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This paper explores growth patterns for British and Irish adolescents transported to Australia in the 19th century. During incarceration in Australia, the young convicts did not catch up with contemporary standards of potential stature—contrary to what we are led to expect by the existing literature and the high calorie convict diet. Rather, the experience of transportation stunted the adolescent male convicts. Variation between height on arrival and in later life confirms that teen convicts remained shorter than their shipmates transported after reaching maturity. We consider, but reject, age-dependent selection as a potential explanation. We speculate that the origin of this unfortunate experience lies in the low economic value of young and unskilled males. While fewer data are available for female convicts, their colonial experiences appear to have differed, again consistent with their relative economic value in the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1840 and 1853, 4,068 Irish convict women arrived in Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania. The lives of these convicts were governed by the penal system. Convicts were kept under constant observation. While still under sentence, convicts had to follow the strict rules of the penal government. A way out of this system was through marriage. Early on, the penal government had emphasized the role of marriage to reform convicts. Although marriage was a key event in the life of convicts, no study has yet to focus on this event. In this paper, marriage patterns of Irish convict women are studied using a mixed methods approach. This study provides a better understanding of how women met their spouses and which women could marry. Three critical aspects of marriage are highlighted. First, being under incarceration or being prohibited by the law reduced access to the marriage market. Second, women who were perceived as more fertile and of a better character had a higher chance of finding a spouse. Third, women with longer sentences or who were pregnant out of wedlock had a higher incentive for marriage than most. Overall, three factors were key to marriage in Tasmania: access, value, and desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of socio-economic fertility differences and its causes during the demographic transition has received a significant amount of attention in historical demography. With few exceptions, however, the previous studies have dealt with Western Europe. This paper increases the geographic range of the literature and investigates the influence of socio-economic status on marital fertility in an urban population of Tartu, a mid-sized university town in Estonia. Unlike previous studies, we perform both a cross-sectional analysis – using census data to analyse net marital fertility – and event history analysis – using linked-records sample to analyse the probability of next birth after the census. We measure socio-economic status based on the husband's occupation, but also include information on the level of her education, employment and migration status. In line with the literature, our results confirm that women belonging to the highest social group to have considerably lower marital fertility in the early phase of transition. However, there is no linear social gradient in fertility in Tartu. Instead, we find women married to professionals and skilled workers to have higher fertility, whereas low fertility is exhibited also by women married to men working in the low-wage service sector. We fail to find any support that the educational level of the woman was differentiating fertility in the late nineteenth century Tartu. We relate these patterns in fertility to both adjustment to structural forces as well as innovation and diffusion of new demographic behaviour experienced by the local urban population during the fertility transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article further develops the term 'high infant mortality trap' as an expression of the concept supposing a mutual relationship between short average birth intervals (corresponding usually to high fertility) and high level of infant mortality. This mutual relationship is among other a consequence of the effect of the same or similar factors standing behind both processes (fertility, infant mortality). In the paper, this relationship is evaluated through the effect of the selected explanatory variables on the probability of infant death (using the Binomial logistic regression) as well as length of birth-birth intervals or time duration from the infant death to the successive birth (using the Cox regression). In the analytical part, the concept is evaluated using data from two localities in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic). The localities differ according the socio-economic as well as ethnic characteristics, what might have affected also the demographic behaviour. The area of the Central Europe has not been fully described in the historical demographic works yet, so this study brings the possibility of comparison of this area with other areas already studied. Particular parts of the analysis prove the assumption of the existence of the high infant mortality trap before the onset of demographic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partners choose each other on the basis of many characteristics. Social status is one of them. A person's social status can be ascribed, e.g. derived from the position of her or his parents, or achieved, e.g. derived from her or his own occupation. According to the status-attainment hypothesis, during the nineteenth century achieved status increased in importance and ascribed status decreased, especially in regions that experienced more modernization. In contrast, the romantic-love hypothesis predicts that modernization caused a decrease in the importance of both ascribed and achieved status. This paper tests these claims. We use data on all the marriages that took place in all the municipalities in six (of eleven) Dutch provinces between 1813 and 1922. These couple-level data are supplemented with municipal-level data on several dimensions of modernization. We find that men's occupational status did indeed become more important and the occupational status of their fathers less important in the second half of the nineteenth century, when modernization accelerated. In general, modernization is positively related to partner selection based on achieved characteristics and negatively related to partner selection based on ascribed characteristics. However, especially in larger cities, some support is also found for the romantic-love hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-nineteenth century phthisis, or pulmonary tuberculosis, was the single most important cause of death in England and Wales. It was widely distributed geographically though some areas were worse affected than others. This paper explores aspects of the geography of phthisis mortality in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the sex differential in mortality from this cause. Phthisis is often thought of as a disease of young women, and throughout much of England and Wales, especially in agricultural areas, women aged between 15 and 40 years were especially vulnerable. However the sex ratio of deaths from phthisis varied greatly from place to place and, in some places where phthisis was prevalent, men rather than young women were at the greatest risk of death. Phthisis mortality was sufficiently important that the geography of the overall sex differential in mortality was to a considerable extent determined by the geography of the sex differential in phthisis mortality. Where phthisis mortality disadvantaged females, the overall sex differential between male and female mortality was small or even negative; where phthisis mortality disadvantaged males, the overall sex differential was large. The paper then considers explanations of geographical variations in the sex differential in phthisis mortality. It is not clear that these are best explained by a ‘bargaining-nutrition’ account which holds that young women in poor households were especially vulnerable to mortality from phthisis because their weak intra-household bargaining position compromised their nutritional status. Other factors, such as the return migration to their native areas of out-migrants who became sick with the disease, and working conditions, especially for females, may have been more important. The final part of the paper considers the implications of the results for explanations of the decline of phthisis mortality between 1860 and 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this paper is to test the commonly made, but not well evidenced, assertion that the English and Welsh census data relating women's work is largely unreliable. This paper explores the hypothesis that when women were ‘regularly employed’ their occupations were fully enumerated in the 1851 census. There is considerable evidence to suggest that women's part-time, seasonal and casual work was not always recorded in the nineteenth century censuses. Rather than being seen as evidence of inaccuracy, it is argued here that these omissions indicate that householders were following the census instructions. In the years 1851–1881, these instructions requested that only the occupations of women who were ‘regularly employed’ be recorded. Comparing the listings of a mid-nineteenth century trade directory of Hertfordshire with the Census Enumerator's Books (CEBs) for the same county, this paper presents the results of new empirical research, and a method which provides a means to test systematically the recording of occupations of women who appear to be ‘regularly employed’. The key finding of this research is that, of the women who could be found in the CEBs, over 95% were recorded with an occupational descriptor. This suggests that the apparent unreliability of the census enumeration of women's work in the census of England and Wales may have been overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the significance of parental loss for a sample of young convicts (aged under 25 years) transported from English and Irish ports to Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century. These convicts experienced much higher levels of orphanhood than the general populations from which they were drawn, and women convicts were more likely than their male counterparts to have been orphaned, or to have lost at least one parent. The conclusion is that loss of family and household made orphans, and particularly girls, more vulnerable to crime as a survival strategy. We also find that the likelihood of parental loss varied by place of birth (male and female convicts), type of crime, occupation, and migration status (men only). Parental loss now emerges as a significant and differentiating characteristic for young convicts to be considered alongside neighbourhood and cultural effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a controversy that erupted in the 1860s over attempts by European settlers in the colony of Natal to regulate African marriages. In 1869 the Natal government promulgated a law enabling the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to regulate African marital customs. The regulations proclaimed under Law 1 of 1869 imposed a tax on every marriage contracted by Africans, restricted the practice of lobola (bridewealth) and required that brides publicly express their assent before an official witness for marriages to be valid. The implementation of these measures unleashed a storm of protest that eventually forced the government to abandon the marriage tax in 1875. Intriguingly, however, while there was African resistance to the law, it was principally the outrage of the colony's European settlers and missionaries that forced the government's hand. This paper explores the creation and implementation of Law 1 of 1869, the subsequent controversy and the abandonment of the marriage tax. In doing so it argues that in the 1860s and 1870s few white Natalians embraced the idea of innate differences between races, and instead employed environmentalist discourses of 'civilisation' and 'savagery' to explain distinctions between themselves and Africans. These discourses were gendered, for domestic family arrangements in African and European societies were used as the benchmark against which the relative levels of 'civilisation' of whites and Africans were measured. This attempt to regulate African family life and the controversy it provoked therefore highlights the extent to which British views of marriage and proper gender roles influenced the practice of colonialism in nineteenth century southern Africa. ☆ Note on Terminology: Histories of racism in colonial southern Africa inevitably require the repetition of pejorative terms. This paper confines offensive terms to direct quotes. The exception to this rule is the use of words such as 'civilised', 'uncivilised', 'savage' and 'barbarous'. Notions of 'civilisation' and 'savagery' were central to nineteenth century conceptions of racial difference, and so if quotation marks were employed every time these words were used the text would have become needlessly cluttered. Throughout this paper the term 'polygamy' is used to describe the marriages contracted by most Africans in nineteenth century Natal. Strictly speaking, the form of polygamy practised in Natal was polygyny. However, as all contemporary sources refer to polygamy, this term is used for the sake of consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on mortality in a cohort of 7084 English, Irish and Scottish-born convict men who were transported on 30 ships to Tasmania between 1840 and 1852. