The Transition to Human Reproduction

We talk now about reproduction but we've had this transition from an early modern period of talking about generation. There is gradually this shift towards what we might say now more formally procreation and because it the shift sort of happens across that period of the industrial revolutions some historians have a spanner rather too simple narrative. It shows us perhaps that that thinking is moving away from seeing this as a kind of natural thing to a more kind of mechanical set of reproductions. And I think the more interesting part of the story is the opposite in a way that when we talk about human reproduction we don't tend to kind of acknowledge its economic importance or its ultimate productivity.