EurAsian history of population and family

Using Canadian data, we explore how exposure to influenza very early in life during the pandemic of 1890 may have influenced mortality risk in the subsequent pandemic of 1918, twenty eight years later. As mortality in 1918 peaked at age 28 in Toronto and in other Canadian cities, we posit that infection with influenza in critical periods of development can result in physiological or immunological impairments that increase risk of death from influenza later in life. The peak at age 28 was most evident in large Canadian cities, while the pattern was still present in a less extreme form in rural areas. The 1918 influenza pandemic occurred during the health transition and, through enduring links to the 1890 pandemic, shows that experiences before the transition may have directly influenced the course of the most severe pandemic of this time period. This study provides new empirical insights connecting early physiological insults and immunological experiences to later life mortality.

Regional variation is an integral part of Japanese historical demography. At least three different patterns of population and family are suggested to have coexisted in three geographic boundaries in early modern Japan: northeast, central, and southeast. However, the evidence for the three patterns are either based on macro level studies or on micro level studies of a few villages in each region. This paper challenges this general categorization and tries to examine "northeastern" pattern of marriage and family using household registers 1716-1870 from diverse economic settings: two rice farming villages, one village enriched by cash crop agriculture, and one booming local post town. We apply the event history analysis model proposed by the Eurasia project for examining marriage responses to economic stress and household context. The results of this study should provide more careful examination of the northeastern pattern and marriage in its relation to household socioeconomic status and context at various stages of local economic and population development.

In the past, many people were ‘unfree’ in the sense that their movement was restricted, and out-migration without permission was recorded as an ‘escape’ on the official population registers. Such ‘escape’ behavior strikingly confronted individual departure with dependency of other family members because, being treated as illegal, people who had ‘escaped’ usually would not come back or at least stay out for years. This paper compares such ‘escapes’ and examines the role played by household context in shaping such behavior, taking advantage of large-scale individual panel datasets of three adjacent ‘unfree’ populations from northeast China, southeast Korea and northeast Japan in 18th and 19th century. We not only find similar temporal, spatial, and age patterns of ‘escape’, but also find similar patterns of associations between individual ‘escape’ behavior and certain aspects of household context. In particular, dependency of child and the elderly makes individual more likely to stay than to escape. This is especially true for females and even holds when kin ties are absent. Despite significant differences in political regimes, populations, communities, and social identities of these three East Asian populations, such empirical findings depict a certain universality of human behavior that is bounded to serve certain others.

This paper aims to compare the evolution of demographic indicators of 196 countries in the context of epidemiological and demographic transition in the world between 1960 and 2010. In this paper we consider to analyze some characteristics: fertility, migration, mortality and epidemiological transition. Such analyses were done using the data published by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations.

The methodology consists in a factorial analysis of the indicators provided by DESA-UN. We standardized the entire period data such that the 1980s has become the reference decade. With the standardize indicators we constructed a factorial analysis aiming reduce it into two dimensions. We applied the factor loading of the 1980s to all years analyzed comparing the evolutions of continents and its countries.

The conclusions strengthen the remarks pointed in Kirk (1996) and Bongaarts (2002) with regard to the rapid transition occurred during the lasts decades, mostly in the underdeveloped countries. As we show it is possible to conclude that epidemiological and demographical transitions have been finished or are near to finish in South America and Asia. In Africa’s countries the situation is different, only 25% (14 countries) are in the same situation of the Asia and South America countries.

The paper presents results from studies on marriage in local Eurasian populations that qualify and in some cases contradict the picture of the Malthusian East-West dichotomy. The design builds on the comparison of the outcome and determinants of marriage in seven local populations in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, using longitudinal individual-level data and event history analysis. When studying the mechanisms of marriage at the individual and household levels, we find the expected difference between Europe and Asia in the general pattern, but also variation within regions and much similarity in human behavior. We found a strong positive association between socioeconomic status and timing of marriage in all male populations regardless of the dominant household formation system, and for women in populations with nuclear households and inheriting women in Japan. Another important finding is that differences were much smaller than expected between the Asian and European populations in relation to gendered and parental authority and individualism. The gender difference in the timing of first marriage was quite similar in the European and Asian populations. We also found several indications of parental control or influence in relation to the marriage process in the European populations.