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study of convict mortality that systematically traces the mortality of convicts after emancipation as well as under sentence. This pilot study investigates the relationship between pre-transportation characteristics, convict discipline, reactions to convict discipline, and mortality under and after sentence of the male convict population. The convict men were various in their origins but shared the experience of penal servitude under the gaze of a paper panopticon. Controlling for other factors, the authors find that the convicts were more likely to die under sentence if they were born in Scotland, London or an industrial-urban area; if they exhibited disturbed mental behaviour under sentence, such as tearing their clothes; or if they had more time in solitary confinement or more accumulated insults of their mind and body. For those who survived sentence, mortality was higher for those born in an industrial-urban area, those who had more alcohol-related offences under sentence, those with more time in solitary confinement under sentence, and those who were violent or threatened violence while under sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses a mixed method approach to analyse whether urban domestic service functioned as a diffusion channel in the fertility decline. The central hypothesis is that nineteenth century female, rural-born domestic servants were influenced by the reproductive habits of their middle and upper-class employers, who were vanguards in the adoption of family size limitation within marriage. This happened via a process of social learning, a mechanism of social influence in heterogeneous social networks. Female domestic servants are an excellent research population to study reproductive ideas and behaviour because they were large in number and had a particular social position in between the working and upper classes and in between rural and urban environments. This paper is unique in its use of qualitative information to analyse social fertility diffusion and in the incorporation of geographical mobility in the statistical part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact of individuals' socialization in a given demographic context on their later reproductive behavior in 19th century Geneva. To assess this socialization effect on the fertility of first generation immigrants, I combine family reconstitution data with Coale's aggregate indexes of marital fertility. I then run two-level Poisson regression models predicting age-specific fertility rates as a function of individual characteristics at the lower level and as a function of province-level fertility at the higher level. The results show a strong socialization effect among couples who were already married when arriving in Geneva, whereas among immigrants who arrived as singles and who got married in Geneva the impact of demographic socialization turns out much weaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tries to examine the intensity and possible influencing factors of remarriages in two distant communities of historic Hungary during the 19th century. It uses longitudinal data gained from parish registers and family reconstitution method and event history models for the analysis of remarriage. Having only incomplete information on the social status of widowed persons, we used sex, age at widowhood, period, duration of widowhood and family composition as independent variables in the models. The analysis could prove that there were considerable differences within the ‘Eastern marriage pattern’: the analysed Transylvanian community showed a higher propensity to remarry than the West Hungarian one. This result fits well into the differing demographic patterns of the two communities. The most probable causes of these differences were better mortality and differing social composition in the Hungarian village. High propensity to remarry and the high proportion of widower/widow marriages stress the unique character of the Transylvanian community. Otherwise the role of sex was decisive in remarriage, that of age and duration of widowhood were also considerable, while period effect could not be observed. The presence of working-age sons decreased the relative risk of remarriage significantly. In this respect there were no considerable differences between the studied communities, and the results are similar to those of other research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the structure and significance of godparentage in the process of social transition among the Finnish new bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Godparenthood is analyzed from the unexplored viewpoint of social upward mobility. Godparent relations are studied in two wealthy business families, the Parviainens and the Ahlströms, who both ascended from a farmer background to the economic elite within one generation during the latter part of nineteenth century. Characteristic of godparenthood interactions was the significant role of kinship, geographical vicinity and heightened consciousness of status and social class. Godparenthood was in many cases the first formal contact between families and an essential expedient to accelerate one's upward social mobility. This familial formalization could be strengthened and maintained by marriages, which is a finding substantiated by numerous pre-marital godparent links between families. Downward social mobility became an intra-familial barrier. Reciprocity in godparenthood relations between a newcomer family and an established upper class family was achieved only when the socio-economic status of the former equalled that of the latter. Various godparenthood patterns and phases could be distinguished particularly during periods of change in economic and social status. While the patterns differed by generation, in the socially turbulent second generation business acquaintances and others of the same profession were favoured over relatives. However, inter-familial variations in strategies increased due to social mobility and migration. The baptismal witness strategies of the rising Finnish business elite mainly adhered to the horizontal, trust-centred and kin-dominated godparental model of entrepreneurs presented by