Historians and demographers have gone to considerable trouble to reconstruct life expectancy in the past in individual countries. This overview collects information from a large body of that work and links estimates for historical populations to those provided by the United Nations, the World...

Estimates from some 700 mostly national studies of survival in the past are assembled to create a broad picture of regional and global life expectancy gains across space and time and to examine implications of that picture. At the initiation of their health transitions, most countries had a life...