Similarity in Difference : Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 [1 ed.] 9780262325837, 9780262027946

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Similarity in Difference

The MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series Editorial Board: Marco Breschi, Cameron Campbell, Akira Hayami (honorary), Christer Lundh, Michel Oris, and Noriko O. Tsuya Series Editors: James Z. Lee, Tommy Bengtsson, and George Alter Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, James Z. Lee, et al. Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 Noriko O. Tsuya, Wang Feng, George Alter, James Z. Lee, et al. Similarity in Difference: Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 Christer Lundh, Satomi Kurosu, et al.

Similarity in Difference Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900

Christer Lundh, Satomi Kurosu, et al.

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Palatino by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Simillarity in difference: marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 / Christer Lundh, Satomi Kurosu, et al. pages cm. – (The MIT Press Eurasian population and family history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02794-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Marriage–Europe–18th century. 2. Marriage–Europe–19th centgury. 3. Marriage–Asia–18th century. 4. Marriage–Asia– 19th century. HQ611.L86 2014 306.8109409’033–dc23 2014008012 10

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Contents

Tables, Figures, and Maps Contributors xv Series Foreword xvii Acknowledgments xxiii

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I

Introduction

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Challenging the East–West Binary 3 Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu

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Eurasian Marriage: Actors and Structures Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu

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Nuptiality: Local Populations, Sources, and Models Satomi Kurosu and Christer Lundh

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Comparative Demographies

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The Roads to Reproduction: Comparing Life-Course Trajectories in Preindustrial Eurasia 89 Martin Dribe, Matteo Manfredini, and Michel Oris, in collaboration with Satomi Kurosu and Cameron Campbell

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The Influence of Economic Factors on First Marriage in Historical Europe and Asia 121 Tommy Bengtsson, in collaboration with Michel Oris, Matteo Manfredini, Cameron Campbell, and Satomi Kurosu

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Contents

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Remarriage, Gender, and Rural Households: A Comparative Analysis of Widows and Widowers in Europe and Asia 169 Satomi Kurosu, Christer Lundh, and Marco Breschi, in collaboration with Cameron Campbell, Matteo Manfredini, and George Alter

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Local Histories

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Social Norms and Human Agency: Marriage in NineteenthCentury Sweden 211 Martin Dribe and Christer Lundh

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Prudence as Obstinate Resistance to Pressure: Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Rural Eastern Belgium 261 Michel Oris, George Alter, and Paul Servais

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Between Constraints and Coercion: Marriage and Social Reproduction in Northern and Central Italy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 295 Renzo Derosas, Marco Breschi, Alessio Fornasin, Matteo Manfredini, and Cristina Munno

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Economic and Household Factors of First Marriage in Two Northeastern Japanese Villages, 1716–1870 349 Noriko O. Tsuya and Satomi Kurosu

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Categorical Inequality and Gender Difference: Marriage and Remarriage in Northeast China, 1749–1913 393 Shuang Chen, Cameron Campbell, and James Lee

IV

Conclusion

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Similarities and Differences in Pre-modern Eurasian Marriage 439 Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu References 461 Index 499

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Tables Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Table 3.3 Table 3.4

Table 3.5

Table 3.6

Table 3.7

Table 3.8

Table 3.9

Age at first marriage in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) and proportion never-married in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Age at remarriage in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Summary of data used in the comparative analyses of first marriage: never-married individuals in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Summary of data used in the comparative analyses of remarriage: widowed individuals in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Measures of individual, household, and community level characteristics used in the comparative analyses of first marriage and remarriage Three categories of socioeconomic status (SES) used in event-history analysis of marriage and remarriage in seven Eurasian populations Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of sex in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Means of covariates used for event-history analysis of the relative risks of first marriage: effects of household context in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 (men)

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Table 3.10

Table 3.11

Table 3.12

Table 4.1

Table 4.2

Table 4.3

Table 4.4

Table 4.5

Table 4.6

Table 4.7

Table 5.1

Table 5.2

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Means of covariates used for event-history analysis of the relative risks of first marriage: effects of household context in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 (women) Event-history analysis of the relative risks of first marriage: effects of household context in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 (men) Event-history analysis of the relative risks of first marriage: effects of household context in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 (women) Mean ages and standard deviations at different transitions in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Proportions never-married and proportions childless in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Distribution of all possible trajectories from living in the parental home to experiencing a first legitimate birth in five Eurasian study populations, 1716–1899 (%) Mean ages at different transitions by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Proportions never-married and never having had a first birth by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Timing of conceptions and first birth in relation to first marriage for women by socioeconomic status in four European study populations, 1812–1899 Distribution of all possible trajectories from living in the parental home to experiencing a first legitimate birth by socioeconomic status in five Eurasian study populations, 1716–1899 (%) Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of adult mortality and fluctuation in grain prices by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (men)

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Tables, Figures, and Maps

Table 5.3

Table 5.4

Table 5.5

Table 5.6

Table 5.7

Table 5.8

Table 5.9

Table 5.10

Table 6.1

Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4

Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of adult mortality and fluctuation in grain prices by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (women) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of the father by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (men) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of the father by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (women) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of the mother by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (men) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of the mother by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (women) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of having brothers and sisters by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (men) Event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage: effects of having brothers and sisters by socioeconomic status in seven Eurasian populations (women) Effects of having an additional brother on the risk of first marriage: men in Casalguidi and Scania, 1820–1894 Rates of remarriage per 1,000 widowed persons by sex and age in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Type of marriage in four Eurasian study populations, 1716–1899 Remarriage by own and partner ’s age in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Means of the covariates used for event-history analysis of the probability of remarriage in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913

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Table 6.5

Table 6.6

Table 6.7

Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Table 7.3 Table 7.4

Table 7.5

Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 7.8 Table 7.9

Table 7.10

Table 7.11

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Event-history analysis of the relative risk of remarriage: effects of age and duration of widowhood in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 194 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of remarriage: effects of socioeconomic status, prices and time period in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 198 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of remarriage: effects of co-resident parents and children in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 200 Birth places of men and women who entered into marriage in four Scanian parishes, 1750–1894 220 Proportions of never-married individuals at age 45 by sex and socioeconomic status in five Scanian parishes, 1815–1894 222 Mean age at first marriage by sex and socioeconomic status in five Scanian parishes, 1815–1894 223 The proportion of first-born children distributed in relation to the date of the wedding in five Scanian parishes, 1815–1894 231 Age-specific marriage rates (per 1,000 person-years at risk) by sex and period in five Scanian parishes, 1825–1894 233 Different types of marriages in four Scanian parishes, 1766–1894 234 Cox regression estimates (relative risks) of first marriage in five Scanian parishes, 1825–1894 240 Logit estimates (odds ratios) of being never married at 45 in five Scanian parishes, 1825–1894 244 Logit estimates (odds ratios) of heterogamy for individuals marrying in five Scanian parishes, 248 1825–1894 Logit estimates (odds ratios) of hypogamy for marrying individuals of peasant origin in five Scanian parishes, 1825–1894 250 Logit estimates (odds ratios) of hypergamy for marrying individuals of non-peasant origin in five Scanian parishes, 1825–1894 254

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Table 8.1

Table 8.2 Table 8.3

Table 8.4

Table 8.5

Table 8.6

Table 9.1 Table 9.2

Table 9.3

Table 9.4

Table 9.5

Table 9.6

Table 9.7

Total fertility rate and total marital fertility rate above age 20 in Sart, Pays de Herve, and Tilleur, 1812–1899 Means and frequencies of variables used in Sart and Pays de Herve, 1814 Cox regression estimates (relative risks) of marriage and outmigration: unmarried 18 to 44 in Sart and Pays de Herve, 1812–1899 Cox regression estimates (relative risks) of endogamous, exogamous, and indeterminate marriage, and outmigration in Pays de Herve, 1846–1890 Cox regression estimates (relative risks) of endogamous, exogamous, and indeterminate marriage, and outmigration in Sart, 1812–1890 Cox regression estimates (relative risks) of marriage with or without prenuptial conception: unmarried women aged 18 to 44 in Sart and Pays de Herve, 1812–1899 Nuptiality indexes: Italy, 1861–1901 Mean age at first marriage, proportions unmarried, and residence in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 Mean age at first marriage by sex, residential arrangements, and socioeconomic status in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 Means of covariates used in the event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 (men) Means of covariates used in the event-history analysis of the risk of first marriage in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 (women) Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of current grain prices in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of socioeconomic status in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888

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Table 9.8

Table 9.9

Table 9.10

Table 10.1

Table 10.2

Table 10.3

Table 10.4

Table 10.5

Table 10.6

Table 10.7

Table 10.8

Table 10.9

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of parents in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 334 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of the presence and age of siblings in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 338 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: effects of “social capital” in six Italian study populations, 1781–1888 341 Rates of first marriage per 1,000 never-married persons by sex and age in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 365 Means and quartiles of age at first marriage by sex and time period in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 366 Means and quartiles of age at first marriage by sex and type of marriage in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 367 Means of the covariates used for the discrete-time event-history analysis of first marriage in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 369 Estimated effects of log of raw rice prices on the probability of first marriage by sex in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 374 Estimated effects of log of raw rice prices on the probability of first marriage by sex and type of marriage in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 375 Estimated coefficients of the covariates from the discrete-time event-history analysis of the probability of first marriage in next one year for men aged 10 to 49 in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 378 Estimated coefficients of the covariates from the discrete-time event-history analysis of the probability of first marriage in next one year for women aged 5 to 49 in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 380 Estimated coefficients of the covariates from discretetime event-history analysis of the probability of first marriage by type of marriage for men aged 10 to 49 in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 384

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Table 10.10

Table 11.1 Table 11.2

Table 11.3

Table 11.4

Table 11.5

Table 12.1

Table 12.2

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Estimated coefficients of the covariates from discretetime event-history analysis of the probability of first marriage by type of marriage for women aged 5 to 49 in Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 386 Age at first marriage (sui) by sex in Liaoning and Shuangcheng, 1750–1913 417 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: men in Liaoning and Shuangcheng, 1789–1913 418 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of first marriage: women in Liaoning and Shuangcheng, 1789–1913 420 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of remarriage: widowers in Liaoning and Shuangcheng, 1789–1913 426 Event-history analysis of the relative risk of remarriage: widows in Liaoning and Shuangcheng, 1789–1913 428 Direction of effects of covariates on the risk of first marriage: summary of regression results for seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 445 Direction of effects of covariates on the risk of remarriage: summary of regression results for six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 447

Figures Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 5.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 5.3

EAP marriage model—schematic framework Wealth inequality in six Eurasian study populations Proportion never-married by age: women Proportion never-married by age: men Relative risks of first marriage: men by socioeconomic status group in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Relative risks of first marriage: women by socioeconomic status group in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Effects of having an additional brother on the risk of first marriage: men in Casalguidi and Scania, 1820–1894

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Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 Figure 11.3 Figure 11.4

Tables, Figures, and Maps

Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Scania, 1766–1894 Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Sart, 1812–1899 Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Casalguidi, 1819–1859 Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Liaoning, 1789–1840 Life-table analysis (Kaplan–Myer) of remarriage by sex and age: Shuangcheng, 1870–1913 Index of proportion married (Im) in Sart and Pays de Herve, 1812–1900 Mean age at first marriage by sex in Sart and Pays de Herve, 1814–1897 Rice prices in Aizu, 1716–1863 Change in population size: Shimomoriya, 1716–1869, and Niita, 1720–1870 Proportions of females ever married at each age 10 to 40 sui, by region Proportions of males ever married at each age 10 to 40 sui, by region Proportions of females ever married at each age 10 to 40 sui, by population category Proportions of males ever married at each age 10 to 40 sui, by population category

184 184 185 185 186 186 266 267 353 360 414 414 415 416

Maps Map 1.1 Map 7.1 Map 8.1 Map 9.1 Map 10.1 Map 11.1 Map 11.2

EAP study populations Locations of the five studied parishes in Scania, southern Sweden Locations of Sart and Pays de Herve Locations of the six Italian study populations Locations of Shimomoriya and Niita in northeastern Japan Locations covered by the Liaoning Household Register data, 1749–1909 Locations covered by the Shuangcheng Household Register data, 1866–1913

15 213 262 309 359 402 403

Contributors

George Alter Professor of History, University of Michigan, and Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, USA Tommy Bengtsson Professor of Economic History and Demography, and Director of the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, Sweden Marco Breschi

Professor of Demography, University of Sassari, Italy

Cameron Campbell Professor of Social Science and Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR Shuang Chen Assistant Professor of History, University of Iowa, USA Renzo Derosas Associate Professor of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy Martin Dribe Professor, Department of Economic History and Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, Sweden Alessio Fornasin Assistant Professor of Demography, University of Udine, Italy Satomi Kurosu Professor of Sociology and Dean, Graduate School of Language Education, Reitaku University, Japan James Z. Lee Professor of Social Science and Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, SAR, and Faculty Associate, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan, USA Christer Lundh Professor of Economic History, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

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Contributors

Matteo Manfredini Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Parma, Italy Cristina Munno Research Fellow of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy Michel Oris Professor and Codirector of the NCCR LIVES, University of Geneva, Switzerland Paul Servais Professor of History, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium Noriko O. Tsuya Professor, Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Japan

Series Foreword

The study of human behavior at aggregate and individual levels defines the core of all social sciences and some of the humanities. Demography, the mathematical study of human populations, provides a tool kit to do so. Concerned largely with the development and application of quantitative methods for the analysis of data on human populations, demographers make grindstones for many humanistic and social scientific mills. As a discipline, demography has long been concerned largely with understanding and describing the processes and implications of the fertility and mortality transitions that together constitute the demographic transition, and the interrelationship of these processes with resources, be they economic or environmental. Historical demography has been central to these endeavors, but only recently has historical demography begun to change our basic understanding of population behavior. For over two centuries the Malthusian model has dominated our understanding of population processes in the pre-modern world. Malthus distinguished two ideal models of population processes: one dominated largely by mortality, which he called the positive check, and the other by nuptiality and fertility, which he called the preventive check. Where the preventive check prevailed, populations prospered. He associated the preventive check with northwest Europe, especially England, and the positive check with the rest of the world. Western economic prosperity, in other words, is a product of Western individualism and Western rationality. In Malthus’s conception, practice of the preventive check required a uniquely Western ability to calculate consciously the costs and benefits of supporting a family and as a result postpone or forgo marriage. Confirmation that the preventive check played a role in England and began even earlier

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Series Foreword

than Malthus had thought has inspired a major revival of Malthusian theory (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Such scholars as John Hajnal (1965, 1982) and Alan Macfarlane (1978, 1986, 1987) have suggested that the European origins of the fertility transition, the European roots of individualism, and even the European development of nineteenthcentury capitalism are all intertwined and embedded in a European family and demographic culture that encouraged such revolutionary social and economic changes. By identifying and linking demographic systems more explicitly and systematically than Malthus, these and other contemporary social theorists have elevated and amplified the theoretical implications of Malthusian formulations (Goody 1996; Schofield 1989). Recent findings on demographic behavior outside the West have suggested that elsewhere, other forms of preventive checks were equally important. James Lee, Cameron Campbell, and Wang Feng have shown that in China, which accounted for a significant proportion of the non-Western population, the positive check was less important and the preventive check more important than Malthus and his followers had thought (Lee and Campbell 1997; Lee and Wang 1999). Their findings challenge many Malthusian assumptions about comparative socioeconomic as well as demographic processes and have been challenged in turn by neo-Malthusians from both sides of the Pacific (Brenner and Isett 2002; Campbell, Wang, and Lee 2002; Cao and Chen 2002; Huang 2002, 2003; Lavely and Wong 1998; Lee, Campbell, and Wang 2002; Pomeranz 2002, 2003; Wang and Lee 2002; Wolf 2001; Zhao 1997a, b, 2002). New data and new methods, meanwhile, have begun to illuminate the complexities of demographic responses to exogenous stress, economic and otherwise. Whereas Malthus and his successors focused on relationships between economic conditions and demographic behavior at the aggregate level, combined time-series and event-history analyses of longitudinal, nominative, micro-level data now allow for the finely grained differentiation of mortality, fertility, and other demographic responses by social class, household context, and other dimensions at the individual level (Bengtsson 1989, 1993b). Appropriately detailed historical population register data exist for selected communities in at least five countries—Belgium, China, Italy, Japan, and Sweden—and have already been analyzed in a variety of publications (Bengtsson and Saito 2000; Derosas and Oris 2002).

