During the past two decades, there have been a number of major advances in constructing time series on the decline in mortality in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. The data for these time series were obtained from a variety of archives. Both the retrieval and the processing of the data were made possible by the remarkable advances in computer technology that not only permitted the creation of the time series but enabled linkage to a variety of variables aimed at explaining the improvement in health and longevity over the past three centuries. In this chapter, I focus first on England and France, for which the longest time series exist, but will make use of data from several other countries including Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan.

Figure 1.1 shows time series for the decline in mortality rates going back to the 1540s in England and to the 1740s in France. These diagrams present the annual crude mortality rates for each country as a scatter of points. The heavy dark line in the center of each scatter shows the underlying trend in the mortality rate.

Figure 1.1 shows that in both England and France, crude mortality rates were much higher in the eighteenth century than they are today – on the order of three to four times higher.