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This chapter analyses key hypotheses on the impacts of rural population growth on agriculture, natural resource management, and related impacts on poverty in development countries. It is argued that the impacts of population growth likely to be negative when there is no collective response than when population growth induces infrastructure development, collective action, institutional or organisational development. The results of recent studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Honduras are discussed.

This chapter presents a case study on regional demographic reconstructions based on data assembled for the Carta Archeologica of the municipal territory of Nettuno, central Italy. The aim of this case study is to contribute to the methodological debate on the use of survey data for past (Roman) population reconstructions. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 discusses the uses of survey data in demographic reconstructions. Section 2 assesses the way the data were assembled while Section 3 deals with diachronic changes in the density and distribution of rural settlement types over the landscape. These data are then used in Section 4 to extrapolate population figures, elaborating methods used in earlier studies. The combined analysis of rural site data and subsequent demographic extrapolations furnish insights into the economic growth and decline of a part of the ager of Antium. The study highlights important methodological issues (especially on the relations between survey intensity and site recovery) that, in the context of the present volume, are of great importance. It also serves as a test case for future application to datasets available for other parts of the Pontine Region. Ultimately, the results may be used to test recent ideas on the extent of Rome's suburbium that would have reached as far as Antium and the Pontine Region.

Following up on the quantitative analysis in the preceding chapter (15), revealing excess child mortality in sub‐Saharan Africa, a more qualitative analysis of the public sector in the countries in this region is provided in Ch. 16. The public resources spent on health care and education, in these countries, are not abnormally small (given the income levels), but the quality of the services is, with few exceptions, dismal. Moreover, the resource allocation is biased towards curative health care in big cities and higher education. Often, less than half the rural population has access to basic health care and primary education. Lack of economic growth and political misallocation of resources are found to be at the bottom of the problem.

This chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the rural population played a major role in riots in 18th-century England. The rural population, also known as the country people, are rarely seen as instigators of large-scale disturbances. While the culture of rural England could be robust and even brutal, it is not usually associated with the sorts of orchestrated community responses that characterized the way in which urban and suburban manufacturing and mining populations faced up to challenges to customary expectations or to living standards. Agricultural labourers are assumed to be too preoccupied with finding and keeping work to risk overt protest, while farmers were too dependent upon maintaining their reputation with the landlords from whom they rented land to endanger that relationship. However, many riots were led and dominated by country people.

This chapter highlights groups that are under-served and otherwise disadvantaged at the end of life. It focuses on people who live in rural or remote areas. Despite some important benefits to living and dying outside metropolitan areas, rural/remote persons are often disadvantaged as they reach the end of life, and in many different ways. Although it is impossible to highlight all global issues, the chapter summarizes relevant current research and emphasizes key aspects of rural/remote inequity for attention. Some comparative points about urban under-served groups are also made, as it would be unfair to categorize all people who live in or near cities as having better end-of-life care chances than rural/remote persons.

Peasants' access to commodities such as fineware was weak in the early imperial period, not because they preferred their native artisan traditions (which had disappeared), but because the new Roman order had limited their ability to consume anything beyond the most basic necessities. Patterns of commodity distribution and production changed in late antiquity. The small farms and villages that had been all but archaeologically invisible during the early imperial period began to obtain datable fineware by the late fourth century. The African Red Slip industry fragmented into many microindustries, allowing fineware to be produced more locally, and therefore more cheaply, than previously. Literary texts began to assume that everyone in North Africa would be dining on pottery (if not something better). There are signs that other forms of material culture—glass, roof tiles, bathhouses, clothing, and money itself—were becoming available to rural populations. Some of these developments might be attributed to a general increase in wealth in the core African provinces, derived from their expanding overseas exports, but patterns of distribution also changed in less-prosperous Mauretania Caesariensis and Tripolitania. This chapter first summarizes the evidence for this diffusion of commodities to rural populations, and then explores its explanations and implications.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The question posed at the beginning of this book was why people began to worry about peasant rebellion in the fourth century, a concern displayed in the North African case by the polemics against the Donatist circumcellions. To reconstruct what was happening to rural populations, a wide range of disparate sources, both textual and archaeological, were considered, in such a way as to discover their “hidden transcripts”—the perspective and agency of the peasants themselves. The examination and interpretation of these sources has led to the conclusion that the rural populations were not rebelling against the Roman way of life in the fourth and fifth centuries, but involving themselves in it on a scale unattested before. Their involvement is what increased social tensions, as it transgressed the boundaries that divided rustici and urbani. The book traces this crossing of boundaries in three different areas of Roman life: the economic, the political, and the ideological.

This chapter examines rural women and the ways that migration impacts them. It focuses on a group of people and institutions who are not migrating per se but who must respond to rapid migration and urbanization taking place miles away in the urban parts of the state. Migration histories tend to naturally concentrate on the migrants as the central characters; but here it is shown that the impact and reach of migration influences rural populations even if their mobility is more static over time than their urban counterparts.

The twentieth century has witnessed the eruption of the rural population of Latin America into the political process: news of land invasions, uprisings, and petitions for agrarian reform in various countries of the continent furnish daily subject matter for the world press. Forms of rural protest have varied widely from country to country, and from historical period to historical period. An analytical scheme would allow relating modes of rural protest to major structural shifts in the political economy of Latin America. This chapter attempts to examine the dynamic of rural protest movements as they respond to changing structural conditions and in turn react upon them. It delineates three phases in the development of the hacienda system: the phase of expansion, the phase of stabilization and coexistence, and the phase of dissolution. Rural protest acquires more relevance because it challenges a system of power and is itself revolutionary.

