Defeating famine and plague bought no extra lifespan, because the same growth that defeated them raised mortality by another route. Part I states it flatly: defeating famine and plague did not result in any increase in expected lifespan. Urbanisation produced crowding and poor sanitation; expanding trade circulated pathogens and achieved the microbial unification of the world; and higher density converted periodic epidemics into permanently endemic childhood diseases, concentrating mortality in the early years. This is the book's spine in its sharpest form: the engine that solves a risk class generates the next one, and the net gain was zero for roughly two centuries.

Evidence 1 passage

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defeating famine and plague did not result in any increase in expected lifespan. Increasing urbanization especially in England across the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created more crowded and less sanitary living conditions allowing diseases to spread more easily. In parallel, increasing internal and inte

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