Series Foreword

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The Eurasia Population and Family History Project is a collaborative effort by scholars in a variety of countries and disciplines to use these new data and methods to re-examine the Malthusian paradigm, explicitly contrasting populations at the extreme Eastern and Western ends of the Eurasian land mass. By carrying out nearly identical analyses on similar data from Europe and Asia, we compare patterns of demographic responses to economic conditions in a variety of contexts represented by the specific communities in the study, identifying both unity and diversity. By combining the increased resolution of individual-level event-history analysis with formal Malthusian models of demographic behavior under economic stress, we achieve a deeper understanding of human behavior. In this series on Eurasian Population and Family History, we examine and compare in successive volumes patterns of individual- and family-level variation in mortality, fertility, and nuptiality at the individual level. These books demonstrate that patterns of demographic outcomes are determined by society, not biology. While demographic outcomes at the aggregate level may be subject to the influence of economic conditions, climatic factors, or geography, they are shaped at the level of the community by specific institutional policies and at the level of the household by explicit decisions about the allocation of resources and responsibilities among individuals. Demographic behavior in the past accordingly varied by geographic location, socioeconomic status, household composition, and position within the household (Lee and Campbell 1997), and demographic responses to short-term stress varied as well (Bengtsson 1993a). At both ends of Eurasia individual demographic actions were the products of political and social negotiation. In that sense the Eurasian Population and Family History project advances and reaffirms the importance of social action and human agency. Our efforts suggest that the grand narratives of classic theory overestimate the uniformity of human responses to exogenous forces. Different people, defined by age, gender, geographic location, family organization, local institutions, specific occupation, regional history, wealth, and much else, in fact respond differently to different economic constraints and opportunities. As a result, and as we document repeatedly in all three volumes of the MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series, while differences by age, sex, and socioeconomic states are virtually universal in demographic responses to economic change, the specific patterns of responses differ dramatically across contexts.

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Series Foreword

Our first volume, Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900, attracted the attention of researchers in economics, demography, history, sociology, and other disciplines, and in 2005 was named by the American Sociological Association Asia and Asian American Section as the Outstanding Book on Asia published in 2003 and 2004. Authors in Allen, Bengtsson, and Dribe (2005) compared our measure of the standard of living in the past with various other aggregated measures of well-being. Ronald Lee and Richard Steckel (2006) appraised and explicitly confirmed the findings on the relationship between mortality and prices reported in Life under Pressure, linking them to an earlier literature based on aggregate time-series data for other historical populations. Our second volume, Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900, excited a similarly enthusiastic response and in 2012 was named by the Japanese Population Association as the best publication in population studies published in 2009 and 2010. Jack Goldstone (2011) went so far as to argue that the clear evidence that families controlled their reproduction in response to current and past economic conditions and household circumstances shows that the traditional view of preindustrial households as hapless victims of fate is false. The present volume, Similarity in Difference: Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900, once again shows that household circumstances, economic conditions, and village context played an important role both in Asia and Europe. Again, it demonstrates clearly that pre-modern societies had numerous options to adjust to their circumstances, not only in Europe but also in Asia. Individuals not only postponed or forwent marriage, but families prioritized access to marriage, privileging or discriminating against members according to their location in the family hierarchy. The findings in these three volumes not only have implications for our understanding of the pre-modern world but also for the modernization process itself. The reason is that the theory of the demographic transition, in which modernization leads to a shift from high to low levels of mortality and then fertility, rests upon the assumption that families in the past were passive victims of circumstance, especially after marriage had taken place. Our findings show instead that families in the past also made plans, not only with regard to marriages but also to reproduction and survival, and not only in the Europe but also in Asia.

Series Foreword

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The work in these volumes bridges the apparent contradiction between two classes of social theory: one that emphasizes universalism and similarity—cognitive psychology, economics, and social biology— and one that emphasizes contingency and difference—anthropology, cultural studies, and history. On one hand, we show that social action and human agency are virtually universal when confronted with specific constraints, producing patterns of differential demographic behavior that reflect ageism, sexism, and other forms of favoritism and particularism. On the other hand, we demonstrate that these patterns are products of institutional arrangements, social relationships, and specific preferences that vary by population. As a result, while exogenous forces elicit human responses everywhere, the patterns of response also vary, conditioned by national, regional, and community context as well as by kin, family, and individual circumstances. The most distinctive feature of the MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series, however, is our ability as a collective to transcend national and even continental boundaries to make explicit comparisons of human behavior across diverse contexts. One key to our success was a federated model of collaboration, by which each group operated independently in terms of their funding, data acquisition, data entry, data processing, and data analysis but produced results for each co-authored volume based on a common template we developed over many highly interactive meetings. This distributed, consensus-based approach differs markedly from that of other comparative efforts with centralized leadership and funding. We hope that our approach can be a model for future comparative collaborations, in which teams with common interests come together, develop a common agenda, and execute it. With the public release of the Chinese and Swedish data, the pending dissemination of data by other Eurasia Project teams, and the availability of data from other locations, such comparisons should become even easier. The increasing availability of data should allow for the natural next step in comparison: transition from identical estimations on separate datasets to single estimations on a single, pooled dataset. While pooling data was not practical for the analyses in these three volumes, it should become straightforward in the near future. In this sense we hope that our collaborative efforts presage or, better yet, inspire a new era of historical comparisons, yielding even greater insights into similarity and difference in the human condition.

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of a decade-long collaboration of sixteen scholars from diverse science disciplines who reside in seven different countries. A product of the scholarly collaboration of the Eurasia Population and Family History Project (EAP), which started in 1994, this volume came to fruition as a result of numerous engagements and efforts via conferences, workshops, meetings, and email exchanges. The discussion of marriage as the subject for the third volume of the EAP started as early as November 1998 at the “Conference on Nuptiality and Household Systems in Eurasian Comparative Perspective” at Peking University in Beijing, China. Initial progress was slow because the other two EAP volumes, Life under Pressure (on mortality) and Prudence and Pressure (on reproduction), were still in process. Moreover, even with the accumulated experience of collaborative work of the Eurasian project, the topic of marriage was tough to tackle. We owe thanks to Renzo Derosas and James Z. Lee for initiating conceptualization of the processes and development of templates for comparison of ideal models to understand cultural and institutional arrangements of marriage in each society as well as common variables for multivariate analysis. At an EAP meeting during the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) in Berlin, March 2004, we started to fully commit ourselves to the development of models for descriptive and analytical approaches to marriage. Since then we have met at a variety of conferences to present papers and discuss the progress of chapters. At the Social Science History Association (SSHA) meeting in Chicago in November 2004, we presented the general model as well as the preliminary results at the session on “Marriage: EurAsia Project Redux.” This was followed by a workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where ideas for comparative chapters and the standard model was discussed. At the SSHA meeting in

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Acknowledgments

Portland in November 2005, some of the preliminary papers were presented. We also held an EAP meeting where we discussed the general framework of the book. This outline developed into the basis of the current introductory chapters. At the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam in 2006, we organized a session on “Marriage and Remarriage in Eurasian Perspective,” and presented three comparative papers on marriage. These became the base of the current chapters 3, 4, and 6. We also presented individual papers at the Population Association of America (PAA) meeting in March, 2007. In August 2007 we gathered for an intensive meeting in Mölle, Sweden. We discussed the theoretical framework as well as the detailed analytical models for comparative chapters. This meeting was followed by a workshop during the SSHA meeting in November 2007 in Chicago where progress reports were made. We held another full day meeting in February 2008 during the ESSHC in Lisbon to discuss drafts of introductory and comparative chapters. As the results from comparison emerged, we came to realize that there were as many similarities as differences, and settled on the current title of this volume. At the PAA meeting in April 2008, we presented a comparative paper on remarriage. Later that year, at the meeting of the SSHA in Miami in October, we again had a full day meeting to review most chapters. In 2010, we started to focus on the main messages of the book as well as the links to previous volumes. We met at the ESSHC in April in Ghent, Belgium, and again at the SSHA meeting in November in Chicago. Our collaboration and iteration of chapters continued, and we had an opportunity to present our major findings at the session on Eurasian history of population and family during the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) meeting in Busan in August 2013. Beside these meetings, lead authors of the book met in various parts of the world to discuss face to face—in August 2007 at Lund University, in August 2008 at Max-Planck-Institut für Demografische Forschung, Rostock, in August 2009 in Utrecht during the meeting of the World Economic History Congress, and in February 2010 at Reitaku University. Our collaboration continued via uncountable email exchanges, and allowed us to complete the writing and re-writing of the volume. We want to thank all the authors for giving priority to the book project during its final phase. We especially thank Tommy Bengtsson, James Z. Lee, Noriko O. Tsuya, Cameron Campbell, and Martin Dribe for their support and constructive comments. We also would like to thank Akira

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Hayami who laid the foundation of the Eurasia project, and who supported our collaborative research throughout the project. We are grateful for the encouraging and detailed comments from three anonymous reviewers for the MIT Press who read the entire book manuscript. Their comments helped us tremendously to focus the volume and tighten its arguments. We also thank discussants of various sessions mentioned above as well as individuals for their valuable comments and advices at various stage of this project. We also owe a tremendous debt to many individuals and organizations that, through their generous support, facilitated the abovementioned conferences, workshops, and other collaborative activities as well as the preparation of the manuscript. Peking University hosted the 1998 meeting in Beijing with additional funding from the California Institute of Technology. The Population Studies Center and the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan funded and hosted the 2004 Ann Arbor meeting. The Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University sponsored the Mölle meeting in 2007. Valuable financial assistance for many project activities was also provided by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, the Holger Crafoord Foundation (Sweden), the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (Sweden), the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Reitaku Institute of Political Economics and Social Studies, and Reitaku University of Japan. They funded many of our international activities especially among lead authors of this book. We also thank various supports from master students and PhD candidates of the University of Gothenburg and staff members of Population and Family History Project at Reitaku.

I

Introduction

1

Challenging the East–West Binary Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu

“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” wrote Rudyard Kipling (“The Ballad of East and West”). Ever since Malthus the rhetoric of an East–West dichotomy has been used to describing the patterns and mechanisms of marriage in Asia and Europe. In Asia marriages were early and universal, while in Europe they were late and non-universal. In Europe, flexibility in the timing of marriages played an important role in keeping population in balance with economy, while in Asia early marriages and high fertility increased population pressure and made mortality checks necessary to reach population equilibrium. In Asia, marriages were decided by families and communities; in Europe, marriages were the results of individual choices. This book challenges the East–West dichotomy by going beyond binary taxonomies of marriage patterns and family systems. By comparing the interpretations based on aggregate demographic patterns with studies of individual actions in local populations, we seek to test previous assertions and transform the understanding of marriage in Asia and Europe in preindustrial times. Our main concern with the East–West dichotomy and other efforts to classify marriage patterns and family systems is that they are too simplistic, typically emphasizing binaries. When studying marriage using longitudinal individuallevel data and more advanced models and methods of analysis, we find not only differences between Europe and Asia but also great variation within these regions and fundamental similarities in the marriage behavior of individuals across regions. Thus, despite large differences in the aggregate marriage patterns, there was obvious similarity in marriage mechanisms. In short, East was East, and West was West, but when marriage is studied in more detail, we find similarities and even commonalities where East and West actually met.

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Nuptiality in Europe and Asia Marriage is a socially recognized union that entails certain rights and obligations for both husband and wife, and their children, and has been present in all known societies (Westermarck 1921; Bachrach, Hindin, and Thomson 2000; Davis 1985). Marriage is a complex institution that has been studied from many different perspectives. The literature is large, not only for contemporary societies, but also for historical societies. Demographers find marriage interesting since it is linked to fertility and reproduction. Sociologists and economists study marriage because of its relationship to social and economic status and importance to social reproduction and stratification. Finally, historians find marriage of interest since it makes visible the typical life course of ordinary people and differences between cultures and geographic regions in past times. While contemporary social science studies on marriage use microlevel data and theory and methods suited for those data, the analysis of historical marriages until quite recently has been mostly at the aggregate level. Scholars have considered culture, norms, institutions, and aggregate rates of celibacy or average ages of marriage. Most of the efforts have been directed toward establishing and comparing demographic (e.g., marriage) patterns for different geographic areas. Thomas Robert Malthus (1803) laid the foundation for the comparative study of marriage by identifying two different types of demographic regimes in agrarian economies characterized by scarcity of virgin land and stationary or slowly rising land or labor productivity: the Eastern and the Western. In Asia, especially China, populations were characterized by early and universal marriages which resulted in high fertility, while in Europe, especially England, populations were characterized by late marriages and lower fertility. In the East, the main restrictions to population growth were disease, famine, and wars (positive checks), while in the West the timing of marriage adapted to individual economic opportunities (preventive checks). Although both regimes kept population and economy in balance, Malthus claimed that the lower population pressure resulting from late marriages and lower fertility would lead to higher living standards in preindustrial Western Europe compared to the high fertility—high mortality Asian system. Following Malthus, later scholars have emphasized large differences between the East and West with respect to the average ages of marriage and celibacy rates (Hajnal 1965), type of households (Laslett and Wall

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5

1972; Hajnal 1982), and degree of individualism (Macfarlane 1978, 1986; Goody 1996). The uniqueness of Europe has been pointed out, for instance, with regard to the household formation system (Hajnal 1972; Laslett 1965; Stone 1977; Levine 1977), or the system of life-cycle service (Laslett 1977). Most of the historical studies concentrate on Europe or single European countries and are influenced by a Malthusian perspective that emphasizes scarcity of material resources as a constraint to marriage, hypothesizing a positive relation between resources and marriage. In preindustrial Europe, marriage and household formation required access to land or earnings.1 In rural areas where agriculture was based on small-scale family farming, access to land was needed in order to establish a separate household. In countries like France and Sweden the rural population increased more than the number of viable holdings, which might explain the increase in marriage ages and proportion of never-married (Wrigley 1981). Among the propertied, a farmstead would become available as the present holder died, and consequently a positive association could be hypothesized between adult mortality and marriage in the locality, and between the death of the father and the marriage of the son in the household (Ohlin 1960; Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, eds. 1976; Head-König and Pozsgai, eds. 2012).2 Inheritance was, however, not the only way of transferring land between generations. Propertied families made various arrangements by which land was passed on to the children before the death of the parents, e.g., retirement contracts to a chosen child who in exchange provided for the needs of the retiring couple in old age, and compensation to the other children if a divisible inheritance system was practiced (Hajnal 1965; Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson eds. 1976; Bonfield 1986; Dribe and Lundh 2005b, c; Head-König and Pozsgai, eds. 2012). In England where the current and prospective earnings had replaced access to land as the major criterion for eligibility to marry, the development of real wages influenced the timing of marriage (Wrigley 1981; Wrigley and Schofield 1981). The background to this is well known: commercial and large-scale agriculture, developed land markets, industrialization, urbanization, a large proportion of the workforce having their livelihood from wage-work, and so on. Unmarried workers and life-cycle servants who wanted to get married had to save from their earnings, and were therefore dependent on the development of real wages, namely the relation between nominal wages and food prices (Wrigley and Schofield 1981).

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The uniqueness of Europe, and thus the difference from Asia, is obvious. The combination of scarce resources and the norm of formation of an independent nuclear household upon marriage thus resulted in late marriages and large proportions never marrying (Hajnal 1982). Marriage thus played an important role in the demographic regime of preindustrial Western Europe; an increase in population size not only led to an increase in mortality but also to postponed marriages and lower marital fertility, resultant in a higher standard of living (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). In Asia, constraints to marriage were lesser because of the household formation system, implying early and universal marriages (Hajnal 1972). Since people married early, the reproductive period was longer and marital fertility higher. In Asia, the balance between economy and population was instead reached through mortality, also leading to lower living standard (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). The Malthusian emphasis on differences in marriage patterns between East and West has influenced the historic discourse of economic performance until quite recently. The individualism and late marriages of Western Europe have been argued to have encouraged saving and investment in production as well as social advancement (Habakukk 1955, 1974; Macfarlane 1978; Hajnal 1982). Also the European (British) preventive-check system has been associated with economic development and increasing living standard, in contrast to the Chinese positive-check system (Voigländer and Voth 2005, 2009). The early industrialization and economic development of the West and the slower development of China have been ascribed to profound institutional and cultural differences (Landes 1998). A similar approach has been taken in relation to the more independent role of women in Western Europe (de Moor and van Zanden 2010). A corresponding and provocative assertion was also made within Asia by Wolf and Hanley (1985:3) that “China is to Japan as Eastern is to Western Europe.” Since the 1990s, the Malthusian East–West dichotomy has been challenged by researchers in a variety of fields, including participants of the Eurasia Population and Family History Project (EAP) (Alter 1991). Indeed some studies reveal that the economic performance of parts of China was close to the European standards and that marital fertility and mortality in the East were lower than had previously been thought (Lee and Wang 1999; Pomeranz 2000; Campbell, Wang, and Lee 2002; Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Allen, Bengtsson, and Dribe 2005).3 Furthermore large variations within the Eastern and Western

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family system respectively have been discerned, for instance, concerning inheritance and marriage (Reher 1998; Goody 2000; Szoltysek 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012). The results of the two previous volumes of the EAP were consistent with this revaluation of the East and West binary (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). Previous comparative studies in the Malthus–Hajnal tradition have made taxonomies and geographies based on narrative sources on norms and institutions or aggregate quantitative measures like the average ages at marriage and celibacy rates. Even though researchers sometimes used longitudinal individual-level data, they never took full advantage of these data; rather, they aggregated the data into rates and proportions. The difference in marriage patterns was established by the comparison of such simple descriptive statistics. Hajnal and others have explained the different marriage patterns by hypothetical individual behavior under the influence of the dominant household formation system of the region. Apparently the link between theory and data was weak; based on average ages at marriage and celibacy rates, little could be said about which factors influenced the timing and incidence of marriage or about the way they interacted. A few attempts have been made in order to use better data and analytical methods since the late 1990s (e.g., Lee and Wang 1999; Engelen and Wolf 2005; Chuang, Engelen, and Wolf 2006; Engelen and Hsieh 2007), but to our knowledge no one has yet combined multivariate analysis of longitudinal individual-level data with a thorough comparative approach to the study of local populations in Europe and Asia. The EAP approach offers a much better opportunity to study the complexity of the mechanisms behind individual and household decisions on marriage matters. For all the included populations in this book we have longitudinal individual-level data of a similar kind. Like data used in family reconstitution studies, our data contain information on demographic events. However, they also include information on migration and household composition, socioeconomic status, and the economic and demographic situation in the localities. Access to such rich data makes it possible to analyze simultaneously the influence on marriage decisions of individual demographic and socioeconomic factors, household context, and economic and demographic conditions in the local community, and the interactions of such variables. By developing this more complex model for analyzing the mechanisms behind human behavior in the marriage market in preindustrial Eurasia, we are able

