EurAsian history of population and family

The aim of the study is to highlight some key points of Italian fertility decline in the first decades of the twentieth century, by using a micro longitudinal approach. The research is based on new individual-longitudinal data and life-course histories from Granarolo, an Italian municipality bordering the town of Bologna. By using Cox models, hazards of having a child are estimated for married women between 1900 and 1940. Individual fertility propensity by marriage cohort and period is assessed, controlling for differences in socio-demographic characteristics and describing the changing reproductive strategies. Moving from one marriage cohort to the next one, the hazard of having a first child progressively increased. On the contrary, probabilities of giving birth progressively fell when women reached higher parities. Fertility continued to decrease even if the Fascist Regime promoted a pro-births campaign against fertility decline. Clear differences in fertility were also visible between socioeconomic groups: the lower fertility of upper classes is confirmed even in a rural community such as Granarolo, whereas sharecroppers’ families remained tied to their own traditional higher fertility.

It is well-known that in the classical formulation of the demography transition theory migration is essentially seen as a result of the changing balance between births and deaths. In the components of the old East-West debate that are rooted in the Malthusian writings, adjustment behaviours decreasing population pressure on scare resources have been considered, with an emphasis on marriage and infanticide, migration being barely considered. From a heuristic point of view, poor theoretical developments are associated with poor data sources. Indeed, accurate information on mobility and migrants are very rare in historical population. This is one of the wealth of the Eurasian Project for the Comparative History of Population and the Family to be funded on a network of teams who reconstituted population registers data that fill his gap in our knowledge for various rural and pre-transitional settings in Japan, China, Sweden, Belgium and Italy. In this paper, our ambition is to synthesize the many contributions brought by our fellow associates during the last 15 years and to evaluate at which point our findings can be generalized to illuminate the current scientific debates.

This paper summarizes the arguments and major findings from the volume Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700−1900, published in 2010 by MIT Press. The book is a systematic and truly comparative examination of human reproduction and social organization in preindustrial communities from both ends of the Eurasian landmass. In contrast with previous studies of historical fertility that focused primarily on European experiences, the volume seeks to develop an Eurasian perspective.

Using individual-level longitudinal data drawn from household registers in populations from 5 countries/regions in preindustrial Europe and East Asia, and employing techniques of event-history analysis, our study uncovers the dynamic mechanisms of reproductive behavior under changing household and local economic circumstance. Our study finds that reproductive behavior and rationales were remarkably similar, despite many differences between the East and the West. Hence, we refute the previously held characterization that “prudence,” fewer children due to late marriage, was more characteristic of reproduction in the preindustrial West while “pressure,” high mortality (especially infant mortality/infanticide) due to over-population, was more prevalent in the East.

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.

This study examines the demographic responses of men and women in preindustrial rural Japan to economic stress—both acute upheaval caused by large-scale famines and smaller-scale local economic downturns—and to household context, using data drawn from the local household registers of three northeastern villages from 1708–1870. Modeling death and out-migration as competing risks, we compare two villages totally agricultural and one near a growing market town in their responses to acute stress caused by three widespread famines—the Horeki famine in the 1750s, the Tenmei famine in the 1780s, and the Tenpo famine in the 1830s—and to annual local economic fluctuations, simultaneously accounting for the effects of household context including landholding, coresident kin, and relationship to household head.

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 importance of this project and its unpublished archival documents, According to research on the sources of poverty, population issues prior to 1956, may help researchers to document information such as economic issues, demographics and population, the number of livestock and crops, the number of households in urban and rural displacement of ethnic and immigration as one of the most original and authoritative sources and use of statistics. Although in recent years much work has been done to understand the problems of the world population, But for various reasons, including failure of the census and statistics provided are only estimates and speculation, a lot of inconsistencies between the information sought is present investigation.
This study for the first time in the field of historical studies of Iran have been conducted using archival documents. Includes the process of identifying and delivering data over the past 150 years and consists of the Iranian population is a database of historical documents. The present article reviews the stages of the project, the efficiency and experience of using archival documents, historical demographic studies to objectively explain.

The emergence and diffusion of fertility control strategies as part of the demographic transition are usually not occurring randomly in space and time. Next to individual-level characteristics also prevailing socio-economic contextual conditions as well as geographic characteristics such as distance to centers of the decline seem to be relevant. However, most existing studies on the fertility decline focus either on macro-level trends or on micro-level studies with limited geographic scope. With this paper we aim to contribute to close this existing research gap. We use 100% individual-level samples of the Swedish censuses in the years 1880, 1890 and 1900 which include detailed information on socio-economic status. Multi-level models are applied to link these individuals to contextual information on the local parishes they were living in. Our main research question is whether in this initial phase of the fertility decline in Sweden social distance or spatial distance were more relevant as constraints for the diffusion process. Our preliminary results suggest that in this initial phase of the decline social class differences were putting higher constraints on the diffusion of the fertility decline compared to spatial distances. This is in line with theoretical considerations by Szreter (1996) on “communication communities”.

This study follows about 500 disabled individuals over life to examine their survival chances in past society and in comparison to a control cohort of non-disabled people. The aim is to detect whether those with disabilities were markedly stigmatized and thus faced difficulties in life, which we in accordance with the labeling theme of secondary deviance assume would be indicated by high levels of mortality. We make use of Sweden’s 19th-century parish registers (digitized by the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University) to identify people who the ministers defined as disabled and to construct the control cohort. Then we employ bi-variate analyses and run multivariate regression models. The statistical results suggest that disability significantly jeopardized the survival of individuals but was not the only key to their mortality, because gender determined the survival of disabled, too. Disability limited men’s life expectancy more evidently than the women’s. Our findings are rare in providing statistical evidence of disabled individuals’ experiences beyond institutional life and because we seek to measure the level of labeling in their life. The death differentials demonstrate that the disabled constituted a disadvantaged but heterogeneous collection of people whose demography and pathways must be further researched.

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’.