Demographic behaviour of colonial populations

However abundant in the archives of the colonial period, good quality parish registers remain highly under-utilized and underestimated by Brazil historical demographers, except for the last two or three decades of the 19th century. In addition, since they are a long-term register-based data set, parish registers provide an opportunity for using direct demographic analysis methods, including cohort fertility rates, as tools for fertility analysis. The major reason for the scarce use of these valuable sources is attributed to the difficulty of finding ready-to-use historical demographic datasets with information generated from long-term vital events series recorded in the original handwritten parish books.
In order to overcome the main methodological difficulty, this paper aims to presenting an alternative method to develop a demographic data set of censitarian characteristics, based upon colonial parochial registers. The basic analytical unit is a well defined population attached to a territory with well known boundaries: the parish. The method includes the establishment of criteria to identify and attribute age to the Parish residents, overcoming sources limitations and deficiencies.

The immigrant heterogeneous society of northern British Honduras faced health-disease processes depending on their membership of a social group (intimate culture, here). To analyze this, I compare social groups built by intimate cultures (Lomnitz-Adler, 1995), analyzing their causes of deaths between 1885 and 1934 from civil registration District of Corozal and Orange Walk. With this information were made crosstabs and X2 statistics to verify the differences in causes of death among intimate cultures. I expect found differential access to health services and living conditions in this British colony due to differences by class and ethnicity in which residents were involved

Although history shows how colonization has exposed indigenous populations to vulnerability, there is a narrow quantitative knowledge of how they demographically responded to colonization. Swedish parish registers are unique in providing longitudinal demographic data on the indigenous populations in past northernmost Sweden: the Sami. The Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, has digitized these registers, which allows this study to conduct event history analyses of the Sami’s colonial experiences during the 19th century. If colonization added to the Sami’s difficulties to maintain their traditional use of land and lifestyle, it would be indicated by (1) untimely death among them; (2) a desire to leave their space as it was increasingly colonized. However, the propensity to depart was significantly higher among the Non-Sami people, primarily settlers, probably because it was a tough task to establish a farm in these remote cold areas. Additionally, ‘lock-in’ mechanisms might have reduced the Sami’s inclination to relocate, if this meant giving up a lifestyle and occupation difficult to perform in other settings. Their survival chances were higher than those of the Non-Sami, especially among women. In all, the findings propose that the Non-Sami individuals suffered from an ‘unhealthy migrant effect’.

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at reviewing the existing qualitative and quantitative data resources eligible to supporting studies of human longevity, in the field of historical demography, of colonial Brazil. It proposes exploring the informative potentialities of the vast nominative colonial records of Minas Gerais. The expected result is a descriptive inventory of the sources suitable for empirical investigation into various aspects of the social life of a highly urbanized context, searching for useful demographic serial data scattered among various types of registers. For some representative towns, the wide institutional spectrum of documentation produced a rich assembly of data, which covers nearly all social aspects of the populations. Contrary to the common sense, detailed information on individuals of the lowest social strata, namely slaves and freedmen, can be recovered from regular nominative listings of such populations.
Second, it intends to present individual cases of good data quality, for all social groups considered, serving as an initial validation of the usefulness of the sources in comparative studies of similarities and differences in the aging processes.