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to go far beyond a simplistic picture of general marriage patterns. The studies here apply event-history analysis, which is also an advance on previous comparative studies on marriages in Europe and Asia. In short, the approach of the EAP is true comparison, using similar data for different populations, modeled in the same way and analyzed with the same statistical tool. The intent of this book is to analyze the outcomes and determinants of marriage in local populations in Eurasia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—both first marriages and remarriages. We study local populations in five countries—Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and China—using longitudinal individual-level data on household composition and socioeconomic status. The studies in this book emphasize variables that are thought to influence marriage decisions but are seldom included in marriage studies, such as conditions in the parental household, socioeconomic status, and short-term fluctuations in the living standard. Event-history analysis is complemented by descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of marriage-related institutions. We find that for all study populations, individual marriage chances were influenced by socioeconomic status, household context, and local economic and demographic conditions, both with regard to first marriages and remarriages. Since there were profound cultural and institutional differences between the study populations, the way that individuals and families responded varied. Hence our results indicate that the marriage process was more complex than the usual East–West binary suggests. We confirm profound differences between the East and the West in the general marriage pattern and family system, but we also find the West in the East and the East in the West, and last but not least we find similarity in difference. Similarity and Difference Studies in social science are based on observations of human action and reaction. In daily life we are faced with an almost infinite number of various observations that give impressionistic pictures of reality. Social science aims at finding structural and causal links between observations that make the constant flux of events more comprehensible and understandable. By establishing patterns and causalities, social science points out similarities and differences in human social life. To a large extent, studies in social science focus on differences between cultures, systems, genders, age or social groups, and time periods. Sometimes

Challenging the East–West Binary

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such differences become oversimplified and stereotypic in a way that actually detracts our understanding of social phenomena, such as in the case of the East–West dichotomy. The aim of this book is not to confirm previous findings about major differences; it is to go further into the variations of marriage in Europe and Asia, looking for unexpected diversity and similarity in difference. Rather than simple comparisons of aggregate marriage patterns, the research strategy of the EAP is to study marriage outcomes and determinants of local populations in a variety of communities in five contextually different countries using similar data and methods. Pre-modern marriage was a complex process in which individual and household actors sought a marital union in expectation of material and psychic gains. The timing and incidence of marriage, however, was influenced by the opportunities for and constraints on marriage that reflected social norms, individual characteristics, household context, and community-level conditions. Since some of these factors were common for all actors in a certain population, such as norms on household formation, a similar behavior could be foreseen, but since there were factors that were different depending on gender or social class, diversity also could be expected. In short, the EAP model predicts a clear difference in the marriage patterns between the West and the East but, more important, also variations within regions and similarities and differences across regions with regard to individual marriage behavior. The Eurasia Population and Family History Project was launched in June 1994 by historical demographers studying local populations in Sweden, Belgium, Japan, and China. Soon afterward, scholars specializing in Italy joined the project. The five research teams had two things in common that formed the foundation of the EAP. First, all wanted to move away from descriptions of taxonomies and aggregate demographic rates and toward analyses of individual responses to changes in individual characteristics, household context, and economic circumstances. Second, all were interested in multivariate analyses of individual-level data, and had access to (or were constructing) databases of longitudinal individual-level data containing information on household composition and structure and socioeconomic status. The Eurasia Project studies how changing economic conditions, such as food prices and wages, and different household contexts including kinship relations and socioeconomic status, affect individual demographic outcomes (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004: 5). The previous two volumes of the EAP, Life under Pressure and Prudence and

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Pressure, demonstrated large differences in general demographic patterns between East and West but also modified existing taxonomies and geographies and offered new interpretations of causality and context of mortality and reproduction (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). As will be shown, we extend upon this approach in Similarity in Difference. Life under Pressure concluded that human agency was at least as important as human biology in determining patterns of mortality responses to short-term stress. There was no single pattern of mortality differentials by age, gender, socioeconomic status, household composition, or responses to short-term economic stress. Mechanisms were too complex and diverse to be accounted for by underlying commonalities of biology, physiology, and local ecology; rather, they reflected choices made by individuals, households, communities, and states about the allocation of resources and the assignment of work roles that affect the risk of dying (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004: 19). In both Europe and Asia, the availability of resources was important for human planning and actions to provide against mortality due to crop failures or other unexpected strain. In Europe, the most important resource was property. Those who had no property often lacked social security networks that could provide help when times were tough, and were consequently more sensitive to short-term economic stress. In Asia, power based on location in the social hierarchy of the household was the most important resource. Therefore the individual position in the household, including gender and relation to the head, was of great importance for the mortality risks. The analyses in Prudence and Pressure also showed that not only did people plan childbearing, they did so in a remarkably uniform and deliberate fashion (Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). Whereas mortality was generally an unintended consequence of responses at the individual, household, and community levels to specific economic and social situations, we demonstrated that birth could be the deliberate consequence of people’s reproductive preferences. While mortality was often the consequence of passive agency, birth was the result of active agency (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2010: 20). As in our previous work on mortality, we again identified differences manifested between property-based societies in the West and power-based societies in the East. The socioeconomic status of an individual or a household was the main resource that enabled an individual to take actions regarding reproduction in the West. By contrast, an individual’s position within

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11

the family and household hierarchy, such as with respect to gender and age, largely defined the range of individual choices regarding reproduction in the East (Lee, Wang, and Tsuya 2010: 321–22). As to nuptiality, human agency self-evidently plays an important role. Marriage is a social construction which varies across cultures, geographies and time periods. Human agency appears in the form of collective culture, institutions and social norms and in the form of actors. Culture, institutions and social norms are the results of previous human actions over a long period of time, which have been internalized and are expressed as formal or informal rules constraining the decision-making process of different actors. In preindustrial society, by far the most important actors were the family (or household) and the individual. In the joint-family and stem-family systems of China and Japan, the family’s role in marriage matters was more fundamental, while the individual was the formal decision maker in the simplefamily systems of Western Europe. In Europe, individual consent was needed for marriage to occur, but parental influence during the marriage process was normal, especially for propertied families and in areas where joint families or stem families were frequent. Thus the challenge of this volume is even greater than that of the previous two volumes in the sense that “marriage” is not a mere demographic response of individuals but a product of an intricate interaction of sociocultural, historical, and demographic processes of human agency in any given context. According to the Malthus model, population equilibrium was reached through mortality or marital fertility, marriage being a central regulating mechanism that was in its turn influenced by the development of food prices/real wages (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Aggregate studies have shown short- or medium-term influence of economic factors on basic demographic outcomes (Richards 1984; Weir 1984b; Galloway 1988; Lee 1990). Using individual-level data the previous EAP studies have found significant mortality and reproduction responses to shortterm fluctuation in food prices in parts of the populations, such as among the landless in the West and those who were not closely related to the head of household in the East. Based on the logic that a prompt and substantial response to short-term economic stress indicates a lower living standard, the results of Life under Pressure and Prudence and Pressure indicated that part of the populations in both Asia and Europe were living under harsh conditions. Since this book is about marriage, the crucial mechanism of the European demographic regime

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according to Malthus, it is highly interesting to find out whether there were any corresponding responses to short-term fluctuations in first marriages and remarriages. Generalizations and Expectations The literature on Eurasian marriage and related issues tends to emphasize the big divide between the East and the West. This paradigm intertwines several generalizations based on aggregate statistics or norm systems, which will be scrutinized in the EAP studies of local populations. We recognize four sets of generalizations. The first one concerns the basic features and geographic coverage of marriage patterns. The European marriage pattern generalization emphasizes the uniqueness of the European marriage pattern characterized by late marriages and large proportions of never marrying individuals, contrasted to the marriage pattern of Asia, or rather the rest of the world, characterized by early and universal marriages (Hajnal 1865, 1972). The East–West divide in marriage is derived from the dominant household formation system; while the married couple in simple-family Europe was typically supposed to form a separate household, the married couple in stem or joint-family Asia usually moved into a parental household. The second set of generalizations reflects the material constraints to marriage in preindustrial Europe compared with Asia. Given scarce resources and a tendency of population growth to exceed production growth, which is inherent in the Malthusian perspective, marriage was constrained in different ways. Postponement of marriage or celibacy were mechanisms that kept the European population in balance (preventive checks), while in Asia (or China) mortality played a larger role for the overall demographic regime (positive checks). Unmarried individuals in Europe who wanted to get married had to overcome the constraints to marriage, reaching their targets in terms of savings, livelihood, and housing, which made it possible to set up a separate household (Hajnal 1972). According to this perspective marriage was typically less constrained in the East where the married couple was included in a parental household upon marriage. For the European populations marriage was made possible by earnings from employment or family property (Wrigley 1981). The real-wage generalization implies that workers and life-cycle servants in Europe, but not in Asia, were sensitive to trends and fluctuations in real wages, since the accumulation of

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resources that made marriage possible had to come from their own earnings and savings (Schofield 1976; Wrigley 1981; Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Marriage candidates of prosperous families in Europe had potential access to additional material resources, for instance, land in rural areas that was owned by the family and possible to transfer from the parents in the form of compensation, gifts, anticipated inheritance, in exchange for retirement service, or as inheritance when the parents died. The family property generalization states that access to material resources, such as land that could be transferred from parents to children, was important for marriage chances in the European populations but not in the Asian populations (Wrigley 1981; Hajnal 1972). Finally, the inheritance generalization states that for the propertied, such as those with land or a craft workshop, the marriage chances of an heir was closely linked to the death of the present holder in the European populations, but not so in the Asian populations (Ohlin 1960; Dupâquier 1974; Conze, ed. 1976). The third set of generalizations reflects the East–West differences in social norms and mentalities. According to the anthropological and historical literature marriage in the East was characterized by collectivism and authority, as compared to individualist Europe. The parental authority generalization implies that the relation between parents and children was a basic divide between Europe and Asia; parental control was much more pronounced in Asian societies (Wolf 2005).4 Parental management and social norms structured the marriage process in the Asian populations with regard to marriage orders based on age, parity and gender, while in Europe marriage candidates had a stronger influence on the partner choice and timing of marriage. Also the gendered authority generalization states that patriarchal relations implying father/ male dominance was one important feature of Asian populations distinguishing them from European populations (Skinner 1997; Wolf 2005). The patriarchal relational system in Asia was kept up by large age differences between the spouses, husbands typically being ten to fifteen years older, while in Europe, considerably smaller age differences reflected the fact that marriages relied on individual consent and more equal gender relations. Finally, the individualist-collectivist generalization claims that Asian societies were characterized by collectivism while individualism was a feature of European societies (Macfarlane 1978, 1986). It could be assumed, then, that the marriage process was more unified or ordered in the Asian populations while there was more variation in the European populations.

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The fourth type of generalization is from the previous EAP studies on Eurasian mortality and fertility, which led to the conclusion that differences in individual and household behavior and demographic outcome were to a large extent due to the fact that societies in the West were property-based while societies in the East were power-based, namely depending on an individual’s gender and position in the family and household hierarchy (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Lee, Wang, and Tsuya 2010). Although some previous results indicate similarity in demographic response in the East and the West, the propertypower generalization implies that demographic response to socioeconomic factors was stronger in European populations, and response to household relation factors was more important in the Asian populations. We do not expect that our studies of local populations, based on longitudinal and individual-level data, will overthrow the thesis of a European marriage pattern. Rather, we expect to find more similarity between European and Asian populations, and more variation within the East and West, respectively, than have previously been thought of. Also, and not least, based on our previous findings on Eurasian mortality and fertility, we expect determinants like socioeconomic status and community-level oscillation of wages and prices to have been more important in property-based European societies, and gendered and parental power to have been more pronounced in power-based societies in Asia. If so, we will be able to check the validity of previous generalizations on the East–West differences, thereby possibly transforming our understanding of the meaning of Eurasian marriage. Data and Design True comparative research is characterized by similarity in sources, models, and methods for different populations. The Eurasia Project studies local populations in Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and China for which longitudinal data at the individual level are available for the preindustrial period (see map 1.1). Previous studies of historical local populations have generally been based on individual-level records of births, marriages, deaths (Fleury and Henry 1985; Wrigley and Schofield 1997), or on cross-sectional data on household composition and socioeconomic status from population registers or censuses (Laslett 1965; Laslett and Wall 1972). The databases used in the EAP contain both these types of information, and the richness of data was the original reason for launching the project. Hence we are able to study human

15

Map 1.1 EAP study populations

Challenging the East–West Binary

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Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu

behavior in the marriage market at the individual and household levels with models and methods similar to those used in studies of modern populations, such as multivariate analysis of panel data. For historical demography, the construction of databases of the kind that is used by the EAP has been revolutionary. The EAP marriage model is designed for the study of the timing and incidence of marriage, including remarriage, and partner selection in some chapters. Human agency is exercised directly by individuals and households and represented indirectly in existing social norms and institutions that are sediments of previous human preferences and actions. Thus the type of family system and household formation system influences whether it is the individual or the family/household that takes the most active part in the decision-making process. In Western Europe individuals played an important role when marriage decisions were made whereas in Asia the family/household was the most important actor (Ehmer 2002: 283–86; Thornton 2005: 52–55). However, in Western Europe parents influenced the marriage decisions of their children too—especially if the family was propertied—for instance, with regard to choice of marriage partner and the timing of marriage into a general family life-course strategy (Ehmer 2002: 313–20). The EAP model assumes that actors in the marriage market, individuals and families, weigh the costs and benefits of alternative decisions, given the context of incentives—disincentives and opportunity—constraint, and make the choices that are the most beneficial and least costly. It builds on a sequential approach to marriage in which marriage candidates are repeatedly exposed to potential partners and make successive decisions.5 From previous research we conclude that marriage was typically associated with material and psychic gains, and marriage was therefore sought by unmarried individuals (and their families) in our study populations. Timing and incidence of marriage were, however, influenced by external constraints like marriage costs, household context, and community-level conditions, and the actors’ opportunities to overcome such constraints (see figure 1.1). In the empirical studies we try to estimate the relevance of potential determinants of marriage by using variables at the individual level (gender, age), household level (composition, socioeconomic status), and community level (availability of partners, economic and demographic fluctuations). One basic divide between individuals is gender. Since social norms are highly gendered, determinants of male and female marriage could

Challenging the East–West Binary

Theoretical framework Actor • individual • household

Incentives and disincentives

Opportunities and constraints • marriage costs • household context • community level conditions

MARRIAGE

17

Empirical study Observed actor • unmarried individual • widowed individual

Variables candidate characteristics (sex, age) household composition and relations household socioeconomic status availability of prospective partners economic and demographic fluctuations

• • • • •

Outcome • first marriage • remarriage • partner selection • celibacy

REPRODUCTION Figure 1.1 EAP marriage model—schematic framework

be expected to have been quite different, and therefore we analyze women and men separately. Each individual is characterized by a certain amount of ability that makes him or her more or less attractive in the marriage market, for instance, age may be hypothesized to reflect the individual working capacity and reproductive capacity. The parental household holds specific assets that could be transferred to the individual in order to achieve a marriage, such as property and/or position as the head of the household. The transfer of such resources increases the ability and attractiveness of the receiving person in the marriage market. However, the transfer of assets from the parental to the younger generation could be made conditional, and in those cases the terms are constraints to marriage. Such constraints could be related to the birth order among siblings, the timing of marriage in relation to the overall family life-cycle plan, or the choice of marriage partner. Another type of household constraint to marriage results from the death of one or both parents, which could impose a pressure on unmarried children to take over the deceased parent’s role in the household.

