK]

20. Estimates based on family reconstitutions at the Cambridge Group, subject to considerable uncertainty because of the difficulties of being confident of making reliable matches between personal names over periods of time greater than 50 years. The Oxfordshire villages were studied by Bridget Taylor. [BACK]

21. On low life expectancy among British peers, see Hollingsworth 1964 and 1977. His estimates are now under further development at the Cambridge Group, where he has been kind enough to deposit the data. [BACK]

22. Houston 1992, a very useful comparative analysis. [BACK]

23. See Laslett 1977: 186. Iceland in 1729 did not have a population of what was even then thought of as on a national scale; there were only about 40,000 people. The aging peak of 1729 came in a year of disaster from smallpox, which seems to have affected younger people far more than the elderly. The Icelandic census gives 9.2 percent over 60 in 1703 and 8.7 percent in 1787. [BACK]

24. See Houston 1992, where the issue is handled with considerable skill. [BACK]

25. See the appendix for the surprisingly high survival of those who reached later life in the Before. Since this part of the chapter was written, evidence has been accumulating at Cambridge suggesting that the general expectation of elite groups having had longer lives than the rest of the population in the past may have to be revised, at least in respect to persons past infancy and childhood. An estimate by Roger Thatcher puts the total of centenarians in England and Wales at about 40 in 1861, and present evidence can be said to demonstrate what is claimed in the text: that it was possible to continue until very late life on the lower aging plateau and even to attain age 100. [BACK]

26. The values for numbers alive at successive ages and the pooled total of years of life still left for them to live are standard features of the life table. Even in the clearest exposition of the life table, the major instrument of demographic analysis and particularly of mortality (Dublin, Lotka, and Spiegelman [1936] 1949) fails to explain to the uninitiated reader why expectation of life behaves in this way. The figures for England and Wales in 1989-1991 come from a provisional life table of the Government Actuary and those for Canada from Bourbeau and Legaré 1982. An even more elementary error about expectation of life is occasionally found in his-

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torical discussions, that supposing longevity at birth of 70, then a person of 50 has twenty years to live. That this is a gross misconception should be obvious from the discussion in the text. [BACK]

27. See Wrigley and Schofield 1989: 530, table A-3-2, and the Chester Beatty, life tables. Japanese period life tables for dates over the century since 1891 have been used to work out generational (i.e., cohort) life tables. See Kobayashi and Nanjo 1988. [BACK]

28. See Mitterauer 1992. [BACK]

29. See Laslett, "Is there a generational contract?" in Laslett and Fishkin 1992, particularly the chapter in that volume by David Thomson. [BACK]

30. On this topic, the supposition that an elderly population hinders national performance, see Laslett 1989, chap. 3; in relation to France, see Dyer 1977 and especially Bourdelais 1993, chap. 9. [BACK]

31. For an attempt at a general theory of the proper use of evidence of this kind, especially literary evidence, when it cannot be supplemented and checked from other sources, see Laslett 1976. [BACK]

32. It should be added that numbers of such specialist studies have avoided these tendencies, as, for example, those in this volume or in Pelling and Smith 1991 or Conrad and Kondratowicz 1993. Although the argument that France was already "modern" in terms of aging under the Enlightenment is not spelled out by Troyansky, it is not absent from all discussion of the topic. [BACK]

33. See Laslett 1989: 105, quoting from Eric Midwinter. [BACK]

34. See Szreter 1994 and Laslett 1987 a , 1987 b , and 1992 for the historical critique of modernization. Carmen Avalos del Pino is at present engaged at the Aging Unit of the Cambridge Group in the analysis of the results of attempting to apply the modernization model to aging in Catalonia during the secular shift. For the historical dissociation of constituents of modernization in the history of the West, see Laslett [1976] 1985, and for its relation with the so-called sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century, see Laslett 1991. [BACK]

35. See Anderson 1985. The accompaniment of the elongated vertical kin links, that is, the attenuation of lateral ones, is the result not of lengthened life but of declining fertility, an example of how intricate are the distinctions that have to be made. For the simulation of kin links over the life course, see Bongaarts, Burch, and Wachter 1987, especially the contributions of J. H. Reeves and J. E. Smith, and Laslett 1988 b . Compare Ruggles 1994 and Zhao in press. The chapter by E. A. Hammel in this volume represents an advanced and sophisticated example of the use of simulation methods. [BACK]

36. For England, see Laslett 1989, chap. 7, and for the United States, see, for example, Smith 1981 and the references in his contribution to this volume. On the two views of the change in the position of the elderly in America, see Fischer 1978 and Applebaum 1978. [BACK]

37. On all these issues, see the considered discussion in Conrad 1991, with its references, and the facts set out in Laslett 1993. [BACK]

