Tony Wrigley

Tony Wrigley, c. 1980s

Sir Edward Anthony Wrigley, FBA (born 17 August 1931),^[1] commonly known as Tony Wrigley, is a historical demographer. Wrigley and Peter Laslett co-founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1964.

Wrigley's scholarly works focus on demographic history, and the long-term causes and effects of urbanization and industrialization. Among his many publications, Wrigley is known for the book Continuity, Chance and Change, published in 1988, in which he explained why Malthus was wrong about the law of diminishing returns slowing population growth. His most celebrated work, however, is The Population History of England, 1541-1871, published in 1981 with co-author Roger S. Schofield.

He was Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1994 until 2000,^[1] and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980, serving as president from 1997 to 2001.^[2] He was the recipient of the 2005 Leverhulme Medal and Prize awarded by the British Academy.^[3]

Publications

• Industrial growth and population change; a regional study of the coalfield areas of north-west Europe in the later nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press 1961,
• An introduction to English historical demography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, editor,Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) 1966
• Population and history, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) 1969, ISBN 0-303-17579-6
• Nineteenth-century society essays in the use of quantitative methods for the study of social data, editor, Cambridge University Press 1972, ISBN 0-521-08412-1
• Population private choice and public policy, The Lindsey Press (London) 1972, The Essex Hall lecture
• Identifying people in the past, Arnold (London) 1973, ISBN 0-7131-5694-5
• People, cities, and wealth: the transformation of traditional society, Blackwell 1987, ISBN 0-631-13991-5
• The population history of England, 1541-1871: a reconstruction, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass) 1981, ISBN 0-674-69007-9
• People Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society, Blackwell Publishers 1989, ISBN 0-631-16556-8
• Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England, Cambridge University Press 1990, ISBN 0-521-39657-3
• Poverty, Progress, and Population, Cambridge University Press 2004, ISBN 0-521-82278-5
• English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837, with R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, Cambridge University Press 2005, ISBN 0-521-02238-X
• Industrial Growth and Population Change, Cambridge University Press 2007, ISBN 0-521-02553-2
• Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-76693-7
• The Path to Sustained Growth. England's Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-316-50428-4.

References

External links

• Personal page at Cambridge University Department of Geography
• Tony Wrigley interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 23 July 2007 (film)