Between 1500 and 1800, London grew to be the largest city in Western Europe, with its population growing almost 22 times larger in this period. London would eventually overtake Constantinople as Europe's largest in the 1700s, before becoming the largest city in the world (ahead of Beijing) in the early-1800s.

The most populous cities in this period were the capitals of European empires, with Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna growing to become the largest cities, alongside the likes of Lisbon and Madrid in Iberia, and Naples or Venice in Italy. Many of northwestern Europe's largest cities in 1500 would eventually be overtaken by others not shown here, such as the port cities of Hamburg, Marseilles or Rotterdam, or more industrial cities such as Berlin, Birmingham, and Munich.

It is only in the past two centuries where demographics and the development of human populations has emerged as a subject in its own right, as industrialization and improvements in medicine gave way to exponential growth of the world's population. There are very few known demographic studies conducted before the 1800s, which means that modern scholars have had to use a variety of documents from centuries gone by, along with archeological and anthropological studies, to try and gain a better understanding of the world's demographic development. Genealogical records One such method is the study of genealogical records from the past; luckily, there are many genealogies relating to European families that date back as far as medieval times. Unfortunately, however, all of these studies relate to families in the upper and elite classes; this is not entirely representative of the overall population as these families had a much higher standard of living and were less susceptible to famine or malnutrition than the average person (although elites were more likely to die during times of war). Nonetheless, there is much to be learned from this data. Impact of the Black Death In the centuries between 1200 and 1745, English male aristocrats who made it to their 21st birthday were generally expected to live to an age between 62 and 72 years old. The only century where life expectancy among this group was much lower was in the 1300s, where the Black Death caused life expectancy among adult English noblemen to drop to just 45 years. Experts assume that the pre-plague population of England was somewhere between four and seven million people in the thirteenth century, and just two million in the fourteenth century, meaning that Britain lost at least half of its population due to the plague. Although the plague only peaked in England for approximately eighteen months, between 1348 and 1350, it devastated the entire population, and further outbreaks in the following decades caused life expectancy in the decade to drop further. The bubonic plague did return to England sporadically until the mid-seventeenth century, although life expectancy among English male aristocrats rose again in the centuries following the worst outbreak, and even peaked at more than 71 years in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Paris was Western Europe's largest city in 1650, with an estimated 400 thousand inhabitants, which is almost double it's population 150 years previously. In second place is London, with 350 thousand inhabitants, however it has grown by a substantially higher rate than Paris during this time, now seven times larger than it was in the year 1500. Naples remains in the top three largest cities, growing from 125 to 300 thousand inhabitants during this time. In the previous list, the Italian cities of Milan and Venice were the only other cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, however in this list they have been joined by the trading centers of Lisbon and Amsterdam, the capital cities of the emerging Portuguese and Dutch maritime empires.

In 1500, the largest city was Paris, with an estimated 225 thousand inhabitants, almost double the population of the second-largest city, Naples. As in 1330, Venice and Milan remain the third and fourth largest cities in Western Europe, however Genoa's population almost halved from 1330 until 1500, as it was struck heavily by the bubonic plague in the mid-1300s. In lists prior to this, the largest cities were generally in Spain and Italy, however, as time progressed, the largest populations could be found more often in Italy and France. The year 1500 is around the beginning of what we now consider modern history, a time that saw the birth of many European empires and inter-continental globalization.

Life expectancy in the United Kingdom was below 39 years in the year 1765, and over the course of the next two and a half centuries, it is expected to have increased by more than double, to 81.1 by the year 2020. Although life expectancy has generally increased throughout the UK's history, there were several times where the rate deviated from its previous trajectory. These changes were the result of smallpox epidemics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new sanitary and medical advancements throughout time (such as compulsory vaccination), and the First world War and Spanish Flu epidemic in the 1910s.