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However, the opposite could also happen: that the death of a parent releases resources and makes the transfer of assets between generations easier. Community-level constraints to marriage could be the economic conditions influencing the access to food and development of real earnings, the availability of vacant jobs and housing for young couples who want to set up a nuclear household, or the availability of prospective marriage partners with the preferred features. We do not expect all individuals in the local populations to respond in the same way to these influences. On the contrary, we foresee differences in the response for two reasons. First, actors (individuals and households) differ with regard to gender, age, and socioeconomic status, which may have influenced the response to some marriage determinants in various ways. For instance, the reaction to rising food prices may well have been different for marriage candidates from families that were producing and selling food (e.g., farmers), compared to candidates from wage-worker families that were net consumers of food. Second, there is a fundamental difference between locations with respect to inheritance, family and household formation, and kinship organization that must have influenced individual and household decisions on marriage in a different way in the study populations. Accordingly, marriage is complex and the analysis of marriage needs to include individual demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status and household composition, demographic and economic conditions in the local area, and the interaction of these variables. The theoretical background to the EAP marriage model is discussed in chapter 2, and a more detailed presentation of the variables and data appears in chapter 3. Our approach stands out from previous comparative studies of marriage in six ways. First, our analytical approach is much better than comparison of aggregate rates of celibacy or average age at marriage and family formation system that is typical for comparative historical demography. We apply event-history analysis to longitudinal individual-level data, which allows us to look into the determinants of the individual timing of marriage. In this way we measure the influence on marriage of individual demographic factors such as age and gender, familial context in terms of presence of parents and siblings, household-level factors such as socioeconomic status, and communitylevel factors such as food prices. Compared to the usual approach in previous studies, we make much better use of longitudinal individuallevel data. Instead of the vague link between the marriage pattern and

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the family formation system of the area, we study determinants of marriage decisions of individuals/families. In conclusion, our approach allows results to be more detailed and robust. Second, we consider the possibility that marriage had a different meaning in different contexts. Since reproduction is so crucial for demographic development, we study various trajectories to reproduction (leaving home, marriage, first birth) in the local populations to see whether marriage was linked to reproduction and to examine multiple pathways to reproduction. By looking at lifecourse transitions as sequences of events, we are able to suggest the relationship between the timing of marriage and reproduction in relation to various trajectories. We also consider the factors related to celibacy. Third, socioeconomic status and household context are important dimensions for our study of pre-modern marriage in Europe and Asia. This makes our study unique. Among previous comparative studies, there are some that are quantitative but lack data on social class and household composition; others deal with these issues based on anthropological qualitative data. We have not found any study that combines the two approaches. Thus the hypothetical links between social class and household context, on the one hand, and marriage, on the other, have never really been tested before. By providing a comparative analysis of this dimension of marriage, this book contributes substantially to historical demography and history of the family. Fourth, we examine the role of economic factors in first marriage, considering the structural differences that have been laid down by family systems and household formation systems. It is a methodological achievement to approach the timing of first marriage from a theoretical angle and to undertake multivariate analysis, rather than theorizing based on aggregate statistics and narratives. By taking this design, we suggest modification of previous Malthusian beliefs on the existence of large differences in marriage costs between the East and the West. We question the mechanisms of the Malthusian savings model (real-wage model), and suggest instead a more refined model including savings from both children and parents and valid for both workers and producers. Fifth, the analyses are carried out with specific attention to postresidential patterns of marriage: whether individuals moved out of the “household of origin” to the “household of marriage.” In neolocal

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marriage, both males and females move out of their parental households and form new households upon marriage. In virilocal marriage, males stay at their parental households while females come to live with them upon marriage. In uxorilocal marriage, females stay at their parental households while males come to live with them upon marriage. The major pattern of marriage was virilocal in the Chinese populations, and virilocal and uxorilocal in the Japanese populations. Although the majority of marriages in Western Europe were neolocal, a considerable proportion of marriages in our European populations (particularly the Italian ones) were found to be virilocal and uxorilocal. The three types of marriage, or three types of options for post-nuptial residence, produce diverse sets of logics involving the timing and order of marriage of sons and daughters. Household socioeconomic status, parental authority (Bourdieu 1976, 1990; Chuang and Wolf 2005), and siblings come into play in a different manner for different types of marriage. This approach by competing risk of different types of marriage encourages us to go beyond discussions about different household systems. Gender difference (or male supremacy; Bourdieu 1976, 1990) can also be reassessed in relation to inheriting or non-inheriting children. Sixth, while previous studies tend to focus more on first marriages and celibacy rates, we extend the analysis to include remarriage. While the timing of marriage varied dramatically among study populations, they all shared a common feature: frequent disruption of marriage due to death of spouse. Since individual survival depended largely on the status of the household in the preindustrial era, remarriage was a common option or strategy for survival in all these populations. We introduce a similar model for remarriage and examine how economic and familial context, as well as individual factors, affected the chance of remarriage. Organization We organize Similarity in Difference into four parts, with part I being the introduction. In part II, on comparative demographies, we present the results of comparative analyses of first marriage and remarriage. In part III, on local histories, each chapter is devoted to the results to a specific country. Finally, in part IV, we summarize the results and relate them to the major research questions of the book. In chapter 2 we start with a brief comparison of the institution of marriage in Europe and Asia; then we present the key elements in

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the framework of the EAP marriage model: the actor perspective, the sequential approach, incentives and constraints to marriage, and the main determinants of the timing and incidence of marriage. Chapter 3 presents the nuptiality patterns of the included Eurasian populations, the data sources, the variables of the EAP model, and the analytical method used. There is indeed a dramatic difference between our European and Asian societies in the timing of marriage and celibacy rates, which confronts us with the reality of marriage being a social construction, and challenges the possibility and meaning of comparative study of marriage itself. By shifting the focus from marriage to reproduction, however, chapter 4 addresses this challenge. We take a sequential approach and analyze the impact of various determinants on the timing of leaving home, marriage, and first birth. We find that while marriage in all the European populations was clearly linked to the start of the reproductive career, this was much less so in Asia, where marriage was more of an agreement concerning future reproduction than access to immediate reproduction. In chapter 5 we develop an economic theory of marriage, taking both parental wealth and marriage candidates’ savings into account. Socioeconomic status was one of the most important variables in the explanation of our mortality and reproduction studies. The chapter examines the impact of socioeconomic status on the timing of marriage. It compares marriage responses of individuals of lower, medium, and higher socioeconomic status to such features of household context as presence of parents and siblings, and community-level influences of food prices, and adult mortality. The results suggest that a higher socioeconomic status increased the probability of marriage for men in all populations and for women in the Swedish and Belgian populations. The influence of the composition of the parental household on individual marriage chances varied between populations but was generally more important for groups of higher socioeconomic status. While the prosperity of the parental household had a significant positive influence on the likelihood of first marriage, the own savings of the potential marriage candidates had little significance. The results indicate clear weaknesses of the predominant savings model (realwage model), and motivate the development of a more complex twogeneration model. In chapter 6 we analyze remarriage of widows and widowers. Remarriage took place in all of our study populations, but its intensity

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and prevalence varied greatly, more so than first marriage, by sociocultural and legal conditions. Nevertheless, beyond the difference in the level and timing of remarriage, we found amazing similarities in the axis of gender, age, and time since the end of previous marriage. Further, controlling for these factors, we also found fascinating similarities among societies in their response to local economic conditions, socioeconomic status, and the composition and gender of co-residing children. In chapters 7 to 11 we turn to the studies of local populations and present results from Scania in Sweden; Sart and Pays de Herve in Belgium; six Italian locations (Casalguidi, Crespino, Follina, Madregolo, Treppo Cornico, and Venice); Shimomoriya and Niita in Japan; and Liaoning and Shuangcheng in China. Each chapter is based on the common multivariate approach to the analysis of first marriage, but the various chapters also identify features and conditions important to the particular population under investigation. Almost all the sites are predominantly rural, but the circumstances and significance of marriage vary considerably. As a result, following our previous two volumes, the models developed in these chapters are more detailed and tailored to local circumstances than the common models in comparative chapters. Chapter 12 concludes the volume and relates results to previous studies including the volumes of the EAP book series, thereby checking the validity of previous generalizations on the East–West differences in marriage. Conclusion This book is a challenge to the East–West binary of pre-modern marriage that was introduced by Malthus and developed by Hajnal and others, and still holds a dominant position in the field of historical demography. The Hajnal thesis—that marriage was constrained by scarce resources given the household formation system in Europe— may be criticized for being ethnocentric and blind to social class and gender, having a weak link between theory on individual behavior and aggregate evidence, and including a lot of geographic and temporal exceptions that weaken its explanatory strength. The weaknesses of comparative marriage studies in historical demography are the point of departure for the EAP approach, which uses better data and more refined models and methods of analysis.

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We acknowledge structural differences in the general marriage pattern between the East and West that could be associated with differences in household formation and family systems. However, going beyond the simple binary derived from aggregate descriptive statistics, we explore the complexity of Eurasian marriage. By studying marriage as a process at the individual and household levels, we find interesting differences within the East and West, respectively, and also within local areas. Furthermore differences were much less pronounced when looking at the timing of first births rather than of marriages, which indicates that the role of marriage was different in Asia and Europe, whereas the role of reproduction was more universal. Studies of individual life courses in the local populations reveal similarities in human behavior despite the differences in social norms between societies. Younger people were generally more likely to marry, or remarry if widowed, than older people, indicating that working ability and reproductive capacity were characteristics making individual candidates attractive in the marriage market. This finding underscores the association between marriage and social reproduction. Life under Pressure and Prudence and Pressure pointed to the fact that human agency was important for Eurasian mortality and reproduction. While mortality was often the consequence of passive agency, birth was the result of active agency. Our results are in line with these findings in that they indicate that individuals and families actively planned and managed their lives, making the timing of marriage dependent on the finding of a preferred type of partner, and also adaptable to household or external constraints. Parents transferred resources to children in order to facilitate marriage, making social reproduction possible and securing their support in old age. In all study populations we find that higher socioeconomic status increased chances of marriage for men. Planning was more common among those with ample resources, since marriage to them was a larger investment and direct wedding costs were higher. The Malthus and Hajnal story of pre-modern marriage in East and West is one of binary and large differences. The approach to comparative marriage studies taken in this book challenges the simplicity characterizing most comparative studies on this topic in historical demography. Using better data and more advanced models and methods, we find the expected difference between Europe and Asia in the general pattern but also variation within regions and much similarity in human behavior.

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Notes 1. Wrigley uses the terms “peasant variant” and “wage variant” to describe the context of preindustrial European marriage (1981: 183). 2. The land niche thesis takes this argument to its extreme, assuming a fixed number of farmsteads, and stating that the marriage of an heir could only take place when the previous landholder, namely the father, is dead. Marriage chances were thus highly dependent on mortality, and the age at marriage was approximately the same as expectation of life at the mean age at paternity (Dupâquier 1974; Conze ed. 1976). Even though the land niche perspective includes constraints to marriage due to scarce material resources, it is not purely Malthusian since mortality is exogenous (Wrigley and Schofield 1981: 461). For an overview of the land niche literature, see Fertig 2003 and 2005. For further discussion, see Schofield 1976 and Wrigley 1981, and Wrigley and Schofield 1981. 3. Some support the old view though (Broadberry and Gupta 2006; Allen 2009). 4. For further examination, see also Chuang, Engelen, and Wolf 2006; Engelen and Hsieh 2007. 5. We use the term “sequential” in a general sense, not referring to statistical sequential analysis.

2

Eurasian Marriage: Actors and Structures Christer Lundh and Satomi Kurosu

Marriage has been a basic institution in all known human societies. Its main function has been to secure reproduction, and its importance has been stressed in custom and law. Marriage is the tie that binds the couple together, secures the stability and well-being of the household, guarantees specific rights to the offspring, and maintains kin networks, thereby making the transmission of property and human and social capital possible. In pre-modern times marriage was a mode of life, constituting one phase in the typical life course of people in Europe and Asia. To the younger generation marriage represented a chance of improving their economic standard and social status, and for the parental generation it was an opportunity to make arrangements for old-age support. The theme of this book is similarity and difference in marriage in preindustrial Europe and Asia. Similarity or difference can be studied with regard to structures (demographic patterns, culture, norms, systems,) and actors (individual and family choices). Whereas previous studies have been mostly interested in the difference in the average marriage patterns, we are looking for similarities and differences in the way that individuals and households acted during the marriage process in the studied Eurasian populations. The Eurasia Project marriage model aims at investigating the choices of individuals and households in the marriage market and the context of opportunity and constraint to such decisions. In contrast to previous studies of Eurasian marriage that have mostly dealt with structures, the EAP model takes an actor perspective. In this chapter, the dimensions of similarity and difference in Eurasian marriage institutions are explored, and the framework of the EAP model is presented.

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Universalities and Varieties of Eurasian Marriage Marriage, or marriage-like relationships, has been present in all known societies (Davis 1985). Marriage refers to socially recognized unions that entail certain rights and obligations for both husband and wife, and their children (Westermarck 1921: 26–28; Bachrach, Hindin, and Thomson 2000: 4–5). The institution of marriage is closely related to reproduction, since the human life course is long, and so is the period of juvenile dependency. Marriage is a stable cooperative arrangement for the breeding of children, based on male and kinship support for the provisioning of the wife and offspring (Daly and Wilson 2000: 94–97; Kaplan et al. 2000: 156–57; Kramer 2005: 224–26). Although the basic function of marriage may derive from “human nature,” the varieties in the details of getting married are associated with culture in a broad sense, including political and social institutions and economic systems (Bachrach, Hindin and Thomson 2000: 4–5). In preindustrial Europe and Asia, the features of marriage varied in accordance with the prevailing family system and institutional arrangements, and several competing types of marriage could be discerned. Marriages could be categorized according to order (first marriages and remarriages), the number of wives (first wife, other wives, concubines) or the household that followed marriage (virilocal, uxorilocal, or neolocal marriage).1 In Europe, marriage was the main way to form a new household, something that took place immediately after the wedding, either as a shift of the head of household in one of the parental households or by the formation of a new unit. In Asia, marriage was not a path to a new household; rather, the married couple typically lived in a parental household, usually on the male side, without any shift of headship (Davis 1955; Davis and Blake 1956: 214–18; Hajnal 1965: 133–34; Hajnal 1982: 451–55; Skinner 1997: 55–57). Typically, neolocal marriage was associated with a conjugal family system, such as in Western Europe, while virilocal or uxorilocal marriage characterized household formation in stem and joint-family systems, such as in Asia and parts of Europe (Skinner 1997: 54–56).2 In a similar way there were differences in the influence of the parental family on marriage decisions. In Europe, the main actor in the marriage market was the individual marriage candidate (even though parents influenced marriage decisions, especially if the family was propertied), whereas in Asia, the family/house-

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hold was the most important actor (Ehmer 2002: 283–86; Thornton 2005: 52–55). In Europe, monogamy was prescribed and no other form of marriage was accepted with respect to the number of wives (Goody 1983: 11; Goody 2000: 33–34). A monogamous marriage could be either a first marriage or a remarriage, and remarriages were socially accepted and quite frequent (Dupâquier et al. 1981). The marriage typically resulted in the formation of a neolocal household, that is, a separate household of the newly wedded couple. In areas where a stem-family system was practiced, a change of the headship from a parent to a son (or son-in-law) within an existing household occurred, though (Mitterauer and Sieder 1982: 32–34). Thus the only competing opportunity for marriage formation in Europe was between first marriages and remarriages. In Asia, marriage formation took many different forms leading to numerous opportunities and therefore complicated processes. In China, although rare among the populations of this study, polygamous marriages were practiced among the elite, as were remarriages among men. The most common type of marriage was virilocal, sometimes uxorilocal, but never neolocal (Lee and Wang 1999).3 In Japan, marriages were in general monogamous. Remarriages were accepted, and since divorces were quite frequent, remarriages were numerous. Just like in China, the postnuptial residential pattern was mostly virilocal but could be uxorilocal. In the latter case the husband moved into the wife’s parental home and joined the household as an adopted son.4 This form of marriage occurred in households without male heirs. While uxorilocal marriage was considered a last resort for men in China, it was often used in Japan as a strategy for assuring the succession among heirless families (Kurosu and Ochiai 1995). The gender aspects of marriage were quite different in Europe and Asia. In Europe formal and customary rules pointed in the direction of individualism and relative equality between the sexes compared to Asia. In accordance with the Christian tradition, marriage was a voluntary union between two individuals in which both had to accept and no one could be forced to marry by their families (Ehmer 2002: 283–86, 313–16; Thornton 2005: 52–55; Thornton, Axinn, and Xie 2007: 32–37). Another indication of relative equality was that in parts of Europe women could inherit and own property (see Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson 1976). Yet we know that prior to the twentieth century women were generally subordinate to men, who were the typical

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heads of households. A woman was legally incompetent and was represented by her father (or other male relative) in marriage negotiations and business if she was unmarried, by her husband if she was married. Even if she owned a property, it was at her father ’s or husband’s disposal, and he was the manager (see Green and Owens 2004 for examples). A more patriarchal structure could be found in Asia where families were clearly stratified by gender and seniority (Skinner 1993, 1997: 58– 60; Wolf 2005: 225–27). In rural Japan, where intensive family farming required the toil of household members, brides were important as farm labor. Yet women gained autonomy only after having had sons and having achieved the status of wife of household head.5 In the Confucian ideology, women were subordinate to fathers as daughters before marriage and to husbands as wives after marriage. The heavy emphasis on male superiority and patrilineal descent in Chinese society was sustained by a legal code that upheld Confucian ideals (Lee and Campbell 1997: 134–36). While these Confucian ideals are embedded in the nature of elite class families and not among peasants in Japan, inheritance norms and village organization encouraged the supremacy of male heads among peasant families as well (Okada and Kurosu 1998). Marriage was typically dissolved by the death of one of the parties. In China, divorces were practically nonexistent and the separation of spouses within marriage was common only in cases of emigrated males. In European countries dominated by the Catholic Church, divorce was not allowed either. The Protestant Church was more tolerant and accepted dissolution of marriage by annulment or divorce, but in practice, divorces were very few. In Japan, marriage could be dissolved by divorce or absconding according to customs and customary laws.6 The number of marriages that were dissolved by divorces or absconding was substantial but varied across regions (Kurosu, Tsuya, and Hamano 1999). Marriage is often seen as an event symbolized by the wedding ceremony. While in Europe a church validation was mandatory, parental and community consent were crucial for legitimizing marriage in China and Japan. However, in both Europe and Asia, preindustrial marriage was a lengthy process of many steps including a long period of planning. Despite the fact that the institution of marriage was strongly associated with reproduction both in Europe and Asia, there were different types of transitions to reproduction, since family systems and

