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A pioneering work in comparative history and social science that compares population behavior in response to adversity in Europe and Asia. This highly original book—the first in a series analyzing historical population behavior in Europe and Asia—pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past. Using techniques of event history analysis, the authors examine 100,000 life histories in 100 rural communities in Western Europe and Asia to analyze the demographic response to social and economic pressures. In doing so they challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view of population processes and demonstrate that population behavior has not been as uniform as pr...
This open access interdisciplinary book integrates the major findings and theoretical advances of a 12-year research program run by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES research program hosted by the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, within a single comprehensive and coherent publication on vulnerability across adulthood. The book is based on the idea that vulnerability is an essential component of the life course that can inform how we use our resources, reserves and cope with stressors across the life course. It provides a unique interdisciplinary research framework based on the idea that vulnerability is a complex and dynamic process that can only be approached through a multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional perspective. This is an invaluable new resource for students and researchers in life course studies, and those from other disciplines willing to include life course factors in their research on vulnerability issues.
A study of marriage in preindustrial Europe and Asia that goes beyond the Malthusian East–West dichotomy to find variation within regions and commonality across regions. Since Malthus, an East–West dichotomy has been used to characterize marriage behavior in Asia and Europe. Marriages in Asia were said to be early and universal, in Europe late and non-universal. In Europe, marriages were supposed to be the result of individual choices but, in Asia, decided by families and communities. This book challenges this binary taxonomy of marriage patterns and family systems. Drawing on richer and more nuanced data, the authors compare the interpretations based on aggregate demographic patterns wi...
Twenty-three major databases containing historical longitudinal population data are presented and discussed in this volume, focusing on their aims, content, design, and structure. Some of these databases are based on pure longitudinal sources, such as population registers that continuously observe and record demographic events, including migration and family and household composition. Other databases are family reconstitutions, based on birth, marriage and death records. The third and last category consists of semi-longitudinal databases, that combine, for instance, civil records and censuses and/ or tax registers. The volume traces the origins of historical longitudinal databases from the 1...
Unlike previous studies, in which Asia is measured by European standards, Prudence and Pressure develops a Eurasian perspective.
The first demographic transition changed the face of the western world as thoroughly as did the Industrial Revolution. As couples began to have fewer children, women were released from the heavy burden of endless pregnancies and extended periods of child care. Even though this profound process of change has been extensively researched, women were rarely pictured as decision-makers concerning fertility and family. Moreover, men and women were mostly not perceived as having potentially differing interests in sexuality and child-bearing. This volume contains papers delivered at the conference Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? which was held at the Radboud University Nijmegen, 20-21 May 2005. The contributions throw light on the active role women played in the fertility decline as well as on the complex process of decision-making between husbands and wives.
The trajectories of pollution in global capitalism, from the toxic waste of early tanneries to the poisonous effects of pesticides in the twentieth century. Through the centuries, the march of economic progress has been accompanied by the spread of industrial pollution. As our capacities for production and our aptitude for consumption have increased, so have their byproducts--chemical contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, diesel emissions, oil spills, a vast "plastic continent" found floating in the ocean. The Contamination of the Earth offers a social and political history of industrial pollution, mapping its trajectories over three centuries, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century.
This volume documents the life uncertainties revealed by migrants’ biographies. For international migrants, life journeys are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational trajectories are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled. The authors discuss the challenges faced by migrants and returnees when trying to make sense of their life courses after years of experience in other countries with different age norms and cultural values. The book also examines the ways to reconcile competing cultural expectations of both origin and destination societies regarding the timing of transitions between roles to provide a meaningful account of their life courses. Migration is, itself, a major life event, with profound implications for the pursuit of migrants’ life goals, organization of family life, and personal networks, and it can affect, to a considerable degree, their subjective well-being. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Due to high adult mortality and the custom of remarriage, stepfamilies were a common phenomenon in pre-industrial Europe. Focusing on East Central Europe, a neglected area of Western historiography, this book draws essential comparisons in terms of remarriage patterns and stepfamily life between East Central Europe and Northwestern Europe. How did the specific economic, military-political, legal, religious, and cultural profile of the region affect remarriage patterns and stepfamily types? How did the greater propensity of widowed parents to remarry in some of the East Central European communities compared to Western ones shape the children’s lives? And how did the routine divorce before O...
This quantitative study of Piotrków Trybunalski traces the evolution of the population in the typical early modern semi-agrarian town in which the majority of activity was concentrated in the Jewish suburbs into a provincial capital in Congress Poland. Through the use of longitudinal aggregations and family reconstruction it explores fertility, mortality, and marriage patterns from the early nineteenth century, when civil records were introduced, until the Holocaust, revealing key differences as well as striking similarities between local Jews and non-Jews. The example of Piotrków set in a broader European context highlights variations in the pre-transitional demography of Ashkenazi Jewry and lack of universal model describing the “traditional” or “eastern European” Jewish family.