The Malthusian Intermezzo Women’s work and earnings, and human capital formation between the Late Middle Ages and the Demographic Transition of the 19 th century First draft, please do not quote Jan Luiten van Zanden (j.l.vanzanden@uu.nl ) Introduction There are two happy stories about demographic transition – and there is a problem in between. The first „happy story‟ is about the genesis of the European Marriage Pattern in the late Medieval Period: it is, as Tine de Moor and I have tried to demonstrate, a story of women‟s empowerment, due to the emergence of marriage based on consensus, which was linked to high levels of participation on the labour market, and which created more scope for human capital formation – both for women and for men (De Moor and Van Zanden 2010). It was, in our view, the first step in the switch from quality to quantity of offspring in Western Europe‟s long term development path, which lay the basis for (amongst others) the gradual building up of human capital that fundamental for long-term economic success of the continent. There is a second „happy story‟, the „demographic transition‟ occurring in Western Europe in post 1850 (or even post 1870) period, due to the decline in mortality, which was followed, after a certain time-lag, by a similar decline in fertility. This has often been seen as the crucial switch towards „quality‟, in which, also, the increased human capital of women may have played a role, but there is still considerable debate about the forces driving the decline of fertility (see for example the discussion in Janssens 2007). In between these two happy stories, however, there is the rather grim 18 th century - or by extension, the „very long‟ 18 th century which may have started in the 17 th century and ended at about 1850 (as „long centuries‟ are supposed to do). This is, even in the most prosperous part of Europe, Great Britain, the world of Malthus, in which population growth accelerated, real wages were depressed (in spite of the fact that per capita GDP was rising in the long run) and levels of literacy stagnated. The combination of a „baby boom‟ (the term has been introduced by Lindert 1983) and stagnating human capital formation during the „long‟18 th century has lead economic historians such as Mokyr (2002) and Allen (2003) to doubt, for example, the importance of human capital in explaining the industrial revolution of these years, and have induced other economic historians to characterize the British economy of that time as being (still) Malthusian, dominated by the growing tension between a rising population and an inelastic supply of foodstuffs (Clark 2007b). The question therefore is, how to explain „the Great Conundrum‟ (Mokyr 1990) of the „long‟ 18 th century? Why did the first switch from „quantity to quality‟ – the rise of the European Marriage Pattern – not lead to the kind of acceleration of economic growth and related deceleration of population growth as is expected by economic theories modeling these processes? Why the Malthusian intermezzo, in which – and that is perhaps its most striking feature – there was a long-term stagnation in human capital formation. At, admittedly, a, by international standards, relatively high level, but this is also exactly the problem: why did the movement