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institutional arrangements varied across geographical regions. In Asia, marriages were planned quite early and age at marriage was low on average. Therefore marital fertility was not directly linked to the formal entrance into marriage. In Europe, marriages occurred late, and fertility was directly linked to the wedding event (Laslett 1977; Wall 1978; Kussmaul 1981; Mitterauer 1992; Dribe 2000). Inheritance was quite equal in the studied parts of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, and both sons and daughters inherited from the parents. Farmers typically aimed at keeping the family farm undivided or limiting the extent of division, arranging strategic marriages that would compensate for land divisions, or trying to avoid unwanted splitting of the family farm by making it over to one of the children in exchange for lifelong bed and board (retirement contracts). The latter was seen as an inheritance in advance, and the siblings were compensated in land or money, by the parents or directly by the favored child. If compensation was not possible, co-ownership among siblings was a possible temporary solution (Habakkuk 1955; Berkner 1972, 1976; Goody 1973b; Le Roy Ladurie 1976; Sabean 1976, 1990; Berkner and Mendels 1978; Gaunt 1983; Arrizabalaga 1997; Fauve-Chamoux 1998; Moring 2003; Dribe and Lundh 2005b, c). Although the two Asian populations placed importance in family succession, each population had different customs of inheritance and postnuptial residence. Throughout China the system of property transmission was partible inheritance for all sons regardless of the mother ’s status (Wakefield 1998).7 However, married brothers often continued to live together after their father ’s death, especially among propertied families and particularly while their mother or grandfather was alive (Lee and Campbell 1998; Campbell and Lee 2000). In such cases the authority to dispose of property was in the hands of the household head, who was often the eldest brother (Campbell and Lee 2004). In Japan, nonpartible inheritance was encouraged by social norms and common law. Feudal lords, concerned with the collection of taxes, also prohibited or limited the division of land among nonheirs, unless their landholdings were above what was considered the amount necessary to support an average farm family. Although it was typically the eldest son who succeeded the headship in northeastern Japan, the succession by an eldest daughter is also reported to have been practiced even when her younger brothers were alive (Maeda 1976; Narimatsu 1992: 170–82).

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Marriage payments between the bride’s and the groom’s families (dowry or bride price/bride wealth) were part of the marriage processes of the populations in this book. Dowry was typically associated with complex socioeconomic, nonkinship-based societies with monogamous and endogamous marriage practices. It was a financial transfer from the bride’s family to the groom’s family or directly to the marrying daughter. Since women in the European populations had the right to inherit property, the dowry was a pre-mortem transfer of resources that would remain with the married couple but be the formal property of the wife. For wealthy families dowry could be property, and the transfer would help maintain the social status of the daughter (Anderson 2007: 159, 161). Also, since all children inherited from the parents, it was rational to compensate a marrying child moving out of the household with a dowry as a pre-mortem inheritance, while the child that was chosen to take over the family farm inherited what was left when the parents died, or got immediate access to it through a retirement contract, and therefore had incentives to extend the family wealth (for a similar argument, see Botticini and Siow 2003). Bride price is typically seen as the payment a husband or his family owes to the bride’s parents for the rights to her labor or reproductive capacity (Goody 1973a: 2–3, 49–52). Any institution similar to “bride price” did not exist in the European context during the studied period, but according to custom, the groom, or his family, was supposed to give the bride a “dower” that became her private property in order to safeguard her in case of widowhood (Goody 1973a: 49–52; Anderson 2007: 161). Transfers between generations, including inheritance, dowries and dowers, were first of all a matter for families who owned property, while their financial importance to the landless workers was much less. In both China and Japan bride price was a necessity to secure marriage while dowry was optional. The content and amount of dowry varied. In China, marriage for women was highly hypergamous, and men hypogamous.8 Therefore bride price was more important toward the bottom of the social ladder as it gave an incentive for parents to marry their daughters into higher status families; and dowry was essential among the social elite who wanted to negotiate special status on their married daughters, or to encourage low status family to accept a daughter-in-law from a higher status family (see chapter 11). Such an imbalance between men and women was not recognized in Japan where both virilocal and uxorilocal marriages were practiced—men’s

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households were to provide a gift in virilocal marriages whereas women’s households were to do so in uxorilocal marriages. Just as in Europe, wedding celebrations and gift exchanges were more pronounced in the upper social classes. In conclusion, when studying marriage in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and Asia, we find large differences across geographies and cultures in the role of marriage, the marriage process and the features of marriage. Such differences are social constructions, developed during thousands of years and contextually adopted. In the previous two volumes of the Eurasia Project, Life under Pressure and Prudence and Pressure, a clear link between biology and human agency was established. Mortality was often the consequence of passive agency, while birth was the result of active agency (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2010: 20). These findings were interesting because while the importance of biology for mortality or reproduction is obvious, the importance of human agency is not that self-evident. With marriage it is the other way around: the important role of human agency is obvious, since marriage itself is a social construction, while the role of biology seems less clear. The universality of marriage may be traced back to a common human need for a stable cooperative arrangement for successful reproduction, given the long period of juvenile dependency characterizing human beings, and in that sense marriage is indirectly linked to biology. The great variety in marriage details across cultures, geographies, and time periods reflects, however, the important role of human decision making. In the framework of this book, human agency appears in the form of social norms and institutions that are collective sediments of previous actions and central to the analysis of human behavior in the marriage market, the choices of individuals and households and the context of opportunity and constraint to such decisions. In the following section the framework of the EAP model is presented in more detail. Framework of the EAP Marriage Model Actors and Choices The EAP model for analyzing marriage is attached to rational choice theory and cost–benefit analysis (Goode 1997; Bachrach, Hindin, and Thomson 2000; Grossbard-Shechtman 2003).9 In accordance with basic rational choice theory, we assume actors know their interests and options and make choices based on that.10 Actors are thought to weigh the costs and benefits of alternative decisions given the context of

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opportunities and constraints, choosing the option that is most beneficial and least costly. The actors in our study are the marriage candidates themselves and their families, and the marriage market is thought to be an imaginary market where individuals are exposed and at the same time searching for prospective partners either by themselves or with the help of their families and kin. The model is based on a sequential approach to the study of marriage behavior. Just as in Prudence and Pressure we use the term “sequential” in a general meaning, to indicate that individuals are seen as repeatedly exposed to potential partners and therefore making successive decisions in response to opportunities and constraints.11 Although a marriage decision includes three considerations—whether to marry or not (the target aspect), when to marry (the timing aspect), and whom to marry (the matching aspect)—we hypothesize the actors to deal with all aspects simultaneously and continuously. For instance, we do not assume that individuals decide once and for all whether to marry or not; rather we assume that a number of repeated decisions to postpone marriage may lead to celibacy in some cases.12 The actors in the marriage market are repeatedly exposed to potential partners and marriage options and thus make successive decisions. In the EAP model, marriage is seen as an investment made by the involved partners and their families. In order to find out whether they should invest, the actors estimate possible costs and benefits, both economic and psychic, and marriage may occur if the net gain is positive for both deciding parties, each one choosing the course of action that is most beneficial and least costly.13 Not only economic (or materialist) gains and costs are included in the estimations. Romantic love, social status, and recognition are examples of psychic benefits from marriage, while social penalty and pressure from kin groups represent a psychic cost for actors who overrun traditional boundaries, for instance, in relation to the “proper” choice of spouse. Despite the fact that marriage has both a materialistic and idealistic side, quantitative studies in social science tend to emphasize the materialistic dimension. This fact is mostly due to data limitation—it is difficult to measure love, affinity, companionship, and the like (Grossbard-Shechtman 2003: 4–5). Historical studies are even more biased in this regard since complementary interviews and surveys cannot be made. This deficiency does not mean, however, that quantitative analyses of historical marriage could not be accomplished, only that we should beware the data bias.14

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In this book we use the cost–benefit perspective to structure the model and variables, not to make estimations that are fully comparable to modern econometric studies. Given the historical context and data, it is, for instance, not possible to calculate the benefits from marriage in terms of a “marriage premium” in earnings, or the costs of marriage for women in terms of forsaken education or working experience because of housework, outcomes that are at focus in contemporary studies. Considering the historical contexts of the Eurasian populations (see below), it is nevertheless clear that marriage was beneficial in several ways for most individuals and families. Costs to marriage were mostly in the form of constraints that affected the actors differently, depending on gender, socioeconomic status, and the household context. In the analyses of the historical Eurasian local populations we use the binaries “incentive–disincentive” and “opportunity–constraint” to capture the basic idea of the cost–benefit perspective. We analyze marriage outcomes and determinants of marriage along two dimensions. The incentive–disincentive dimension captures the long-term, or structural, net gains from marriage that are typical, given the context of the society that the studied individuals were living in. The dimension of opportunity–constraint reflects the way that marriage costs, household context, and community-level conditions influence the timing and incidence of marriage. Opportunity and constraint are opposites along this dimension. In general, constraint lowers marriage chances and opportunity indicates that constraint in some way could be overcome. Thus, according to the EAP model, the decisions of actors are based on general incentives to marry, and opportunities and constraints to marriage that were different depending on gender, household context, and socioeconomic status. The EAP marriage model aims at exploring the basic mechanisms of marriage in the studied populations, given the well-known differences in family systems. Like the previous EAP models for mortality and reproduction, the EAP marriage model includes variables at the individual, household, and community levels that are presumed to have influenced the actors’ marriage behavior. Incentives—Disincentives “Love” and “money” have been the two most important motives for marriage across cultures and times. Depending on the context, stress has been put on one or the other, though. While modern ideals

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emphasize romantic love as the prime benefit of marriage, the materialistic side to marriage was probably more important in the past. Love as a motive for marriage has its background in biology and sexual instincts, and the psychic returns to marriage along this dimension are usually described in terms of affection, happiness, companionship, affinity, and so on, in the social science literature (Orden and Bradburn 1968; Byrne 1971, 1997; Shorter 1975; Stone 1977; Kalmijn 1998). In Western Europe, where young people were more independent from their parents than in Asia, love was an essential element of the courtship system, especially among the landless groups (Ehmer 2002: 313–21; Thornton 2005: 54–55). Studies of populations that practice arranged marriages conclude that love tends to exist after marriage (Broude 1994; Thornton 2005: 54–55). Money as a motive for marriage is referring to materialistic gains in a broader sense (for a more detailed and theory-driven discussion of the material incentives to first marriage, see chapter 5). In the types of societies we are dealing with in this book, such returns to marriage were mostly associated with the formation of a new household or a change of position in an existing household (immediately or in the future). The household was the dominant and most efficient unit for production/income, consumption, and distribution in preindustrial Europe and Asia; household structure and size differed between the studied populations depending on the family system, though. Production, consumption, and welfare were organized by the household, which pooled resources, distributed goods, and evened out risks (Ehmer 2002: 297–300). The economic rationale of the household was economy of scale, for instance, the sharing of consumption costs (housing rent, furniture, household equipment, etc.), increasing returns in household production of goods and services, and bulk discounts in purchasing (Nelson 1988: 1301–1302; Waite 1995: 492–93). Through the pooling of resources, division of labor, and sharing of risks, the net consumption and savings per capita in a multi-person household exceeded what would have been possible to reach in a one-person household (Parsons and Bales 1955; Becker 1965, 1985). Consequently, and given the fact that the average level of standard of living was much lower than today, there were few single-person households. The economic importance of the household could partly be derived from the fact that the technological level was quite low and benefits from largescale production few, partly from the fact that the costs of supervision of labor were generally low in peasant households. Within the

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household, social control was substantial and family members and domestic servants were generally loyal and industrious. Within the household, the production revenue was consumed and shared by household members on more altruistic grounds than in any other organization of that time (Lee, Wang, and Tsuya 2010: 325–26). As a social insurance and welfare institution, the household was in a class of its own prior to the era of private insurances and public welfare. The ideal type of preindustrial household functions just given is valid first and foremost for propertied families, while the role of the household for joint production or as a welfare institution was less pronounced for poorer families. On the one hand, worker families received most of their earnings from work outside the household and their resources were too small to be able to save money for periods of unemployment, sickness or old age. On the other hand, the household was still a unit for economic cooperation between the spouses in these families, and terms like “adaptive family economy” (Wall 1986) or “industrious households” (de Vries 1994) reflect the adaptive behavior of the working poor in early modern Europe (Mitterauer and Siedler 1982: 78–80; Ehmer 2002: 297–300). As a result of industrialization and other societal change, the traditional role of the household as a unit for economic cooperation between the spouses gave way to a new household model (male breadwinner–female homemaker) that was established in the late nineteenth century, when our study period ends. For the individual there were clear incentives to enter a marital union since this typically implied a higher social status and level of standard of living. Marriage symbolized the starting point of a new phase in the life cycle, either as a master or mistress of an own separate household as in Europe (Model, Furstenberg, and Herschberg 1976: tab. 1; van Poppel and Nelissen 1999: 51–52), or as a nuclear unit within the parental household as in Asia. In the latter case this unit would later develop into a superior unit of a household, either by inheritance or fission. In Europe, marriage was a significant step toward full independence from the parents, while in Asia, parental control continued after marriage. In both cases, however, the social status of married people was generally much higher than that of unmarried people (Ehmer 2002: 298). Furthermore marriage was the main form of sexual relation and usually led to an improvement in the individual’s consumption level. Not only for the immediate improvement of position, status, and consumption, but also in a long-term perspective, there were

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individual incentives to marry. Family formation and the rearing of children, which meant a downward pressure on the consumption level of the household as long as the children were small, could be seen as an investment in future benefits. The household was a general security for its members in cases of illness and any unforeseen events (e.g., famines, change of political conditions). When they became older, the children could contribute to the household production and take care of the parents in old age. Thus the individual had good reasons to marry. In the social context of preindustrial Europe and Asia, life as an unmarried person would be equivalent to a lifelong position of subordination within the household and a low rank in the social hierarchy. From a parental perspective, marriage of a child was beneficial too. One classic motive for marriage has been the formation of an alliance between two families confirmed by a marriage between representatives of the younger generation (Lévi-Strauss 1971/1947; Ehmer 2002: 292– 94). The unification of two family lines may reduce the risk of future conflicts and pooled land and other resources, thereby maintaining and increasing the wealth and status of the included families. Another incentive for the parents to encourage a child to marry has been to secure social reproduction, including board and lodging in old age for the parents (Ehmer 2002: 294–97). The motive was general but was certainly more important before the rise of the modern welfare state. In the study locations of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and Asia, no modern social security arrangements such as insurance or provision for old age or sickness, public health, and nursing existed (for details, see chapter 5). Individuals had to rely on the family, which was the most important institution providing social security for its members. Furthermore, within the family, assets were transmitted continuously, from producers to consumers, often between generations. For an aging couple, it was secure to have a married son or daughter who was responsible for taking care of them in their old age (Tsuya and Nystedt 2004). The matchmaking aspect of this is that it was important that the selected partner of a marrying child contributed in a substantial way to the household with property and labor so that the production capacity of the property could maintain two family units. For example, frequently practiced divorce and remarriage in Japan can be seen as a trial marriage, a strategy to find a good match for a succeeding child (Kurosu 2011). In short, institutional arrangements for taking care of the elderly varied depending on family system and inheritance practice.

