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DISCOVERING THE WESTERN PAST: Statistical View of European Rural Life 1600-1800

DOCUMENT 1:

NOTE: Modern farming methods on amply watered wheat fields in the U.S. Midwest produce yield ratios

of at least 40:1 and usually much higher.

Questions:

1. What do you conclude about the productivity of agriculture in the period?

2. Which areas of Europe were most and least productive?

3. Which areas showed the greatest advance toward a more productive farming?

4. Given such an agriculture, why would you not be surprised to find the majority of the population

occupied with farming?


DOCUMENT 2:

Questions: Consider the diets as a group

1. What food would you find missing?

2. What food type, based on the calories it represents in daily consumption, seems to dominate

the diet of the peasant farmers who sonumed these rations?

3. What do you think the health consequences of such a diet, more or less generlaized in this

population, would have been?

Note: Most of the receipents of these food allotments were expected to work and a daily food intake of

about 2,400 calories was needed to sustain moderate labor. (1,500 calories per day is necessary simply

to sustain life) In a day you need about 1 gram of protein for 1 kilogram of body weight. (ex: 65 grams of

protein for 65 kilogram or 143lbs) In a day you need about 40 grams of lipids and fats. You need 40

grams of sugar per day. Calcium consumption should be between 60-80 percent of phosphorus.


DOCUMENT 3:

Questions for Documents 3:

1. In what years were the spring and summer temperatures abnormally cool?

2. How do seasonal temperatures correlate with wheat Prices?

3. In what years did weather adversely affect agricultre and drive up prices?


DOCUMENT 4:

Questions:

1. What do you observe in the long-term salary trends?

2. What do you note about the long-term trends in the price of the wheat essential in making

bread, the dietary stable of the poor?

3. What sorts of conditions did the wagoners of Bas-Provence experience in the 1730s, the late

1740s and especially from the 1760s into the late 1780s?


DOCUMENT 5:

Questions:

1. In what towns did the greatest portion of the population die?

2. What impact would such losses have had on the towns?


DOCUMENT 6:

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Questions for Document 6:

1. Was Europe’s population growing rapidly prior to the 1740s?

2. What reasons might account for this trend?

3. In what years, as revealed in an abnormally high death rate, did demographic crises strike the

various European Countries?

4. How might these devleopments affect a society’s ability to replace its losses?


Document 7:

Questions:

1. In what years were food prices high?

2. In what years did Burials exceed births?

3. What do you think caused the excessive burials?

4. Do you think theis population grew much in this time period?


DOCUMENT 8:

Questions:

1. Approximately what percentage of Eighteenth-century French children might hope to live to age

ten?

2. Why do you think so many children did not live past 10?


DOCUMENT 9:

Note: Life Expectancy Modern England: Males 70.2, females 76.2 Third World Countries: 43 for males and females

Questions:

1. How do such life expectancies compare with those of modern England and the Modern

Third World?

2. What role do you think infant mortality had in keeping average life expectancy low?


DOCUMENT 10:

Questions:

1. How does the death rate reflect the impact of the agricultral year and climatic conditions on

French people?

2. When did children die? Why?