Jacob Rose

Economic and Social History (2024 cohort)

Every historian claims that their period was one of 'major change', but in fin de siècle western Europe the fundamental reproductive relationship seen in all human societies and most animal species - that more resource creates more births - was rapidly being reversed. In two generations the average married woman went from having nearly 6 children to less than 2.5. I am interested in how and why this occurred, particularly in relation to the accumulation of human capital across generations, a process which interacted with the fertility decline and the onset of modern economic growth. The vast majority of scholarship on this issue has been limited by the use of aggregate data, which produces macroeconomic models with high variance, ecological fallacies, and which often only permit cross-sectional comparative analysis between the large spatial population units. Such data and models make causal inference very difficult, especially given that causality between most economic and demographic processes is bidirectional. I hope to use the new Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM), a digitised individual-level census database for 1851-1921, to record link enumerated individuals or communities longitudinally to create timeseries cohorts of people. These data can then be linked externally to socio-economic or cultural events and changes affecting local areas, such as the collapse of a staple industry or a philanthropic endowment of new schools. In response to such changes, the elasticity of fertility can be estimated. Ultimately, my approach aims to examine how exogenous shocks and socio-economic changes relating to human capital altered the lifecycles of people who were exposed to them.

I read history for my BA and then did an MPhil in economic and social history, both at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge. At Caius I won a ‘Senior Scholarship’ during my BA, and an academic scholarship for my Master’s. At Cambridge I was also awarded the Ellen McArthur Doctoral Studentship Award for economic history by the Faculty. However, I did not take the award as I went to work as a public spending analyst at the National Audit Office in London, helping assess the efficacy and efficiency of policy-specific government spending. I loved this job, and it has informed my worldview considerably. Outside of demography or economic history, my lifelong passion remains climbing: on rock, on ice, in the alps, and, during one first ascent which I led in a sub-range of the Tien Shan in Kyrgyzstan, in the greater Asian ranges.