‘A confession of ignorance’: deaths from old age and deciphering cause-of-death statistics in Scotland, 1855–1949

A large amount of the research undertaken in an attempt to discover the reasons underlying the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mortality decline in Britain has relied on the statistics published by the Registrars General. The processes by which individual causes of death are recorded and then processed in order to create the statistics are not, however, well understood. In this article, the authors build on previous work to piece together a time series of causes of death for Scotland, which removes many of the discontinuities encountered in the published statistics that result from the Registrar General deciding to update the nosology, or classification system, which was being used to compile his figures. Having regrouped individual causes of death to ‘smooth’ the time series, the authors use the new groups to examine the changing causes of death in Scotland for selected age groups, before turning to undertake a detailed examination of mortality amongst those aged 55 or more. The authors find that when deaths from ‘old age’ in the latter age group are separated from other ‘ill-defined’ causes, it becomes obvious that there was a ‘rebranding’ of cause of death. The authors then use individual-level data from two Scottish communities to further dissect the roles played by ‘informants’ and ‘doctors’ in this rebranding, in order to see how these roles may have altered over time and what the consequences might be for one's view of how mortality changed in Scotland between 1855 and 1949. Finally, the authors argue that their findings have important implications for some of historical demography's most prominent theories: the McKeown thesis and the theory of epidemiological transition.     

Book Reviews

Small Firms and Local Economic Networks: The Death of the Local Economy?. James Curran and Robert Blackburn, 1994. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 210 pp.; £29.95 hardback. ISBN: 1 85396 209 0

Tourism and Politics: Policy, Power and Place. Colin Michael Hall, 1994 (reprinted. March 1996). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. 239 pp.; £14.99 paperback. ISBN: 0 471 9647 2

European Union Spatial Policy and Planning. R. WILLIAMS, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 304 pp. £16.95 paperback. ISBN: 1 8539 6 305 4

Disability and the City: International Perspectives. Rob Imrie, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 200 pp.; £15.95 paperback. ISBN: 185396 273 2 (paperback)     

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.     

The triple black burden: Race,knowledge production and South Africa's international affairs

China's relationship with Africa is viewed as strategic and complementary by both regions, politically and economically. The article analyses the relationship within the framework of China's official policy, looking at what both sides stand to gain.     

Pax Africana in the age of extremes

Agriculture in Asia was revolutionised in the latter part of the 20^th century through the creative use of new technologies and well‐targeted government intervention. Similar principles can be applied in Africa.     

Public Investments in Education and Children’s Academic Achievements

While the benefits of additional schooling in the developing world are widely recognised, the best use of scarce resources to improve academic achievement remains unclear. We compare public investments in school infrastructure, school improvement grants, teacher qualifications, and attendance incentives on independently-gathered measures of academic skills as well as grade progression for 8–11 year olds in India. We match a rich household survey containing a skills-assessment module, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), with detailed measures of each district’s education resources from the District Information Survey on Education (DISE). We also include border-pair fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that incentives for children to attend school were associated with arithmetic, reading and writing skills, and grade progression. Investment in teachers were associated with greater probability a child could write and do more advanced math. Small improvement grants to schools were associated with better reading skills and writing ability. Investments in school infrastructure were only associated with improved writing ability.