Coping with City Growth assesses Britain's handling of city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian. What emerges is an exciting and provocative accounts that have long occupied problem development economists: urban unemployment, underemployment, and the alleged failure of city labour markets to absorb the flood of rural emigrants; the persistent influx of newcomers, which makes it difficult for municipal planners to improve the quality of social overhead; the crowding of migrants into densely packed urban slums with few, if any, social services; and rising density and city size which augment pollution while lowering the quality of the urban environment.
List of tables; List of figures; Acknowledgments; 1. Coping with city growth, past and present; 2. The urban demographic transition: births, deaths, and immigration; 3. Migrant selectivity, brain drain, and human capital transfers; 4. The demand for labor and immigrant absorption off the farm; 5. Absorbing the city immigrants; 6. The impact of the Irish on British labor markets; 7. Did British labor markets fail during the industrial revolutions?; 8. Did Britain's cities grow too fast?; 9. City housing, density, disamenities, and death; 10. Did Britain underinvest in its cities? References; Index.
"Coping with City Growth is packed full of important research findings....it is an important piece of work that deserves to be read carefully by all scholars working on nineteenth-century British industrialization and urbanization." Journal of Economic History
Timothy J. Hatton, Jeffrey G. Williamson, University of Essex) Hatton, Timothy J. (Professor of Economics, Professor of Economics, Harvard University) Williamson, Jeffrey G. (Laird Bell Professor of Economics, Laird Bell Professor of Economics
Philippe Aghion, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Philippe (University College London) Aghion, Massachusetts) Williamson, Jeffrey G. (Harvard University, Jeffrey Williamson
Philippe Aghion, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Philippe (University College London) Aghion, Massachusetts) Williamson, Jeffrey G. (Harvard University, Jeffrey Williamson