This chapter introduces the work of community delineation done by rural sociologists and land economists of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare under the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). In the application of the sociological and participatory-democratic theories conferred by rural sociologists, the BAE initially organized a system of representation, wherein rural neighborhoods are represented by a community committee, and then local communities are represented by a county committee. Through an effective representation of social units, conflicting locality-based interests were brought together in order to develop collective solutions. The chapter also describes the actual implementation of the community delineation work to different rural counties.

This chapter places the development of York and its civic institutions in the context of the development of the county of Yorkshire. It addresses issues of changing population size and structure, the foundation and distribution of markets and fairs, and the development of overseas trade. All these developments shaped the development of distinctive institutions in York, in particular the foundation and attempted reform of market places, the reconstruction of the city walls, and the development of summer festivals culminating in the rise of the feast of Corpus Christi in the middle fourteenth century.

Wales, in common with many locations in the British Isles, had a mixed career during the economic and demographic upheavals of the late eighteenth century. Rural west Wales was especially prominent in the emigration account; it also vividly manifested some of the classic conditions making for mobility. Increased mobility in rural Wales was marked also by particular episodes of emigration which entered the folk memory. The demographic and economic career of the upland Swaledale region in the North Yorkshire Pennines demonstrates with unusual clarity several typical sequences within the long-term decline of its rural population. The Swaledale economy remained dominated by agriculture, and productivity increases were impressive, especially in dairying. Swaledale was a classic case of rural change associated with migratory adjustments to demographic and economic pressures, and was a regional variant of the common experience in rural Britain.

This chapter explores the reputation and reality of the nation's less populated regions, which one in every five people in the United States call home. Too often, the rural designation implies an environment in which poor health and diminished opportunities are the norm. Though the chapter contributors acknowledge the enduring economic, social, and educational inequities that pervade these regions, they are equally invested in capitalizing on the inherent strengths of the rural heritage. Using examples from several Southern, rural communities that are among the poorest in the country, yet also offer pockets of hope, the contributors show that it is possible to reshape the narrative of rural living. To enhance health and well-being in rural America, policymakers and advocates must build on the unique challenges, strengths, and opportunities in rural populations. Changes that leverage local resources and strengths to better serve residents are vital, and some of them are surprisingly simple and often community-driven.

Although there are particularly salient and problematic challenges in addressing the transportation needs of people living in rural areas with dementia, there has been limited research in this area. In this chapter, we discuss the risks of driving with dementia, including the risks of collisions but also the adverse outcomes associated with cessation of driving. We summarize qualitative research about the particular challenges faced by those living in rural areas. We describe these challenges as experienced in Canada and Scotland, and present an innovative national partnership in Scotland aimed at providing dementia-friendly transportation alternatives. We conclude with recommendations for policy-makers, clinicians, researchers, people with dementia and their caregivers.

Chapter 2 brings new information to Florida’s sparse historical record of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, initiated from 1922 to 1929. To provide expert administration of the program, public health nurse Laurie Jean Reid arrived, armed with a reformer’s vision augmented by a large dose of cultural chauvinism. Reid soon declared bringing federal initiatives into the state would be an uphill climb when the intertwining problems of race and poverty mired the state in its backwardness. The task of establishing authority over the predominantly black midwives and bringing health improvements to mothers rested with Reid’s team of public health nurses. They found innovative ways to bridge the communities they served with policies that addressed the threats of infection and the high infant and maternal mortality levels. Meeting these cultural and environmental challenges became not only a test of Reid’s judgment, but also a trial of how well the nurses operating under the Sheppard-Towner Act effectively imposed rules and regulations to a mostly rural population without creating racial and class tension.

This chapter focuses on water quality violations in America. Most Americans have access to safe drinking water. However, there are pockets of American communities that are afflicted with high levels of contaminated water. In 2015, almost 10% of Americans were drinking contaminated water that violated water quality standards. The chapter then evaluates research at the University of California, Irvine, which examined water quality violations across the United States from 1982 to 2015. Researchers analyzed geographic and temporal patterns, with the goal of helping state enforcement agencies focus their attention on areas at high risk of contamination. The researchers cite decreasing population size and incomes as common obstacles faced by rural populations trying to follow water purification standards. Indeed, rural towns often rely on outside funding and low-interest government loans to support infrastructure to correct water quality violations. However, as of June 2017, over $600 million in grant funding was cut from Environmental Protection Agency drinking water programs. Such cuts, coupled with attempted environmental deregulation, threaten the public’s health.

This chapter investigates family and community influences on adult height using newly collected data on Union Army recruits. In addition to providing new estimates for family and community influences on adult height using ordinary least squares (OLS), the analysis employs a variety of alternative specifications. It explores potential differences between urban and rural populations and across occupational categories. The analysis also estimates the model using county-level fixed effects and compares these results to the OLS equations. Finally, it estimates the main specification using quantile regression, a technique that has received increasing recognition as a method of exploring the impact of covariates on the entire conditional distribution of the dependent variable (in this case, height), rather than simply estimating the conditional mean, which is what OLS achieves.

The attempt to work out population estimates of the Mughal empire and, then, of India is based on two separate sets of assumptions. In the first set it is assumed that (a) the total area of cultivation in 1601 was 50 to 55 per cent of what it was in 1901, (b) the ratio of urban to rural population was 15:85, and (c) the average agricultural holding was 10 per cent larger in 1601 than in 1901. Whence population range for India, 1601: 136–50 million. The second set of assumptions is the following: (a) yield per unit of area was the same in 1601 and 1891, (b) area of land cultivated per capita also remained the same, and (c) crop-distribution also remained largely the same. These assumptions yield a population of 149.07 million for India in 1601. Putting the two estimates side by side, the chapter considers 145 million a reliable estimate of population for 1601, yielding a rate of growth of 0.21 per cent over the period 1601–1801.