PAMELA SHARPE is currently Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia in Perth. She was Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Bristol from 1993 to 1999. She received an MA (Hons) in Economic History from the University of Edinburgh and completed a doctorate in demographic history at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge, in 1989. From 1990 to 1993 she was Essex County Council Research Fellow in Local History at the University of Essex.