The historian Sir Tony Wrigley, who has died aged 90, transformed our understanding of the industrial revolution. He did this by mining in British history for a rich ore that nobody had previously thought usable: England’s parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials, created by Thomas Cromwell in 1538.

Before Wrigley, our knowledge of population change throughout the period before the first decennial census of 1801 was patchy. Population was growing strongly from 1801 onwards but it was not known with any certainty when this had begun to occur, nor how exactly population change might have related to the early phases of growth in towns and in the iron, coal and cotton industries, or the controversial processes of enclosure.

The forthright claims of the early economist Thomas Malthus, whose theories so influenced the formation of the modern discipline of demography - the statistical study of populations - were untestable.

Wrigley’s first book, Industrial Growth and Population Change (1961), was a multilingual comparative study of the coalfield from the Ruhr to the Pas de Calais. Through his appreciation of the work of the French demographer Louis Henry, Wrigley realised that some English parish registers could yield their secrets about demographic change if subjected to Henry’s arduous process of family reconstitution. This involved rebuilding the multiple interacting genealogies of all resident families in a parish over generations amounting to centuries.

He began in Colyton, east Devon, where the Devon and Cornwall Record Society had published the registers, which were unusually complete and had been begun almost immediately following Cromwell’s initiative. Wrigley’s first, famous publication using the Colyton family reconstitution study was Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England, which appeared in the Economic History Review in 1966.

Having demonstrated proof of concept, Wrigley teamed up with the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett (his ex-tutor in political theory), who had also become intensely interested in family forms in pre-industrial England.

In 1964 they founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and, through a far-sighted commitment to engage with the public, recruited historians and genealogists around the UK into the Local Population Studies Society. This volunteer army transcribed hundreds of thousands of entries from the parish registers, enthused by Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965) and Wrigley’s highly accessible Population and History (1969).

With funding from the Social Science Research Council, they then set about recruiting programming, statistical and database experts. Two mammoth books, principally produced by Wrigley and Roger Schofield, with Jim Oeppen and Ros Davies, have changed our understanding of economic growth in Britain before and during the industrial revolution: The Population History of England 1541-1871 (1981) and English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837 (1997).

The key new finding was that early and more widespread marriage – and as a result higher fertility – was by far the most important driver of population growth, especially in the century of industrialisation c1730s-1830s, and not, as had previously been supposed, a change in mortality rates. This carried massive implications for understanding the relationship between society and economy, which are still being further researched.

Wrigley was born in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester. His father, Ted, was a Unitarian minister and his mother, Jessie (nee Holloway), had been a schoolteacher until she married. An evacuee to North Wales during the second world war, Tony then attended King’s school, Macclesfield, and gained a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1949. He gained firsts in both the history and geography triposes, followed by a year’s fellowship at Chicago University.

He then learned demography from the doyen of this field, David Glass, of the London School of Economics. In 1958 he was appointed lecturer in the geography department in Cambridge, only relinquishing this teaching post in 1974 when SSRC funding was forthcoming for full-time support for his demographic research programme.

The Cambridge Group proved sustainable and, following the stewardship of Richard Smith, is currently in the hands of a third generation of younger scholars who are continuing to build on Wrigley’s innovative work. It has also functioned for 60 years as an international magnet for scholarly exchange and visits from colleagues in many disciplines.

As well as Wrigley’s central, pioneering achievement in demographic history, there was a five-volume definitive edition of Malthus’s writings, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (1986); a painstaking re-working of the information in the first six censuses, The Early English Censuses (2011); two volumes of stimulating essays published in leading peer-reviewed journals; and the three volumes that commenced with his 1987 Ellen McArthur lectures, published as Continuity, Chance and Change (1988), about the energy transformation that has been at the centre of world economic history for the last three centuries.

Tony’s international distinction brought many honours from across the world; while his warm, friendly and conscientious personality brought the offer of many academic responsibilities, which he willingly shouldered, including professor of population studies at the LSE (1979-88), professor of economic history at Cambridge University (1994-97) and master of Corpus Christi College (1994-2000), president of the British Society for Population Studies (1977-79) and president of the British Academy (1997-2001). He was knighted in 1996.

Throughout this extraordinarily productive career of research and professional service, his family was always central to Wrigley’s life. In 1960 he married Mieke Spelberg, whom he cared for daily throughout the last decade after she was diagnosed with dementia.

He is survived by her and by their four children, Marieke, Ave, Tamsin and Rebecca.

• Edward Anthony Wrigley, economic and demographic historian and geographer, born 17 August 1931; died 24 February 2022