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Pre-modern society in Europe and Asia implied, as we have seen, both individual and parental incentives for marriage. Since the bulk of people in all the studied populations were actually married—the proportion of married people aged 45 to 49 ranged from 78 to 100 percent (see table 3.2 in chapter 3)—attitudes could be assumed to have been mostly in favor of marriage. The fact that the life courses of the vast majority included a marriage must have affected the expectations of a “typical” life of unmarried younger individuals to a large extent. Since a system of universal marriage was practiced in Asia, especially for women, the target of marriage was probably even more pronounced in Asia than in Europe. Also the social norms of the proper age of marriage must have influenced the timing of marriage for individuals (Hogan and Astone 1986: 116–18; Skinner 1997: 60; van Poppel and Nelissen 1999: 52). The influence of family and local community could be described as socialization in marriage according to local customs. The fact that some individuals never married could partly be explained by a lack of resources and external constraints (see below), but there were also disincentives in some cases, such as for widows who would lose their legal competence if they remarried (Lundh 2002: 433, 446; Lundh 2007: 373–74, 400–401), or unmarried persons who would have to lower their standard of living if they formed a family (Guinnane 1991: 50).15 In conclusion, there were clear incentives to marry for both the marriage candidates and the parental families. The fact that marriage was a typical phase in the lives of most individuals in the study populations indicates that the involved parties generally held positive attitudes toward marriage. Thus it is a basic assumption of this book that the actors aimed to get married. The timing and incidence of the marriage were, however, dependent on the attractiveness of candidates, resources of the parental household, and household and community-level constraints, and the interactions of these factors. Opportunities—Constraints Marriage Costs Marriage costs are both material and psychic. For marriage in preindustrial Eurasia we distinguish three types of material costs as being particularly important: investment costs for forming a new household unit, search costs and direct marriage payments. The “money” cost of marriage plays a decisive role in the Malthus/ Hajnal paradigm. In Western Europe it was costly for mates who wanted to get married because they were expected to be able to set up

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a new household upon marriage. Therefore they had to work and save during a phase of their lives until they had enough money to get married (Hajnal 1965: 132–33; Schofield 1976: 151–52; Wrigley 1981: 183; Hajnal 1982: 451–53). As shown in chapter 5, the burden of such investment costs varied among social groups, though. For those who aimed at setting up, for example, a farming household, large investments were needed in furniture, bedding and household items, working premises, tools and equipment, cattle, a horse, and so on. If the parents owned land or other resources, the savings target of a child could be reached sooner by inheritance if a parent died, or by the transfer of resources between the generations while both parents were still alive. In families that owned no property or other resources that could be transferred, this way of shortening the waiting time was not possible. However, the investment costs needed were smaller, since such households were mainly consumption units and, to a lesser degree, units for cooperative household production and welfare (see also Fertig 2005: 43–44). Besides the investments needed, marriage implies costs for the searching and screening of potential candidates (and their families) (Keeley 1977: 238–40; Keeley 1979: 528–29). Search costs include both forgone gains from marriage during the searching period and factual costs. Since marriage is not only a demographic event but a social process during which the actors identify possible marriage candidates, meet, negotiate, and plan for the marriage, it involves substantial costs for the households (besides the ordinary costs of food, housing, etc., for the unmarried child). Since the parental household played a more important role in marriage in Asia than in Europe, search costs were probably higher there. In Europe, search costs could be hypothesized to have varied among social groups depending on the availability of resources and ambition. For a propertied family searching for a partner to a child that wanted to get married, choosing one with the “right” features was of great importance, such as with regard to wealth and human skills. Here the family wealth was at stake; search costs could be accepted because the gains from marriage depended on the quality of the match, and also because the family disposed of resources to cover them. For a family without property, search costs were smaller for several reasons. One is that the issue of partner choice was less important for social groups without property; marriage could result in upward social mobility, but a homogamous union of two unpropertied parties was the default

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outcome and meant no shame for either party. Another reason is that for the lower classes, the gains from marriage could be expected to have been smaller than for those with property; consequently the gains forgone during the search period were smaller too. Finally, poorer families disposed of smaller resources and therefore did not spend as much on searching and screening of potential partners as did the propertied. The analysis of first marriage in chapter 5 builds on the following important revaluation of previous beliefs. While the Malthus–Hajnal paradigm stresses the importance of marriage costs in Western Europe, it tends to underestimate the importance of such costs in regions where complex family systems were the norm. The main argument is that the pattern of early and universal marriage was due to the fact that marriage was not as expensive as in Europe, since the married couple lived in the parental household and did not have to set up a new household. Even though some costs were higher in the cases of neolocal households, forming a new unit within an existing household also implied costs for an extra room, bedding, clothes, and the daily consumption upon marriage. Furthermore some costs associated with marriage such as for searching and bargaining were probably larger in complex family systems than in regions where marriage was the result of individual mating and decisions. Then, again, bride prices/dowers or dowries could be costly investments in marriage for the two involved parental households. Given the virilocal residential pattern, the groom’s parental household gained additional labor when the son married, while the bride’s parental household lost labor when a daughter married and moved out, which was sometimes compensated for by bride prices (Murdock 1967; Goody 1973; Quale 1988). As to the material marriage costs, marriage implies payments between the bride’s and the groom’s families (or between the marrying parties directly), such as in the form of a dowry or bride price (Anderson 2007; Kaplan 1985; see chapter 5 for a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications). A dowry is the price the bride’s family pays to get a resource-rich husband, and this could also be seen as an altruistic transaction of resources from parents to a daughter in order to keep up her status in the marriage. Bride price is the payment a husband or his family owes to the bride’s parents for the rights to her labor or reproductive capacity. Dowries could be hypothesized to have been more important for resource-rich families in Europe where daughters inherited their parents, while bride prices were more important in

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Asia and the price was standardized and less dependent on the wealth of the household than with dowries. The psychic costs of marriage dealt with here are costs that could be anticipated before the marriage and thus could be thought to have potential influence on the marriage decision, not the perceived negative outcomes of marriage that were discovered after the wedding. We identify two such psychic costs. First, for the unmarried person it is a psychic cost to leave the parental home and move into another household, breaking or weakening strong ties with the parents and siblings. On the one hand, the cost was hypothetically inversely related to age and larger for females in cases of virilocal residence, the opposite being true for males in cases of uxorilocal residence, and neolocal residence being more gender neutral. On the other hand, the age of a marriage candidate was probably positively correlated to the psychic marriage costs of parents, since younger brides and grooms were easier to manipulate during the marriage process than older ones. Second, actions and choices that violate social norms related to marriage give rise to psychic costs. Social norms are culturally embedded and tell us how to behave during the marriage process, in relation to the parents, siblings, prospective partners in the future and their families, and to others. Some norms are common for entire populations (e.g., through taboos or legislation) while others are specific for social groups or by ethnicity/religion. Individuals and households tend to follow social norms in order to minimize psychic costs. Household Context In addition to the direct marriage costs, other important constraints to marriage stem from the social norms on how a marriage should be carried out, without upsetting the household order, for instance, with regard to the individual’s relation to the head of the household, older siblings, and relatives outside the household (Hernes 1972: 173–74; Model 1980 211–12; Hogan and Astone 1986: 116–18; Bongaarts and Watkins 1996: 659–60; van Poppel and Nelissen 1999: 51–53; Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2004; Derosas and Oris 2002; Wang, Lee, Tsuya, Kurosu, et al. 2010). Social norms could, for instance, prescribe certain marriage orders among siblings, depending on birth order and gender, or bring about norms on the transfer of property between generations and on who among the children should take care of the parents or a widowed parent in their old age. The composition of the parental household and the relation between a potential marriage candidate and the head of the household may lead

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to different types of constraints to marriage, given the social norms. Consequently a change in the household composition, for instance, through the death of a household member, changes the prevailing household hierarchy and puts the members in new positions, which influences their probability of marriage in one way or another (Tsuya and Kurosu 2000). Thus the life status of the parents and the number of siblings are variables of great importance to the individual marriage chance of the household members. If both parents are alive and not too old, the household is probably wealthy enough to manage a marriage of a child. Yet, to the extent that making over land or position from the older to the younger generation is necessary to make a marriage possible, having both parents alive may prolong the waiting time. The death of a mother or a father may open up the way for inheritance, thereby shortening the waiting time, but it may also imply that one of the children needs to help the widowed parent and stay unmarried for some time. If one or both parents are dead, the wealth of the household may also be lower than before. Another type of household constraint is the competition among unmarried siblings for resources to get married. Social norms may prescribe a “marriage order” that is gender neutral or gender specific, and the number of siblings at different ages influences the probability of marriage for a specific unmarried child. Widowhood, too, induces a specific type of constraint on the household: the competition between the widowed parent and adult children over the resources that are needed to set up a marriage. In Japan and Europe, pre-modern social norms were supportive to remarriage, although there was a social penalty on older widows who remarried in Europe in the nineteenth century (see chapter 6). Social norms related to the household order and household context influenced individuals differently depending on gender and social class. While the influence of household factors on marriage could be expected to be lower for individuals with low socioeconomic status in Europe, since they typically moved out of the parental home early and were not expecting to inherit much, the marriage of a child was a very important event for propertied households, which needed to be carefully planned. For the sake of the family business, it was of utmost importance whom a child married. Usually socioeconomically equal partners were preferred, since this facilitated the accomplishment of parental marriage strategies in order to form social alliances, pool economic resources, or just to ensure that the prospective partner would

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fit the role as a new master or mistress (Bourdieu 1976; Ehmer 2002: 294–97, 313–16; Dribe and Lundh 2005a: 150–56). Community-Level Conditions Besides marriage costs and household context, external community-level economic and demographic conditions constrain marriage. First, the availability of land, jobs, and dwellings in the location constrains marriage chances. Since the number of farms, shops, crofts, and the like, was stable or increased only slowly in preindustrial times, there was a potential link between mortality and availability of resources. An increase in adult mortality indicates an increase in the number of vacant landholdings, jobs and housing opportunities, and a lower mortality rate indicates more crowding and competition (Ohlin 1960: 190, 197). Second, short-term economic stress influences the demographic behavior of individuals and households. In preindustrial times the major source of external stress was related to food access (Bengtsson 2004: 45–50). Bad harvests drove up the grain prices for entire regions, caused cost of living to increase, real earnings to decline, and food to occupy a larger portion of the household budgets, influencing also the size and composition of food consumption. Research using aggregatelevel data has established an association between food prices and vital events in preindustrial Europe (Richards 1984: 382; Weir 1984b: 45–47; Galloway 1988: 288–89; Lee 1990: 375; for an overview, see Bengtsson and Reher 1998). Based on individual-level longitudinal data, the previous EAP studies give strong support for the influence of food prices on mortality and reproduction, especially for the most vulnerable groups (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). It could be hypothesized that short-term fluctuation in grain prices influences the timing of marriage as well. The waiting time can be assumed to be shorter in periods of increasing access to food and real earnings. However, it can be hypothesized that fluctuation in food prices affect socioeconomic groups differently (Bengtsson 204, 45–50). The interaction of socioeconomic status and food prices is dealt with in more depth in chapter 5. Third, another type of external constraint comes from the availability of prospective spouses in the marriage market, given the social norms on what constitutes a “proper” match. One basic social norm in Europe and Asia prescribes that a marital union is between husband and wife, namely a man and a woman. If the proportion of unmarried males and females is skew, the timing of marriage is influenced in a

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different way for men and women (Bergstrom and Lam 1994: 61–62). Other social norms influencing the choice of marriage partner are specific for certain groups. Research in the field of partner selection, contemporary and historical, indicates that preferences have been mostly in favor of endogamy along a row of features (race, religion, language, education, status, etc.; see Bumpass 1970: 253–55; Heer 1974: 246–49; Monahan 1976: 224–26; Kalmijn 1998: 398–400). To the extent that the actors in the marriage market search for partners with the preferred features, for instance that resource-rich candidates and families search for a prospective partner of the same kind, the probability of a match is dependent on the number of available candidates (Blau 1977; Blau, Blum, and Schwartz 1982: 46–48; Blau, Beeker, and Fitzpatrick 1984: 598). Expectations on Outcome and Determinants The literature on Eurasian marriage and related issues tends to emphasize the big divide between the East and the West. This paradigm intertwines several generalizations based on aggregate statistics or norm systems, which will be scrutinized in the EAP studies of local populations. One generalization states that the European marriage pattern (late marriages, large proportions of never marrying) was different from the Asian (or rather non-European) marriage pattern (early and universal marriages), and that the European pattern was constrained by the household formation system (Hajnal 1865, 1972; Engelen and Wolf 2005). In Europe, marriage chances were therefore dependent on access of material resources, such as land in rural areas, and unpropertied people were sensitive to fluctuations in real wages (Hajnal 1965, 1972; Schofield 1976; Wrigley 1981; Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Marriage in the East has been characterized as collectivist (as compared to individualist Europe), and relations in the family and household have been characterized by gendered and parental authority (Macfarlane 1978, 1986; Skinner 1997; Wolf 2005). Even though we claim that the East–West binary picture is too simplistic, we do not expect the EAP marriage studies of local populations will wreck the Hajnal thesis of a European marriage pattern. We expect nevertheless that comparative studies of individual and household decision making will indicate more similarity between European and Asian populations, and more variation within the East and West, respectively, than will fit the East–West dichotomy. Also, and not least, based on our previous findings on Eurasian mortality and fertility, we

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expect determinants like socioeconomic status and community-level oscillation of wages and prices to have been more important in propertybased European societies, and gendered and parental power to have been more pronounced in power-based societies in Asia. If so, we will be able to help to qualify the meaning of Eurasian marriage, and to modify some of the generalizations on the East–West differences. Conclusion A comparative study of marriage looks for similarities and differences in marriage behavior in different populations across times and societies. Tendencies to similarity or difference can be studied with regard to structures (culture, norms, systems, patterns) and actors (individual and family choices). Although marriage, or marriage-like unions, can be found in most societies and may derive from a universal human need for a stable cooperative arrangement for successful reproduction, it is also true that there is a great variety in marriage details across cultures, geographies and time periods. The Malthus–Hajnal paradigm deals with marriage from a structural perspective only, comparing Europe and Asia (or rather England and China) with regard to the average marriage pattern and family formation system. In the previous chapter we claimed that this perspective on pre-modern marriage is far too simplistic and that its link between hypothesized individual behavior and aggregate evidence is quite weak. We believe that a more elaborate approach to a comparative study of marriage is needed that takes into consideration the more complex situations that individuals and families faced when marriage was considered. If we want to study marriage behavior, it must be studied at the actor level, where individuals and families made their choices and decisions. The EAP approach to comparative analysis of pre-modern Eurasian marriage matches such requirements. It is based on the assumption that individuals and families had to deal with a rather complex situation and consider factors of various sorts. We study marriage at the individual level using longitudinal data, accounting for the influence of the abilities and resources of the individual marriage candidates, the resources and composition of the (parental) households, and the community-level context. Controlling for the differences between the studied populations with regard to the marriage patterns and family formation systems, we aim to study the extent to which individuals

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and families behaved in a similar way in marriage matters despite the fact that cultures and institutions were quite different. Notes 1. The terms refer to postnuptial residence. “Virilocal” indicates that the married couple is included in the parental household of the husband, “uxorilocal” that they are included in the parental household of the wife, and “neolocal” that the young couple form a separate own household upon marriage (Fox 1967: 198). 2. There also existed a “launching pad” model, where a new couple temporarily resided with the parents of one of the spouses (Skinner 1997: 62); this was not uncommon in Western Europe, particularly in urban areas (Alter 1996; Derosas 2003). 3. Other types of minor marriages include little-daughter-in-law marriage and levirate (to marry a brother of one’s diseased husband); see Wolf and Huang (1980) and Birge (2002). 4. Yet a third Japanese residential form has been distinguished, namely ashiire-kon, when the wife remained in her natal home and was visited by her husband every night, without his moving in until later (Emori 1986). This form of marriage, however, is not found in the populations of this study. 5. Das Gupta argues the relationship between female autonomy and mortality (1995). Tsuya and Kurosu (2004: 280–81) found in the studied populations that compared to those who were heads’ spouses, women who were spouses of stem kin had significantly higher mortality. 6. In the Japanese study location, for example, a customary law allowed one to remarry when the partner has absconded and did not come back for six months (see chapter 6). 7. The only exception was in Mongolia where the practice of ultimogeniture inheritance (inheritance by the last child) is said to have been common. 8. Hypergamy means that a person marries someone of higher socioeconomic status, and hypogamy that a person marries someone of lower status. 9. The EAP model also attaches to the previous EAP analyses of mortality and reproduction. The model is a common framework for the different analyses used in most chapters of this book, and complemented in some chapters. Some parts of the model are based on the achievements in chapter 5 by Tommy Bengtsson et al. (for details, see the text). 10. Compared to economic models, for instance, in the New Home Economics tradition, our approach is “moderate” in the sense that we do not assume perfect rationality, only that people usually know their interest and are trying to get what they want. Also individualism is not a precondition for the EAP model; rather, we recognize families/households as actors as well as individuals, and social structure and context are present in the model. 11. We do not thus refer to the specific statistical tool package of sequential analysis (e.g., see Wald 1947). 12. We are, however, aware of the possibility of single decisions leading to lifelong celibacy, for instance when a young person decides to take the vows and become a monk or nun, but we see these cases as exceptional.

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13. Interestingly, in the second edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population Malthus described marriage as the outcome of a cost–benefit calculation on the part of both men and women (Macfarlane 1986: 321; Ehmer 2002: 289). Advantages of getting married such as assuaging the psychological pressure for “love/companionship” and the biological urge for sex were balanced against the economic and social costs of marriage. Malthus presented cost–benefit analyses for the classes of the wealthy, the middle classes, the wage-earners, and the servants, and because their social and economic situation varied the calculations differed; still the net gain of marriage was in many cases negative and postponement of marriage (or celibacy) a rational outcome. 14. In some cases, psychic benefits and costs hypothetically stemming from social norms could be measured indirectly by the actions of individuals and households; in other cases, the absence of response to “materialistic” gains or costs may indicate that idealistic motives are more important. 15. We cannot rule out the possibility that some individuals refrained from marriage for other reasons, such as disability. Tusya and Kurosu (2004: 280) in fact found in the studied Japanese population that never-married or divorced women were much more likely to die than their currently married counterparts. They argue the possibility of marriage selection; that is, never-married or divorced women failed to get or stay married because of their poor physical and mental health.

