Poster session on Historical demography

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.

The 2011 Census conducted in February 2011 is the 15th census in India started around 1872 during British rule. Census of India has seen a shift in its approach from an instrument of governance to an aid in the development planning despite it continues to be part of the Ministry of Home Affairs unlike British Census controlled by an independent Statistical Authority and US Census working under the Department of Commerce. After independence, new economic questions have been added and older concerns with caste were dropped except the questions on SCs and STs. On the other hand, the rural- urban classification, workforce and migrant and non-migrant composition of population have gone through several definitional changes to capture the emerging realities. Further, since 1991 Census along with population, housing tables were published which provided data on household amenities like electricity, sources of drinking water, toilet facility and household assets like car, television, telephone/mobile phone, refrigerator, motor cycle, bank account etc. This paper discuses the changing nature of the economic and social aspects of population data available from the censuses in India.

Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any global social science. But, precise comparison is virtually impossible without similar methods and similar data. Comparable datasets are scarce in particular for historical periods. This paper introduces and compares four new historical panel datasets from East Asia: the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), the China Multi-Generational Dataset-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC), the Korean Multi-Generational Dataset-Tansong (KMGPD-TS) and Taiwan Colonial Household Register Database . It discusses the key features of these datasets; the historical institutions which produced the original data; the subsequent processes by which the data were reconstructed into individual level panels; the completeness of recording and problems of missing registers; and their potential for important social science research. The paper shows how these data are important to identify and differentiate what are particular and different among these populations and what are general and similar. It also shows how the comparative method applied to these datasets can illuminate the local as well as the global, or at least regional. Such comparison should give us a much more nuanced comparative understanding of East Asian historical sociology and global social science in general.

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.

Paper analyses patterns of male and female fertility over the first (FDT) and second demographic transition (SDT). Main hypothesis claims that both transitions led to unification of male and female fertility with respect to quantum although differences in tempo of reproduction remained unchanged. Hypothesis originates from biological and social perspective on human reproduction which predicts that males should enjoy higher reproductive outcome than females due to multiple and sequential mating and lower costs of reproduction. Thus, quantum of reproduction for males should be higher than for females in high fertility and high mortality settings. Differences in tempo of reproduction (age at parenthood) are attributed to better access to resources among older males which affects female mate choice. The difference in quantum of fertility should disappear as a result of transitions due to decrease in number of children per family, improvement in mortality conditions and contraception. Paper uses data form population which underwent FDT (reconstitution of parish registers from Bejsce in Poland, 1740-1968) and data from registration of births in Poland for period 1985-2011 (SDT). Hypotheses are tested with use of standard period measures: total fertility rate, age specific fertility rates and age at birth of child for all parties.

More than 40 years ago, two major databases based on the digitization and linkage of Quebec parish records were initiated by the PRDH and the BALSAC Project. More recently, Quebec data from the Canadian historical censuses (prior to 1921) have also been digitized and formatted in databases. We now intend to build an infrastructure to compile this historical microdata on the Quebec population with the objective of preserving, highlighting and developing this unique historical and scientific heritage. The creation of this infrastructure will: 1) offer a longer period of observation which will enhance research opportunities; 2) encourage comparative and multisectoral research as well as collaborations both at the national and international levels; 3) facilitate integration of new data and development of new tools for linkage and analyses; 4) promote scientific expertise and training in relevant disciplines. In this poster, we will describe the steps involved in the construction of the infrastructure, the content of the resulting database as well as provide some insights on the challenges and issues involved in this endeavour. Lastly we will give an overview of the research opportunities that will emerge both for the social and the biological sciences.

Differential patterns of transitions between births in a population describe the dynamics of family building and signify varying impacts of social change on population growth. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the changing patterns of reproductive timing of females of Orissa (one of the 29 states of India) in the last over two decades (between 1981-82 and 2005-06). Life table estimates of female’s age at the time of childbirth of specific order in two different time periods (being more than two decades apart) are compared for some subgroups of the study population. The results show that there is a change in the reproductive timing of females with time and the socio-demographic variables works differently with respect to time.

La plupart des méthodes employées en paléodémographie pour estimer la structure par âges d’une population inhumée sont entachées de biais méthodologiques les rendant inutilisables. Récemment Caussinus et Courgeau (2011) ont élaboré une méthode reposant sur une procédure d’inférence bayesienne, censée pouvoir être utilisée avec n’importe quel indicateur biologique, pour estimer avec fiabilité la structure d’une population d’âges inconnus. Nous faisons donc l’essai sur un nouvel indicateur: le cément dentaire. La cémentochronologie est une méthode d’estimation de l’âge individuel reposant sur le décompte des dépôts annuels de cément acellulaire autour des racines dentaires. Cette méthode a été mise au point par les zoologues pour déterminer l’âge d’espèces animales, avec de bons taux de corrélation. Elle est actuellement appliquée à l’homme et les premières études publiées s’accordent à trouver cet indicateur très prometteur. Le travail que nous présentons repose, dans un premier temps, sur la mise au point d’une procédure pour passer d’une lecture directe d’un âge individuel à une estimation de la structure par âge d’un ensemble d’individus. Une fois élaborée la table de contingence nécessaire à l’implémentation de la méthode PIB, nous testerons les résultats sur une ou deux populations d’âges connus, prises hors échantillon

In the present paper authors estimate infant and child mortality rates in Vykhino estate (region of Moscow) during 100 years (1815-1918) on the basis of individual records from the parish registers. Data set includes information on 10100 births and 7750 deaths, among them 5300 deaths of children aged 0-4.
The authors will explore the effect of certain demographic variables, such as parents’ age, birth order and birth intervals, sex, season of birth, household size and structure, on probability to die at age 0 and 1-4. We will also study the seasonality and causes of infant and child deaths.
Our findings show a notable decline in infant and child mortality since the end of the 19th century which might be considered as a sign of incipient demographic transition. Nevertheless, even declined, infant and child mortality rates remain high and the causes of death as well as determinants of infant and child mortality remain “pre-modern”.

The death of a parent is always a traumatic event, with emotional as well as material consequences. In the historical past the death of a parent not only jeopardized the survival of the family as a dynamic unit but it also affected individual members’ health and their future prospects. Infants and children were particularly affected, as they were dependent on parents for their care and provision of all their needs. Mortality risks for orphans were clearly mediated by the coping strategies. However, while remarriage, move within the parish and recruitment of kin help have been studied in, migration from the parish of residence, and its gendered use, have been scarcely considered as potential interference. This paper will study the effects of parental death on children’s life chances and the widowhood strategies during childhood in five parishes in Scania, (Southern Sweden) during the 19th and early 20th. The aim is to analyze the particular impact of parental death on mortality during particular periods of childhood, extending the analysis to the 20th century and including surviving parent’s coping strategies. As the probability of dying and migrating were changing during the period of study, changes over time in the effect of paternal death on both of these outcomes will be additionally considered.