EurAsian history of population and family

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.

In the recent literature on young age mortality, quite some attention has been devoted to the spread of deaths between families. Most infant deaths seem to cluster in a rather limited number of families, an observation which has been named ‘death clustering’. Studying infant mortality from a family perspective relocalizes the focus of explanations from individual characteristics to family traits. Family-level explanations might not only enhance our knowledge of causes of infant mortality, it will also improve our understanding of mortality differentials.
This paper aims at studying death clustering over time. The data stems from a historical, 19th century population where mortality levels are still at a constant high, but the early stages of the fertility transition have already been set off. The changing population structure in terms of family sizes affects how mortality is spread between families. Infant mortality will be studied from both a familial perspective, and a hierarchical (multilevel) structure where infant death risks are dependent from one another. By using the perspective of death clustering, the focus is shifted towards the family, enhancing an in-depth look to the relationship of infant mortality and the fertility decline.

The current notion that life in ancient Roman cities was distinctly unhealthy is based primarily on theoretical inferences and qualitative descriptions of life in the city of Rome. Quantitative evidence to assess the health experience of urban and rural residents in the ancient Roman Empire has only become available very recently, through the publication of skeletal studies of markers of ill health. This paper will investigate this new material. It draws together evidence from 29 burial sites, mostly from Italy, to investigate differentials in exposure to ill health between urban and rural populations in the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Focus is on two indicators that are widely considered to be good general, non-specific indicators of health: cribra orbitalia and linear enamel hypoplasias. Preliminary investigations that control for several potential biases in the material yield counterintuitive results. Urban communities score better on both health indicators than rural communities do. In discussing why we might observe this anomalous pattern, I consider various context-specific conditions that may have given Roman urban populations health advantages over their rural counterparts. These include the urban system of aqueducts and that of state-subsidized or free food rations for inhabitants of Europe’s first true metropolis.

From September 1870 to May 1871, the siege of Paris, first by the Prussian army then by 'legalist' French troops, resulted in a harsh famine: Parisians were forced to eat rats and even the elephant of the zoo. We study the impact of this shock on both child mortality and the height stature of survivors, with a specific focus on the selection effects linked to mortality as well as to fertility and migration. To this aim, we collect original data on 20 year-old military conscripts born in one of the poorest district of Paris between 1855 and 1875; conscripts born in the poorest district of Lyon, France's second largest city, are used as a comparison group. The analysis of height stature evolution across birth cohorts reveals a rather unusual pattern: a large drop in height of 2 centimeters is observed for cohorts who were 7 to 9 year-old by the time of the siege, whereas lower age children seem unaffected. Using data from the 1866, 1872 and 1876 population censuses, we examine whether selection effects can account for this specific timing, and conclude preliminarily it is not the case. We tentatively argue that early-age children were protected from the famine at the expense of their older brothers or sisters who could not catch up.

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria was known for endowment with oil, its aquatic splendour and wealth creation. The relative advantage of its cities blurred the inherent multidimensional consequences of oil exploration and exploitation on the physical and social environments. With time however, the cumulative negative effects of environmental degradation on the health, wellbeing and socio-economic lives of inhabitants became quite obvious. The people’s agony was exacerbated by government neglect which accounted for the amplification of frustration and aggression among a large majority of the poor in the area. As a result, different categories of the people became activists who were seemingly committed to protests against environmental degradation through petitions, advocacy and peaceful rallies. Over time, these legitimate means evolved into militancy, proliferation of thugs and assassinations. Consequently, Niger Delta communities became synonymous with insecurity, pseudo-governance and youth restiveness. This paper attempts to examine the trends and dimensions of the unholy dynamics that drive demographic transition in the region by highlighting the connections between the dilemma of a failed state, insecurity and underdevelopment with a view to suggesting possible remedies.

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.

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.

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.

Comparing populations in China, Japan, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden using individual level longitudinal data, for which we know population at risk and occupation, we find the mortality response to short-term economic stress is quite similar in size but have different patterns in Asia and Europe. While Europe has a clear socio-economic gradient in the response—the landless proletariat suffers but not the farmers—in Asia almost all households suffer, but not all of their members. In Asia the mortality response followed the golden rule of biology, in that members closely related to the household head are doing well, while more distant household members suffer from increasing mortality in years of high food process. We also find that the response diminished during the latter part of the nineteenth century, both in Asia and Europe, indicating improvements in living standards for the vulnerable groups. The result not only question the classical view on the immense population pressure and poverty in Asia, comparative to Europe, but also cast a new view of the demographic transition theory.