38. On this paragraph, see Laslett 1989, chap. 8; 1977, chap. 5; and 1993; and compare the statements made by Hammel and the other authors in Part II, Living Arrangements, in this volume. Research is in progress at the Cambridge Group on the detailed social structure of thirteen English communities between 1891 and 1921 which may determine what effects the early path of the secular shift could have

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had on the familial position of the elderly. Compare also Janssens 1992 and Bulder 1993 for the Netherlands with the work of Avalos del Pino (see note 34) for Catalonia, where she has shown that co-residence of parents with married children did indeed increase against the expectation raised by the modernization model. [BACK]

39. See Laslett 1992; on the recent rapid rise in the primary individual, see Kobrin 1976. As for the United States, Steven Ruggles has laid it down that toward the end of the nineteenth century, all parents who had a married child to reside with took up that familial position. It was only after that that the rise of the primary individual began. See Ruggles 1994 and compare Laslett 1989, rev. ed., chap. 9. [BACK]

40. See Laslett 1988 a and its references, especially to the work of David Thomson and Richard Smith. The amount provided for the dependent elderly seems to have varied extensively from country to country and locality to locality. It was almost never sufficient to support a penniless individual by itself. For the Dutch case, in which the support was particularly exiguous, see Bulder 1993. A somewhat skeptical view as to the collective support of the elderly is put by Thane 1993 and in her forth-coming book there cited. [BACK]

41. See Gordon 1988. [BACK]

42. See the chapter by Ransom and Sutch in this volume, and compare Riddle 1992. These developments are summarized in Laslett 1989, chap. 9. [BACK]

43. The four-stage division of the life course is set out in Laslett 1989, where the Fourth Age is defined as one of final decrepitude and dependency, not a necessary stage of the life course of any individual and evidently subject to reduction and alleviation by medical progress and social policy. Along with the Third Age, it was intended to replace the blanket term "old age," which can now be considered obsolete. But the concept of a Fourth Age has been rejected by some authorities (see Young and Schuller 1991). In my own view the Fourth Age does represent a historical reality and its retention as a concept is required by the definition of the Third Age. See Laslett 1994, a review article on the Carnegie Enquiry into the Third Age in Britain, defending the Third Age against that Enquiry's decision to give it a chronological connotation covering a period of life between 50 and 74, a decision unacceptable to the originator of the concept and to those in the Third Age themselves. [BACK]

45. Nevertheless, there was a multiplicity of conventional ages of withdrawal, especially from public affairs ("Stepping Down," see Plakans 1989), affecting the better off for the most part, withdrawal into a retirement that might come in middle life and be ended by taking another office. This complicated situation is classically described by Keith Thomas (1976). The greater flexibility of transition into the final stage during the Before together with elements already present, which are characteristic of the Third Age, are discussed in Laslett 1989, rev. ed., and 1993. Bonfield (1989) considers the question of the Third Age during the Before in legal terms. [BACK]

46. In Laslett 1987 a and 1989, the proportional condition to be satisfied was different—at least 10 percent of the population over 65 years of age. Other demographic indicators associated with the longevity criterion for the appearance of the Third Age are found in the appendix. [BACK]

47. For details of these projections and their results, see Ogawa 1988 and the following references for readers of Chinese: Yao Shuben 1989, Zeng Yi 1990, and Wu Cangping and Du Peng 1992. [BACK]

48. Laslett and Fishkin 1992. The joint introduction bears this phrase as its title, and it is claimed that political theorists have a quite inadequate conception of justice over time and lack the concept of processional justice as well. [BACK]

49. See Laslett 1988 a and the introduction to Pelling and Smith 1991. Some scholars suppose that the Western familial system did specifically provide for old age dependency by requiring married children to take in aging parents (see the preface and Kertzer's concluding chapter to this volume). In my view the situation of such persons, many of whom had no surviving child, or none in a position to support them, was too miscellaneous for this to be so. Provision for support was ad hoc on the part of both family and collectivity, and the relationship may have been contractual, contractual between generations (see Laslett and Fishkin 1992). [BACK]

50. It would not have been advisable to go over to "West" altogether for the later figures, because this would have sacrificed the continuity throughout the whole series which alone makes comparison possible over time. [BACK]

51. Similar cross-comparisons can be made to estimate roughly other values of interest to the reader. [BACK]

52. Values have been taken from the Stable Population Series for Model North, using the columns for a female gross reproduction rate of 2.25. This is only an approximate average for English historical experience and is badly out at higher levels. No correction has been made to remedy this for the reason given in note 50 above. [BACK]

53. See especially Bourdelais 1993, chap. 7. His argument is that measures of this kind should be employed for preference in measuring longevity and that when converted into proportions over certain ages by an operation not easy to describe in the present context, should replace conventional aging indicators. The intriguing outcome is that countries like France, whose great age in proportional terms has been a major theme of this chapter, can actually be said to have grown younger in the twentieth century when his suggested indicators are applied. [BACK]