This paper intends to shed light on the underestimated impact of population concerns on the ways in which historians and social scientits grasped the contours of modern Turkish historiography. The rapid social and political change during the time of Turkey’s foundational era in the 1920s, population concerns stood at the forefront of the new regime. The “disappearence” of the non-Muslim populations and a huge loss of Muslim populations during the troubled times of the Balkan Wars, World War I and the War of Indepence made it all the more necessity for the Turkish Republic to tackle the question of population in a serious way. Indeed, after such a demographic earthquake, the elites the new regime started a campaign of “more population” and devised spectacular ways to increase the population of the country. Birth control and abortion were outlawed together with incentives to those who had six or more children such as exemptions from the infamous Road Tax. In fact, many of the current issues such as nationalist discourse, strong state and many more can never be fully comprehended without taking into account the urgent necessity to populate the country. At the time, “quantity” rather than “quality” of the population mattered and many of the state social policies were based on this necessity. That most historians explain such polici

The last two centuries have been marked by extremely large increases in life expectancy and reductions in variability of age at death. In this paper, we analyze how the `mortality revolution' has altered individuals' lived experience of death during life. Drawing upon nearly 360 years of historical and projected age-specific demographic rates for Sweden, we use formal demographic analysis and microsimulation to measure the extent and timing of child loss across the demographic transition as well as the average age at first experience of death of a maternal kin member and the type of kin death experienced. Our results indicate a considerable reduction in child loss across cohorts and a concentration of child loss in old age, an increase in the average age individuals experience their first maternal kin death, and a shift in first death experience from that of a sister, mother, or aunt to that of a grandmother. The transformation of the lived experience of kin death that we document has had profound implications for the health and well-being of individuals, the timing of major life course events, and the inequality of access to kinship resources.

Historians of the late Roman Republic (3rd -1st c. BCE) debate intensely over the nature of demographic developments during this period. Two opposing stances with widely divergent historical implications are being defended. One camp, the ‘low counters’ holds that Roman Italy paid a heavy toll for its military and political expansion into an Empire and experienced continued population decline. The other, the ‘high counters’ by contrast hold that population grew pronouncedly. Both base their arguments on census totals and archaeological traces of habitation that leave room for widely divergent interpretations. At the same time, available evidence on a number of demographic parameters – life expectancy, marriage ages and excess mortality rates – is not integrated into this debate. In this paper, we employ a micro-simulation model, SOCSIM, to integrate both sets of evidence. By doing so, we make explicit which assumptions underlie the opposing viewpoints on population dynamics in Roman Italy. This allows us to evaluate the respective plausibility of each of these scenarios, as it will become evident how well these required assumptions match the range of historically attested demographic parameters for the Roman world. Sophisticated demographic techniques can thus provide significant advances in a fundamental historical debate.

How the survival of children may affect the fertility behaviour of their mother? More directly could the lost of a child increase the fertility of his/her mother. This question is important in the study of the impact of the reduction of infant mortality for the fertility transition. Sardinian population that experienced late fertility transition and high level of marital fertility until the 1950’s has been reported as an appropriate case to address this question. We select the village of Villagrande located at 700 meters above sea level in the province of Ogliastra with 3,441 inhabitants still involved in agro-pastoral activities and living and traditional life style still prevalent. Based on church and civil records we reconstruct 702 completed families with parents married between 1851 and 1955. Even if we observe that mothers losing one child have a lower over risk to have a new child during the transitional period compared to the period of natural fertility regime, the decrease of fertility is lower that what could be expected from the decrease in infant mortality. In fact the fertility level for mother without lost child increased in the first phase of the transition between 1931 and 1950 and started to decrease thereafter only.

In the last few decades, there has been particular interest in describing demographic patterns in the 19th century in Portugal. Parish-level research has made it possible to observe marriage, fertility, mortality and migration patterns all over the country. However, no attempt was made to synthesise the findings in order to reach a broader understanding of the Portuguese population dynamic over the period. Different parts of Portugal presented their particularities, which were mainly a consequence of regional socio-economic specificities associated with a larger context of demographic patterns (such as international migration streams). In order to fill this lack in the literature, this paper will present a review of the research findings at local and regional levels. It will also analyse data from the census of 1845, 1864, 1878, 1890 and 1900. The idea is to make a comparative analysis of what has already been studied and what the census presents, so regional and national patterns will be identified. In this way, findings of parish level will provide a way to better understand the country as a whole. As a result, it will be possible to observe the influence of socio-economic characteristics, urbanization and migration networks on population behaviour in nineteenth-century Portugal.