historians Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon. The overall picture is diversified by the disparity of the socially mobile generation, in which socially vertical relations dominated instead of the horizontal ones prevalent in the first phase of godparent acquisition. In the light of the Finnish case, godparenthood can be characterized more as a means to create and strengthen business relations than as a way to protect them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The paper offers a new explanation for ‘the great conundrum’, the acceleration of population growth in England in the second half of the 18th century. It is argued that it was not only population growth that was ‘different’ in England, but the stagnation of the rise of literacy and of human capital in general, seems to be an anomaly of this period. This ‘conundrum’ has been explained in the following way. It is demonstrated that in England the gender wage gap increased a lot during the early modern period, which was caused by: (a) the switch from post Black Death labour scarcity to labour surplus, which in particular harmed the economic position of women, and (b) changes in the structure of agriculture, leading to the rise of large-scale, capital intensive and labour extensive farms, which had a very limited demand for female (wage) labour. This is also suggested by the fact that on the Continent (in the Netherlands) a much smaller decline of female wages occurred, because there family farms continued to be quite important. Moreover, the decline of English wages had important effects on its demographic development. It helps to explain the decline of the average age of marriage of in particular women between 1600 and 1800, and the related increase in fertility that occurred in this period — resulting in a much faster rate of population growth after 1750 than elsewhere in Western-Europe. It also helps to explain the stagnation in human capital formation that occurred during the 18th and early 19th century — again a feature peculiar for the English development in these years. The explanation of ‘the great conundrum’ is therefore intimately linked to the changing position of women on the labour market and within marriage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The making of the modern Ottoman state in the 19th century was closely interrelated with population issues and policies. ‘Population’ became an important component of Ottoman history throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. As the state identified the ‘population’ as a source of income after the Tanzimat, it tried to protect and procreate it through certain institutional arrangements and regulations. These policies consisted of protecting the existing population, controlling population movements, promoting procreation, and giving subsidies and lending money at interest to peasant families. The procreation policies included enforcement of marriages and encouragement of reproduction within marriages while they discouraged traditional birth control methods and practices. As in any other context, Ottoman families resisted the policies of procreation and pressures coming from the central government. This paper will examine the state''s policies toward families and individuals as well as the responses of the people to these policies. I will attempt to construct a model based on the protection and the procreation policies of the modern Ottoman state, which will be an important springboard toward building a basis for conducting comparative analysis with other European states. By doing this, I will try to challenge some of the established assumptions on the nature of the ‘modern state’ in the 19th century. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines the extent to which poor relief supported families and households in two contrasting European (and predominantly Roman Catholic) countries, Ireland and Italy, over the long nineteenth century. The main focus of the article is on the poor law in Ireland and the extent to which it provided support to families and households. While nuclear and extended families dominated household structures in late nineteenth-century Ireland (at least in rural areas), we show that by 1900, the majority of persons supported in workhouses were single. However, outdoor relief also formed an important part of the Irish poor law system and data on the household composition of persons supported is not available from official sources. Drawing on a data-matching exercise for one poor law union, this article suggests that the household structure of persons on outdoor relief may have been more complex than the official data would indicate and, in contrast to indoor relief, much more representative of overall household structures. In order to put these findings in context we compare the Irish approach with that adopted in Italy. ☆ This article draws on a paper given at the University of Limerick conference on the history of European families, June 2007. I would like to thank a number of the participants for helpful comments on that earlier version. I would, in particular, like to thank Mr. Ivor Hamrock, Mayo County Library for kindly providing the data on outdoor relief in Ballinrobe; Anna Schüle for giving me a copy of her thesis on outdoor relief (and Inga Brandes for drawing my attention to this work); Dr. Ina Scherder, who provided me with data from her work on Galway; Mr. Roger McDonnell and his dedicated group of volunteers who are responsible for the fact that the Ballinrobe 1901 Census data have (as part of a broader project) been put on-line (see www.leitrim-roscommon.com); and CLASP thanks to whom the Clare 1901 Census manuscripts are available on the internet (http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/genealogy/1901census/1901%5fclare%5fcensus.htm). Finally I must thank Ciara Breathnach for her support during the drafting process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The increasing urbanisation and industrialisation of the late 19th century promoted migration of families and individuals into the growing towns. As a consequence the protective network of kinship and village was lost. In the process the access to household production was also severely decreased. After the death of a husband in a labourer''s household the widow had to face a difficult situation. The aim of this paper is to assess the standard of living of poor widows in the Nordic countries. To estimate the proportion of intrafamilial contributions, the role of the wider kinship group and to calculate level of support from poor relief authorities and other possible sources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]