Reviews of Books

This collection of thirteen chapters authoritatively informs the reader about the histories of three major populations of North America: Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and African Americans. The primary goals of population history as exemplified in this volume are to reconstruct population totals and to dissect change into the components of migration, mortality, and fertility. When sources permit, overall fertility is then broken down into the contributions of illegitimate fertility, nuptiality (marriage rate), and fertility in marriage. Marital fertility is further dissected into the factors of child-spacing and cessation of child bearing. As one contributor puts it, demography is a "science of rates" (p. 268) relating numerators such as births, deaths, and marriages to the denominators of the populations at risk for these events to occur.	1
Most relevant to the readers of the William and Mary Quarterly are the chapters dealing with the earlier period in the histories of these populations. Two anthropologists, Douglas H. Ubelaker and Russell Thornton, respectively survey pre-contact disease patterns and the course of Indian population collapse following European contact and then its revival during the twentieth century. Native Americans, as historian Robert McCaa points out, also predominate in the population history of Mexico. His essay examines the peopling of Mexico from ancient Mesoamerica to the Revolution of 1910. Of central importance, uncertainty, and controversy in the demographic history of Mexico is the size of the Indian population before European contact and hence the path of its decline. Unlike other scholars, McCaa also points to extremely early marriage and consequent high fertility among the Nahuas as important elements in the demographic regime of Native Americans.	2
The demographic history of Europeans who came to the British and French regions of mainland North America was dramatically different from that of Native Americans. So unusual was that of Québec that its extreme reproductive success has been highlighted in a recent history of world population. Most of the six million French-Canadians living today descend from a mere 15,000 immigrants who arrived before 1760 and stayed (Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population [Cambridge, 1992], 9). The demography of early Québec and nineteenth-century Canada resembles the northern mainland British colonies and the northern part of the United States. Similarities include early marriage and high birth rates compared to Europe and a very rapid rate of natural population increase that can be traced to a high ratio of land to population.	3
The literature of Canadian historical demography for the era of French control before 1763 is more extensive and precise than that for the British colonies. In their chapter, four French-Canadian historical demographers, Hubert Charbonneau, Bertrand Desjardins, Jacques Légaré, and Hubert Denis, outline the demographic results of a massive computerized reconstruction of the rich sources for the entire population of New France. That the population reached only 70,000 by 1760, less than one-sixth that of New England in the same year, helped to make this project manageable. Oriented toward population studies of early modern France and drawing on French demographic leadership in the technique of family reconstitution, the authors do not compare their results to other areas of colonial North America. Indeed, they assert that New England attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants before 1760, a claim they would not have made if they had only read the next chapter in the volume.	. . .