Demographic behaviour of colonial populations

The plantation systems established during colonial times relied on the ongoing supply of free or low cost labour which was provided through the large movements of people from all corners of the world. African enslaved people first and later indentured labourers from India, China and Indonesia were brought to the Caribbean to undertake specific economic functions. As labour needs changed in the region, such as with the construction of the Panama Canal, workers migrated to take advantage of work opportunities outside of the plantation system. Independence marked a shift in migration prospects. If on one hand people’s ability to migrate was constrained as restrictions to movement were introduced, on the other hand the desire and need to migrate may have increased as new independent states were formed. The aim of this paper is to investigate how migration patterns and migration motives changed before and after independence. More specifically, I will investigate how independence may have affected migration opportunities for different segments of the population in Guyana and Suriname, where highly diverse populations may have had held different expectations of their role in the new independent state and pursued diverse migration strategies.

The work seeks to understand the demographic regimes that characterize the Brazilian past. Within this concern, it considers the population of the municipality of Franca (São Paulo, Brazil) in the 19th century, seeking to reconstruct demographic indicators and their relations with regional and national socioeconomic context, comparing them with those found for other towns and regions of Portuguese America. For both, series will be raised from existing parish registers for the period 1806 to 1888. The analysis of such registers will allow a better comprehension of migration dynamics that compound Brazilian demographic regimes, as well as other variables of population dynamics (marriage, birth and mortality).

Frontier colonization and European settlement have been landmarks in nineteenth century demographic and economic history of Latin America. This was particularly true in the Argentine pampas and in the south of Brazil. These areas, traditionally specialized in large-scale livestock production, were deeply transformed by this way to modernization. Demographic and productive changes were, in the long-run, astronomical in both cases. This paper tries to analyze the impact of these new settlements on native societies in those countries. As usually the “immigrant” farmer population hoarded up the academic attention, Creole peasants have been neglected as a part of these transformations. This paper will unravel the complex relationships between them. We use two case studies of particular importance, since they were the biggest and earliest colonization experiments. The aim is to compare productive and demographic changes in a time frame that spans between the decades of 1860 and 1870. We pretend to identify the main features and changes that these settlements boosted, using census sources, tax records and probate inventories.

The continuous departure of emigrants (mostly young males) observed in Portugal over the nineteenth century directly affected nuptiality patterns, and so fertility behaviours. The Portuguese historiography has already shown a clear connection between migration, high ages at first marriage and inheritance patterns in rural areas. However, Portugal was not only constituted by rural communities, medium and large towns and cities had different population behaviour. In an attempt to fill this gap in the historiography, this paper will present the case of Vila do Conde, a medium-size urban town placed in northwestern Portugal, area from where most of the emigrants were originally from. It will show that in the case of the urban setting of Vila do Conde, the significant absence of young males had a different impact on marriage patterns. Aiming to contribute to a better understanding of fertility patterns in nineteenth-century Portugal, this paper will present an analysis of fertility levels in relation to specific cohorts and times, in order to understand its variations over time. In addition, investigation on illegitimacy patterns will also take place being the first step towards identifying fertility patterns and their impact upon the dynamics of Portuguese population over the nineteenth century.

Around 12,000 of the 73,000 convicts transported to Tasmania, 1803-1853, were women. This paper reports on a study of a sample of 2,500 of these convicts. We investigate the backgrounds of these women before conviction, and trace them from transportation through to death. We find that many of the women, particularly the Irish, were without family or household and committed crimes of poverty in order to survive. We contrast the life courses and demographic characteristics—including mortality and fertility—of the transported women under and after sentence with those of women who remained in their place of origin. We find that many vulnerable women were wrecked by the convict system, debilitated by alcoholism and unable to successfully negotiate life in the colonies.