3

Nuptiality: Local Populations, Sources, and Models Satomi Kurosu and Christer Lundh

This comparative study of marriage follows our previous endeavors on mortality and fertility in the Eurasia Project. More so than mortality or fertility, however, marriage is a social construction and not a simple response to biology. How are we to compare the product of an intricate interaction of sociocultural, historical, and demographic processes of human agency, which varies in any given context across cultures, geographies, and time periods? In this chapter we delineate our approach to a comparison of this complex event. First, we introduce patterns of property (socioeconomic status) and power (household organization) differentials in our study populations which have been important in explaining our previous studies of mortality and reproduction (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Tsuya, Wang, Altar, Lee, et al. 2010). We then describe the nuptiality patterns of the studied populations. While acknowledging that patterns of age at first marriage and celibacy conform to the well-known East–West divide, we also emphasize the universalities of Eurasian marriage patterns, from which we build the basic assumptions of our study. Second, we show how actors, namely individuals and households, are brought into the central stage of marriage decision making. We begin by introducing the comparative data sources of the study populations that make our approach possible. We then explain how we measure the potential determinants of first marriage and remarriage. Building on the design of the EAP marriage model presented in chapter 1 and the theoretical and contextual background in chapter 2, we describe the empirical design of the model, showing how variables are constructed, and presenting the statistical methods used. Third, we present the results of a common model estimated by all participants to examine determinants of the relative risk of first marriage, concentrating on the major variables that influence opportunities and constraints to marriage: gender, socioeconomic

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status, and household context. This illustrates their comparative value and facilitates understanding of the results of our statistical analysis. It will also introduce further questions to be addressed in the later chapters. Local Populations We compare seven local populations in five regional contexts in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and Asia: Scania in southern Sweden, Sart and Pays de Herve in eastern Belgium, Casalguidi in central Italy, Shimomoriya and Niita (two villages are pooled) in northeastern Japan, and Liaoning and Shuangcheng in northeast China. Data for these local populations span the period from 1716 to 1913 (see tables 3.4 and 3.5 below). Details of local context are described in each local chapter. This section introduces the local populations, focusing on socioeconomic status and household organization, two important dimensions of analysis in our previous studies (Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee, et al. 2004; Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010), and discusses them in relation to the nuptiality patterns of the study populations. From our previous studies we know that socioeconomic status (“property”) had a greater effect on mortality and reproduction in our European than our East Asian populations, while household organization and position (“power”) mattered more in East Asian communities than in Europe. Here we extend our arguments into the field of nuptiality, further increasing our understanding of the demographic regimes and of individual and household behavior in the marriage market. Socioeconomic Dimension As discussed elsewhere (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2004: 86–93; Lee, Wang, and Tsuya 2010: 30–33), the populations of this study were rural and had roughly comparable levels of commercialization. None of these populations were unusually well-off or advanced. We know from our previous studies on mortality and fertility that they experienced changing economic conditions reflected in variations in grain prices and wages. While the populations were all agricultural, there was substantial variation in specific economic context. Scania was primarily agricultural, located in the rich open plains of the breadbasket of Sweden. Agrarian production was organized either as family farming on

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freehold, crown, or manorial land or as large-scale corvee-work or wage-work on the manors (chapter 7). The eastern Belgian municipality of Sart was a poor, hilly region whose inhabitants depended heavily on the area’s abundant communally owned forests for wood and forage for livestock, as well as slash and burn agriculture. Pays de Herve was a plateau of rolling meadows and orchards, and was prosperous, having had an early transition from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture (chapter 8). The Tuscan form of sharecropping farm (podere mezzadrile) predominated in the central Italian village of Casalguidi, and remained so during the period under study (chapter 9). The northeastern Japanese villages of Shimomoriya and Niita depended largely on rice agriculture with small-scale intensive family farming (chapter 10). The Liaoning and Shuangcheng populations consisted of tenants on state-owned land who were descended from migrants who arrived in Liaoning beginning in the seventeenth century and in Shuangcheng between 1815 and 1830, and had diverse geographic and economic context (chapter 11). The clearest systematic difference between the economic contexts of the Eastern and Western populations is in the distribution of wealth, as reflected in landholding. Figure 3.1 compares the distribution of land among households in six Eurasian study populations (Scania, Sart, Casalguidi, Shimomoriya and Niita, Liaoning, and Shuangcheng) based on late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century population registers and/or taxation records.1 Wealth differed dramatically within our study populations and varied between two extremes—the highly egalitarian rural communities of northeastern Japan and China, and the more unequal societies of southern Sweden. The contrasts are clearest at the opposite ends of the social spectrum. At the top, in Scania, Sart, and Casalguidi, the richest 5 percent of the households held 36, 31, and 25 percent of the land, respectively. In contrast, the corresponding shares were 15 percent in Shimomoriya and Niita and 20 percent in Shuangcheng. The picture at the bottom of the distribution is very different. Landless households accounted for as much as 50, 40, and 30 percent of all households in Scania, Sart, and Casalguidi, respectively. However, only 15 percent of all households in Shimomoriya and Niita and 10 percent in Shuangcheng were landless.2 Although precise figures are not available for Liaoning, the provincial averages on the eve of land reform in 1948 were remarkably similar to those of Shimomoriya and Niita and of Shuangcheng. Only 15 percent of the rural population had no land at all.3 Thus the most

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100 90

Percentage of land

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Percentage of households Scania Casalguidi

Shuangcheng Sart

Shimomoriya and Niita Liaoning

Figure 3.1 Wealth inequality in six Eurasian study populations. Note: “Percentage of land” refers to the prospective yield of farms rather than the exact size of land, except for Casalguidi where the family tax included property and earnings.

nonegalitarian of our populations was Scania, while the least were Liaoning’s imperial peasants. The Gini coefficient gives a comprehensive measure of inequality and is based on the data presented in figure 3.1 (the Lorenz curve). The Gini index ranges from zero to one where zero expresses perfect equality and one maximal inequality. In the figure, perfect equality is represented by the diagonal line from zero to one. Calculations of Gini coefficients for the study populations included in figure 3.1 confirm the hierarchy in wealth inequality previously described. Scania was at the top with a Gini coefficient of 0.74, followed by Sart (0.65) and Casalguidi (0.60). The least unequal populations were those in Liaoning, Shimomoriya and Niita, and Shuangcheng with a Gini coefficient of 0.37, 0.41, and 0.45, respectively. If we follow the logic of our previous studies, we would expect a stronger effect of socioeconomic factors on marriage and remarriage in Western communities where inequality was greater.

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Household Organization Dimension Just as in the case of “property,” study populations tended to be polarized with regard to “power.” The predominantly simple conjugal household populations in eastern Belgium and Scania contrast with the complex stem-family household populations in northeastern Japan, and joint families in northeastern China (Lee, Wang, and Tsuya 2010: 28). The central Italian populations, however, fall between the two groups due to the high proportion of sharecroppers and the consequently higher degree of complexity in domestic organization (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2004: 97). Our detailed studies of household organization and structure reveal that similarities and dissimilarities in kin composition and other criteria are a product of the principles for family formation and household organization followed by each population (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2004: 93–101, tab. 4.3). The central Italian and northeastern Japanese populations followed a stem primogeniture system4 and therefore resembled each other in some ways. Eastern Belgian and southern Swedish populations followed largely neolocal principles of family formation and norms of partible inheritance. The northeastern Chinese populations followed joint principles of family formation combined with norms of partible inheritance. Similarities in male patriarchy may explain other cross-continental similarities, such as the low rates of widow remarriage in northeast China and northern Italy (see chapter 6). Marriage plays different roles in household formation in different family systems. In simple conjugal household populations, on one hand, a new household is created upon marriage. This was even expressed as “marriage demande ménage” (a marriage requires a household) in Belgium (chapter 8). In complex household populations, on the other hand, marriage is irrelevant to household formation since young couples always remain either in the husband’s or the wife’s native household. Marriage in the European populations was predominantly neolocal while in the Asian populations it was predominantly virilocal, though uxorilocal marriage was also prevalent in Japan. In our study populations, there were numerous cases of virilocal or uxorilocal marriage. In Sart, the proportions of virilocal and uxorilocal marriage were 17 and 10 percent for men and 9 and 17 percent for women, respectively (Campbell et al. 2006). Co-residence with parents tended to be temporary, and was usually followed by the establishment of a new household once the new couple accumulated enough resources.5 Postnuptial co-residence with parents in societies with a

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complex household system was usually long term. In Casalguidi where sharecroppers were predominant, 54 percent of the men (considered virilocal) and 5 percent of the women (considered uxorilocal) stayed in the parental household upon marriage (table 9.2).6 In Liaoning and Shuangcheng, almost all marriages were virilocal. Among men in Shimomoriya and Niita, virilocal and uxorilocal marriages made up 84 and 16 percent of all marriages, respectively. Among women, 29 percent of the marriages were virilocal, 34 percent uxorilocal, and the rest (presumed to have been mostly virilocal) were marriages outside the village.7 Such variety in household arrangements upon marriage generate differences in incentives and opportunities for individuals and households. Marriage was a collective decision in societies characterized by stem and joint-family systems while the simple-family system builds on individual decisions. Further, based on our previous studies on mortality and reproduction, the more complex the household organization (i.e., the presence of co-residents of different gender, generation, or hierarchy), the more affected the timing of marriage and remarriage would be. Nuptiality Patterns To compare nuptiality patterns in the study communities, we will start with the simplest and the most used indicators of the timing and incidence of marriage: average age at first marriage and celibacy. We should note that even though our focus is on the first marriage of individuals, in some cases their partners may have been previously married. In a similar way, when we examine remarriages (chapter 6), we study widowed individuals, while their partners may have been unmarried or previously married. In all study population except one, the “previously married” were widowers and widows; in Shimomoriya and Niita, this category also included a substantial number of divorced individuals. Table 3.1 displays descriptive statistics of the average age at first marriage for men and women. In addition we show the proportions of those who had never been married for different age groups (figures 3.2 and 3.3). The population of never-married individuals (in certain age spans) constitutes the risk population for the regressions of first marriage, and the proportion of never-married is used for the estimations of the singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) (table 3.2). While the arithmetic mean age at marriage shown in table 3.1 is based solely on

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Table 3.1 Age at first marriage in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Men Study areas and populations Southern Sweden Scania, 1815–1894 Eastern Belgium Sart, 1812–1899 Pay de Herve, 1846–1900 Central Italy Casalguidi, 1819–1859 Northeastern Japan Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 Northeastern China Liaoning, 1789–1909 Shuangcheng, 1870–1913

Women

Mean

Standard deviation

Mean

Standard deviation

N

28.0

5.0

807

25.6

5.0

1,128

30.3 31.1

5.7 6.2

1,533 1,244

27.1 29.1

5.8 6.1

1,485 1,345

27.6

6.2

394

24.8

5.7

756

18.6

5.4

748

14.7

3.3

708

20.4 21.6

7.8 7.3

49,082 18,391

18.5 20.0

4.3 3.6

9,490 8,502

N

Sources: Scania: population registers (husförhörslängder) and church records of vital events linked to poll-tax registers (mantalslängder) (see chapter 7); Sart and Pays de Herve: population registers (see chapter 8); Casalguidi: parish registers linked to the Status animarum (see chapter 9); Shimomoriya and Niita: local population registers (ninbetsu-aratame-cho) (see chapter 10); Liaoning: banner household registers (see chapter 11); Shuangcheng: banner household registers (see chapter 11). The Scania data are from the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD), the data of Liaoning are from the China MultiGenerational Panel Dataset, Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), and the data of Shuangcheng are from China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC). Note: Populations in ages 10–45. The table is constructed based on table 4.1.

recorded marriages, the SMAM in table 3.2 takes age structure into account. Therefore SMAM is often considered to provide more realistic figures for the marriage pattern of the populations. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 confirm a clear East–West divide in the timing of marriage and rates of celibacy, alongside the differences on socioeconomic (egalitarian vs. nonegalitarian) and household (complex vs. simple) dimensions noted earlier. East Asian men and women married much earlier than their European counterparts. In the East Asian study populations, the average age at first marriage was between 15 and 20 for women and between 19 and 22 for men. In the European study populations the average age at first marriage was considerably higher,

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Table 3.2 Singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) and proportion never married in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913

SMAM Study areas and populations Southern Sweden Scania, 1815–1894 Eastern Belgium Sart, 1812–1899 Pay de Herve, 1846–1900 Central Italy Casalguidi, 1819–1859 Northeastern Japan Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 Northeastern China Liaoning, 1789–1909 Shuangcheng, 1870–1913

Never-married (% at 45–49)

Person-year (age 0–49)

Men

Women

Men

Women

Men

Women

28.7

26.8

14.8

13.6

22,753

23,614

30.1 30.9

28.6 29.8

16.1 21.6

11.7 21.3

44,440 80,138

19,531 85,021

28.5

25.7

14.5

10.0

40,828

40,662

19.1

15.2

4.8

0.6

45,794

43,149

20.1 20.5

17.8 20.4

13.5 10.4

0.7 3.1

75,393 23,328

16,305 10,713

Sources: See table 3.1. Notes: Figures except Chinese are based on the calculations we performed for our fertility analysis (Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). Liaoning and Shuangcheng figures are life-table calculations as underregistration of never-married females precludes calculation of SMAM. Person-years for Sart are for age, 10–49.

between 25 and 31. The SMAM estimates in table 3.2 are slightly higher than the arithmetic means for most populations, but the East–West divide in marriage age is obvious. Furthermore less than 5 percent of East Asians (except Chinese men) had never married by the ages of 45–49. In contrast, 10 to 22 percent of European men and women had never experienced marriage by age 45–49. Figures 3.2 and 3.3 capture the dynamics of marriage patterns in the studied populations. Not only did women in the East Asian study populations marry earlier than European women, they were also more likely to marry overall. By age 20, at least half of females were married; by ages 25–30, less than 10 percent remained unmarried. Among women in the West European populations, marriage rarely took place before age 20, and afterward marriages proceeded at a slower pace. By 25–30, half of European women were married. However, between10 and 20 percent of women remained unmarried at 45–49. There were some variations within the West and the East. Women in Shimomoriya

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100 90 80 70

Percent

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 15–19

20–24

25–30

30–34

35–39

40–44

45–49

Age group Scania Casalguidi Shuangcheng

Sart Shimomoriya and Niita

Pays de Herve Liaoning

Figure 3.2 Proportion never-married by age: women. Notes: Figures 3.2 and 3.3 except Shuangcheng and Liaoning are based on the calculations we performed for our fertility analysis (Tsuya, Wang, Alter, Lee, et al. 2010). For Liaoning and Shuangcheng the proportion of nevermarried of a five-year group is the unweighted mean of the proportions of five, one-year groups. For the Chinese study populations the female numbers are based on life-table estimates, because complete counts of unmarried women are not available. Sources: See table 3.1.

and Niita started to marry much earlier than Chinese women, and women in Pays de Herve started to marry considerably later and were more prone to remain unmarried compared to women in the other European populations. The contrast between East and West applies to the male populations as well, although we find more similarities. From figure 3.3 it is clear that men in East Asian study populations began marrying much earlier than their European counterparts, and married at a faster rate. By age 15–19, as many as 25 to 40 percent of the East Asian men were already married. For the age group 25–30, the percentage married was 70 to 90. Corresponding percentages for European men were considerably smaller. For the East Asian populations, the decline in the proportion

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100 90 80 70

Percent

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 15–19

20–24

25–30

30–34

35–39

40–44

45–49

Age group Scania Casalguidi Shuangcheng

Sart Shimomoriya and Niita

Pays de Herve Liaoning

Figure 3.3 Proportion never-married by age: men Sources: See figure 3.2.

of never-married slowed down for age groups above 20–24 or 25–30, while the slowdown happened later in life for the European male populations. Interestingly the proportion of never-married among Chinese and European men tends to converge for higher age groups. There are at least three important similarities in marriage patterns across Europe and Asia. First, although there was a considerable age gap at first marriage between East Asia and Europe, the age gap at remarriage was much smaller. Rates of remarriage varied, though depending on the legal, religious, familial or cultural contexts, and not by any automatic East–West division (see chapter 6 for details). The mean age at remarriage for both men and women, in general, was only slightly lower in the East Asian populations (around 38) than in the European ones (around 40) (table 3.3). Second, although the proportions never-married varied, in every population the vast majority of people (more than 80 percent) married by age 50. Together with the general inclination toward remarriage

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Table 3.3 Age at remarriage in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913 Men Study areas and populations Southern Sweden Scania, 1766–1894 Eastern Belgium Sart, 1812–1899 Central Italy Casalguidi, 1819–1859 Northeastern Japan Shimomoriya and Niita, 1716–1870 Northeastern China Liaoning, 1789–1840 Shuangcheng, 1870–1913

Mean

Women Standard deviation

N

Mean

Standard deviation

N

45.8

9.0

209

40.1

8.2

235

41.7

9.4

85

38.5

7.8

34

41.6

9.8

115

35.6

8.8

51

38.3

12.4

186

38.0

13.1

131

38.0 36.2

11.3 10.8

1,981 678

39.4 37.6

10.4 10.0

875 452

Sources: See table 3.1. Note: The figures are based on the datasets used in chapter 6 and include remarriage of widowed individuals for age below 65 who were residing in the respective communities after being widowed.

mentioned above, this supports our assertion in chapter 2 that individual or at least family attitudes favored marriage, and that individuals were expected to marry. We further argue that in principle, all unmarried individuals were eligible to marry and therefore were at risk of getting married. Constraints lead to postponement of marriage, but we do not assume any individuals with specific characteristics (poor, disabled old, widowed, etc.) were specifically excluded from the marriage market altogether.8 Third, gender is crucial in determining the life course in all the study populations. While the mean age at marriage and SMAM, as well as the proportion who never married, varied considerably, there was a consistent gender age gap across all the populations. Women generally married much earlier than men, and unmarried women were less likely to remain unmarried than their male counterparts. Remarriage patterns were reversed: widowers were more likely to remarry, and fewer remained widowed. One possible reason for this is that gender differences in all populations were more profound than any of the differences between populations on other dimensions.

