| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 245 words from this article are provided below; about 538 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, James Z. Lee, et al. Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900. (The MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series.) Cambridge: MIT Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 531. $45.00.
"The Eurasia Project," whose work is contained in the book under review, has been the most active endeavor in comparative historical demography for the last ten years, with papers appearing widely in demographic and historical journals. The present volume represents the first time that members of the group have focused on a single topic—mortality—and published their results in book form.	1
The volume consists of studies of the relationship between short-term economic conditions and mortality in the sample of mainly rural villages in eastern Belgium, northeastern China, northern Italy, northeastern Japan, and southern Sweden that comprises "over thirty separate populations with 2.5 million individual-level observations" (p. 14). Villages have not been selected through any sort of sampling process but rather because of the availability of "household registers," the principal source on which the project is based, and series of grain prices that can be used to measure short-term economic fluctuations (the main independent variable that researchers seek to link to patterns of mortality). Studies focus mainly on the nineteenth century, when all of the villages had developed markets for grain, making it possible to measure macroeconomic conditions or economic "stress" through variations in prices of staple crops.	. . .

There are about 538 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.