Population developments in the Northern Netherlands (1500 - 1800) and the validity of the "urban graveyard" effect

The notion that the pre-industrial city always had a natural surplus of deaths has been accepted as almost axiomatic. In a study published in Past and Present 19 (1978) Sharlin questioned this notion by suggesting a distinction between the reproduction of the permanent population and that of the itinerant population. In this study, based on developments in Dutch cities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I propose that the existence of a surplus of deaths in the pre-industrial city was not a necessary feature determined for all time and places by nature, but a situation provoked by specific historical circumstances.