In this paper we present preliminary results on the study of population structures in the former Portuguese colonies of Brazil, Mozambique and Portuguese India circa 1800. Here, we look at socio-occupational, religious, and ethnic composition, working population, and age groups in the different territories. Our final aim is to compare results and highlight main differences between these colonial spaces.
This study is integrated in the project Counting Colonial Populations: Demography and the use of statistics in the Portuguese Empire, 1776-1875. This project aims to identify and reconstruct the principal indicators of the demographic colonial populations; to distinguish and explain the existing demographic regimes; to rebuild the bureaucratic network used in the production and collection of statistical information; to identify the evolution of population categories; and to assess how these statistics responded to the needs of the colonial administration at military, fiscal and territorial occupation levels. To achieve these goals the team is collecting, processing, and analyzing population maps ordered by the Portuguese Crown, and generating reliable indicators and demographic series for each territory: Brazil, Madeira, Azores, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé, Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese India, Macao and Timor.

There is a shortage of research into the institutions governing fertility in pre-transitional settings, particularly in Third World populations during the colonial era. The common view that everywhere fertility was high before demographic transition is largely without empirical support. This paper focuses on the pre-transition Kingdom of Siam which though independent was surrounded by colonies and imbedded in an era of global influences. This paper aims to understand the demographic system regulating population change in the pre-transitional (largely 19th century) Kingdom of Siam, and then extend the analysis in the twentieth century and precipitous fertility decline. The authors combine extensive archival research with modeling of the 19th century demography using an inverse projection algorithm (POPULATE) and demographic assumptions inferred from a close reading of the historical record. Two scenarios are presented, one constructed around the classic demographic transition assumptions, including high fertility, and the other around sharply different assumptions (including a moderate level of fertility) better incorporating the institutions and global/colonial influences prevailing at the time. Prominent in this narrative are corvee and warfare-based labor policies before about 1850, and then opening to commercial export agric

The proposed conference paper will produce a new set of general fertility estimations for the Québec population, drawing upon the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (RPQA). While the fertility behaviour of the pioneering generations is already known, the proposed paper will push our knowledge further forward in time, comparing fertility patterns under the two political regimes and across regions and parishes, and incorporating a host of new perspectives and methods. In particular, we will draw upon life course theory and biographical analytic methods to situate individual fertility patterns within the context of inter-generational and intra-generational patterns. Our study will focus on 25,115 women born in Québec during a later period, up to 1750, whose death date is known. This choice will allow us to compare the reproductive histories of women both before and after the change in political regime from French to English. A preliminary profile of these women indicates a population which was largely rural, whose first and last births occurred on average at ages 23.5 and 37.65. These women gave birth to an average 6.8 children, of whom an average of 5 survived to at least age 12.

This research aims to study the behavior of mortality in Montevideo and its countryside, from the colonial period through the first decades of Uruguay as an independent country. First, we analyze extraordinary mortality, trying to identify years of mortality crises and what was said about their nature. Second, ordinary mortality is studied, ie, its level and characteristics in normal times, with emphasis in the composition of causes of death, for those years iwith available data.
Demographic information of Montevideo and its countryside was developed from 10 parish registers.
The outcomes achieved are result of the application of different demographic methodologies, ranging from population projections (inverse projection) and estimated mortality level indicators, to the use of specific methods to identify years of mortality crisis (Dupâquier as well as Del Panta-Livi Bacci methodologies).
Furthermore, an epidemiological analysis is made, standarizing the different lists of causes of death to a classification that would allow its interpretation in the context of the epidemiological transition.
The results found in this study agree, broadly, with what at first suspected. Throughout the entire period we find a high level of mortality, with characteristical pretransitional mortality fluctuations.

The aim of this paper is to explore transitions into marriage in the context of family during the 17th and 18th century in Québec. More precisely, we are interested in the occurrence of exchange marriages between sibsets. These marriages occur when two siblings from one family marry two siblings from another family. When two brothers marry two sisters, a parallel exchange marriage takes place, and when a brother and sister marry a brother and sister, a crossed exchange marriage occurs. Most research addressing this subject are qualitative and/or restricted to a community. For our study, we will explore this phenomenon at the national level of Québec, taking advantage of a quantitative life course approach. Which factors influence the hazard of being involved in an parallel or crossed exchange marriage? Are they individual characteristics, family dynamics and composition, or contextual factors? To explore these questions, we draw upon the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (RPQA). This longitudinal database is based on parish registers linked with the family reconstitution methods, providing the opportunity to trace the life course paths of thousands of individuals. To describe the importance and the distribution of marriage exchange, constant and time-varying covariates are constructed, such as sibset size.