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Sources, Model, and Method Sources As in our previous volumes on mortality and reproduction, we compare five regional and temporal contexts. The appendix of Life under Pressure provided a detailed discussion of the origins, administrative purposes, and the procedures for compilation of the population registers and other sources used in the analysis (Campbell 2004: 441–76). We will not repeat that detailed discussion here. Instead, we will briefly summarize the data sources for the study populations and focus on their strengths and limitations for marriage and remarriage analyses. Because efforts to digitalize and link population registers continued after the publication of Life under Pressure, this study considers many more localities than that volume. Each team has continued to increase the coverage of their data sources, in terms of area, time period, and linkage to other sources. Two of the teams have publicly released their data, making it possible for researchers to replicate or extend on the analyses here. The northeast Chinese datasets used in the previous EAP volumes have been expanded and publicly released as the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset, Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) and China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset, Shuangcheng (CMGPDSC) at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/CMGPD. The Swedish dataset is also publicly accessible as the Scanian Economic Demography Database (SDD) at http://www.ed.lu.se/news/1216. The comparative analyses here include the populations of five rural parishes in western Scania in southern Sweden (Halmstad, Hög, Kågeröd, Kävlinge, and Sireköpinge) from 1815 to 18949; two locations in eastern Belgium, Sart, 1812–1899 and Pays de Herve, 1846–1900; one large agricultural village, Casalguidi, in Tuscany in central Italy from 1819 to 185910; two farming villages, Shimomoriya and Niita, in northeastern Japan from 1716 to 1870; and two populations in northeast China, Liaoning, 1749–1909, and Shuangcheng in Heilogjiang province, 1866–1913. The details of each local context are discussed in detail in the country chapters in part III of this volume. Each of these study sites is in many ways unique and was selected because ongoing projects had produced data that could be analyzed comparatively, not through a formal sampling procedure (Lee, Bengtsson, and Campbell 2010: 6). It must therefore be emphasized here that our estimates refer only to the study locations, not to their regions or countries. Our interest is in the

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underlying mechanisms and processes suggested by the directions of effects, and in some cases, their relative strength. The core of the Scanian data consists of information from family reconstitutions produced in conjunction with the construction of the Scanian Economic and Demographic Database.11 The family reconstitutions were carried out and checked manually and linked to other sources, chiefly the poll-tax registers (mantalslängder) and the catechetical examination registers (husförhörslängder). The poll-tax registers provide information regarding the economic characteristics of households such as farm size and tenure arrangements. The catechetical examination registers contain annual information on all individuals resident in the parish, and notes on individual migratory moves during the year. The sources are characterized by a high degree of coverage and accuracy. The database contains all individuals born in the different parishes, or migrating into them. Instead of sampling any particular group (e.g., a birth cohort), all individuals were followed from birth, or time of arrival in the parish, to death, or outmigration (see chapter 7). The population registers in Sart and Pays de Herve, the two rural areas of the extreme east of Belgium, were compiled by the local government to be used for civil administration. Introduced in the nineteenth century, the Belgian population registers recorded demographic and socioeconomic features of households and individual members residing in them. Once the registers started, their information was updated on a continuous basis by adding annotations to the listing of each household member. When annotations were accumulated to the point that further updates were difficult, the register was closed and a new one containing only current information was compiled.12 All the events occurring to individuals (death, internal movement within the locality, marriage, outmigration) or to households (birth) were thus recorded. People migrating into the locality were also gradually added, as well as new households created by marriages. The linkage of people from one register to another then permits researchers to collect their different pieces of life and to reconstruct, totally or partially, their biographies (see chapter 8). In Casalguidi, parish registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages have been linked to the information on household composition reported yearly by the Status animarum. The latter is a kind of census compiled annually by the parish priest before Easter. For each member of the

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household, the name, age, sex, marital status, and relationship to the head of the household, or with some other member of the family, are recorded. Since these records were compiled annually, linkage to supplementary data from parish and vital registers has allowed for reconstruction of the life histories of all the individuals and families who were members of the population of Casalguidi. Chapter 9 seeks to account for the complexity of Italian marriage by adding five more study populations in northern and central Italy characterized by a variety of ecological, economic, and social conditions. In some cases, sources include population registers like the ones for Belgium. In the two farming villages of Shimomoriya and Niita in northeastern Japan, local officials enumerated the population annually on the basis of current domicile, producing registers known as ninbetsuaratame-cho (NAC). The population registers in these villages are not the shumon-aratame-cho (SAC), which were much more common elsewhere in Tokugawa Japan. While the original purpose of the SAC was to prevent the spread of Christianity by identifying hidden Christians, the NAC was used primarily for population registration and investigation (Cornell and Hayami 1986). NAC registers were compiled based on the principle of current domicile (de facto), therefore giving far more exact demographic information than those based on the principle of permanent domicile (de jure) used more frequently in SAC. Organized by household, both registers recorded not only demographic characteristics of individual persons living in each household but also relationships between them, in addition to socioeconomic features of the household. The registers also recorded all major demographic events, including reasons for and origin/destination of migration (chapter 10). The NAC registers of this region are considered one of the best available among household registers in preindustrial Japan in terms of comprehensive information and nondisruption of records spanning more than 150 years. The Chinese analysis makes use of data from populations in Liaoning and Heilongjiang in northeast China. The Liaoning state farm populations consist of the banner peasants administered by the Imperial Household Agency (neiwufu) in Shengjing, who resided in some 700 villages in Liaoning province between 1749 and 1909. Observations before 1789 are excluded from the analysis because the registers from those years do not distinguish individuals by residential household. The Heilongjiang population consists of migrants from Beijing and elsewhere in northeast China and their descendants. They resided in

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120 villages in Shuangcheng in Heilongjiang province between 1866 and 1913. For statistical analysis, only the data from 1870 to 1913 are used because the data for 1866 to 1869 were not yet ready at the time the calculations were carried out. The data are drawn from the household registers compiled by the Eight Banners bureaucracy between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. The Eight Banners was an institution to organize a hereditary elite population related to the conquest army, and this was a major feature of Qing dynasty rule. Individuals associated with the Eight Banners were referred to as bannermen. They were a special group who provided a service to the state as soldiers, officers, or laborers. They had privileges as well as responsibilities that distinguished them from commoners. The banner household registers in northeast China provide comprehensive and accurate demographic and social economic data for individuals, households, and location (see chapter 11). Despite the variation in the organization and format of our sources, the contents of the datasets created by the participants of the Eurasia Project are similar enough to allow for detailed comparative analysis. Tables 3.4 and 3.5 present the population- and country-specific numbers of person-years at risk that were included in our comparative analyses of first marriage (chapters 4, 5) and remarriage (chapter 6), together with periods of investigation for each population used by the comparative analyses. One person-year of observation corresponds to one person observed for one year. Population at risk of first marriage consists of never-married individuals below age 50 who were residents of their respective locations. The lower boundaries of age were determined by the respective communities depending on their cultural and/ or institutional context. Population at risk of remarriage includes widowed individuals below age 65, and those who stayed in the study location after being widowed. Remarriage after age 65 was rare in all communities. For comparative purposes, only widowed individuals and not divorced individuals, who were numerous, were included in Shimomoriya and Niita. Since the number of remarriages was small in some populations, particularly for widows in Sart and Casalguidi, we need to be careful with the interpretation of the results. Pay de Herve is not included in the remarriage analysis because it had a low frequency of remarriage. The data sources used in the EAP studies allow us to overcome the restrictions in previous studies of preindustrial marriage. First, by studying those who were at risk of first marriage or remarriage, rather

Scania Sart Pays de Herve

Casalguidi

Shimomoriya and Niita Liaoning Shuangcheng

Southern Sweden Eastern Belgium

Central Italy

Northeastern Japan Northeastern China

1716–1870 1789–1909 1870–1913

1819–1859

1825–1894 1812–1899 1846–1900

Time period

8,678 332,688 316,587

8,698

14,185 23,955 29,127

Men

3,920 66,701 120,560

7,219

13,621 18,297 29,834

Women

691 27,080 7,808

394

589 889 790

Men

650 5,282 3,571

537

796 1,110 1,096

Women

Number of first marriages

Annual for population, continuous for events Annual Triennial Annual

Continuous Continuous Continuous

Frequency of registration updates

Sources: See table 3.1. Note: Figures are based on the datasets used in chapter 5. Population at risk includes never-married individuals below age 50 who were residents of respective communities. The lower boundaries of age were determined by cultural and/or institutional context of the respective communities.

Study population

Study area

Person-years at risk

Table 3.4 Summary of data used in the comparative analyses of first marriage: never-married individuals in seven Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913

62 Satomi Kurosu and Christer Lundh

Scania Sart Casalguidi

Shimomoriya and Niita Liaoning Shuangcheng

Southern Sweden Eastern Belgium Central Italy

Northeastern Japan Northeastern China

1716–1870 1789–1840 1870–1913

1766–1894 1812–1899 1819–1859

Time period

1,986 27,466 15,063

2,433 2,910 903

Men

3,292 70,196 59,926

9,284 4,496 2,600

Women

186 1,981 678

209 85 115

Men

131 875 452

235 34 51

Women

Number of remarriages

Continuous Continuous Annual for population, continuous for events Annual Triennial Annual

Frequency of registration updates

Sources: See table 3.1. Note: The figures are based on the datasets used in chapter 6. Person-years at risk include widowed individuals residing in the respective communities and are age below 65.

Population

Area

Person-years at risk

Table 3.5 Summary of data used in the comparative analyses of remarriage: widowed individuals in six Eurasian study populations, 1716–1913

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than only those who actually experienced the event, we are able to examine determinants of marriage and remarriage. Measurement of the at-risk population was particularly laborious for European populations because the data were based on linked parish records and catechetical or taxation registers. It was easier for East Asian populations as the household registers provided census type information for all individual residents of households in the study areas. For Europe this is a major departure from the family reconstitution data that traditionally has been the basis of historical demographic studies (chapter 7). Second, the structure of the dataset is unique, or nearly unique, in historical demography. The longitudinal individual-level data include information on household context, socioeconomic status and community-level conditions. The datasets were constructed either by linking individual records in the population registers from one year to the next or by linking information from additional sources (landholding and tax information) to demographic data for individuals and families in parish registers. Teams also linked annual information on community-level conditions such as grain prices to the individuals in the study populations. The data thus make it possible to study the influence on marriage chances of household context, socioeconomic status, and the local demographic and economic situation. Despite the compatibility and richness of data in all the study populations, we note two issues to be kept in mind when considering results from comparative analysis. First, the definitions of the risk populations include a risk of faulty left or right censoring, that is, the omission of individuals from the risk population. Marriage is defined in the data in different ways: directly from a record noting the wedding date (or event), indirectly by the appearance of a new household consisting of a previously unmarried couple who married outside the study location, or indirectly by the entry of a new household member via marriage into an existing household between two consecutive registrations and concomitant changes in relationships among the members of the household of marriage. The risk populations include unmarried individuals (first marriage) or widowed individuals (remarriage). Left censoring is not an issue in the European and Japanese data. Individuals are included in the risk population if they met specific criteria for age or marital status, and remained at risk as long as they appeared in the population registers. Chinese registers, however, tend to omit many daughters completely. As a result the female risk populations in China are considerably smaller than the male ones, both with regard to the

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person-years at risk and the number of events. At this point we have not found any indication that the omission of daughters is selective (chapter 11). A more important potential issue is right censoring, that is, the exclusion of individuals leaving the risk population. Since we want to estimate the relative risks of first marriage (and remarriage), we exclude individuals from being at risk once they die or migrate out of the location. In the European populations it is sometimes impossible to identify individuals who migrated out of their current location in order to marry. This is not a problem for Chinese study populations because there was very little migration outside the region, and movement within the region was recorded in the registers. Neither is it a problem in the Japanese study populations. Japanese peasants moved frequently, but peasants always had to report migration outside villages and apply for official permission. Because of this, the NAC data provide a detailed account of migration with regard to reasons and destinations, including marriage-related migration. Thus it is possible to examine the likelihood of marriage by postnuptial residence, namely intra-village virilocal/uxorilocal or inter-village (marry-out) marriage (chapter 10). This form of right-censoring is potentially a more serious issue in European populations. Identifying marriage-related migration is impossible in some contexts, and very time-consuming in the contexts where it is possible. This selection bias of the “residual” population consisting of those who do not move and remain under observation in the parish (Ruggles 1992, 1999) is inherent. The registers only record the marriage patterns of individuals born and raised in the community, not those who migrated elsewhere and then married. Those who remain in the community may be a select group, and their marriage patterns may not be reflective of marriage patterns overall. This is particularly a problem for communities with a high volume of rural and urban labor migration, as in east Belgium, and less so for a large village such as Casalguidi that had fewer migrants as a share of their population. The selection bias was overcome in various innovative but laborious ways by our European teams. For Scania, the Swedish team avoided the problem by tracing all married individuals back to their birth parish in order to obtain information on the parental household, and by tracing unmarried out-migrants into the new residential location in order to check whether it was marriage migration or not (chapter 7). For Casalguidi, the Italian team linked parish records to Status animarum, the equivalent of a household census (chapter 9). For

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Sart and Pays de Herve, all the marriages were recorded in civil registers by a local official under the Belgian Civil Code and the Belgian team linked all unlinked marriage registers to the population registers to identify any marriage dates not found in the population registers. They also compared marriage and outmigration using the same model to show the different factors associated with both events (chapter 8). The second limitation of our data is that we cannot analyze partner choice for the East Asian study populations. We have not yet been able to link the records of wives back to their records as daughters in other households in China. As for Shimomoriya and Niita, it is possible to match records of households of origin and marriage for individuals who were born in the two villages but not for those who migrated into or out of the two villages upon marriage. Thus, given the large number of female migrants, these data would bias estimates of the pattern of partner selection. The Swedish team, by contrast, was able to trace all individuals back to the parental household, regardless of parish of birth (chapter 7). Such a linking method is not applicable for Japan as the number of surviving NAC data from the surroundings of Shimomoriya and Niita are extremely limited. Model and Variables Our model takes a sequential approach to the study of marriage behavior in preindustrial Europe and Asia, in that individuals are seen as repeatedly exposed to potential partners and therefore making successive decisions in response to opportunities and constraints. Marital decisions, in other words, are not predetermined.13 Unmarried individuals, or families with unmarried sons or daughters, are at each moment focused on whether they should accelerate or delay their marriage, or their son’s or daughter ’s marriage. The sequential approach is made possible by the use of the longitudinal individual-level data of our study populations as well as by the use of event-history analysis. This multivariate approach to studying the determinants of events and transitions over an individual’s life course allows for examination of the influence of individual, household, and community-level variables on marriage outcomes. Marriage is embedded in familial, cultural, and institutional contexts. We therefore treat marriage timing as a product of human agency within specific, shared household, local, and institutional contexts. By focusing on the timing of marriage, we shift our perspective from a

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simple dichotomy based on aggregate measures such as average age at marriage or proportion married, and we allow dynamic comparisons between Europe and East Asia. Our sequential model includes two main actors in the marriage market: individuals and households. We assume that they interacted and played different roles in different contexts. Generally, there were strong incentives to marry because it was prerequisite for reproduction, and because it increased the status of the marrying couples and in some contexts their families. In some contexts it helped secure decent conditions in old age for the parents. Nevertheless, depending on the context, there were also disincentives to marriage. By studying marriage and remarriage outcomes and the influence of different factors on them, we can make general conclusions about which circumstances made a marriage more or less probable. Following our previous studies of mortality and reproduction in the Eurasia Project, we distinguish the possible determinants of marriage at the individual, household, and community levels. Table 3.6 lists the measures for each of the three levels. Table 3.6 Measures of individual, household, and community level characteristics used in the comparative analyses of first marriage and remarriage Level

Measures

Individual

1 Current age of individuals (a) 2 Sex 3 Duration of widowhood (b)

Household

1 Presence of parents (by sex, survivorship, age) 2 Presence of siblings (by order, sex, marital status) 3 Socioeconomic status of household (SES) 4 Co-residing children (by sex and minor/adult composition; c)

Community

1 2 3 4 5 6

Local grain price, logged and time-lagged by 1–3 years Adult mortality as proxy for job and housing market Sex ratio as proxy for marriage market SES group size as proxy for marriage market Time period Location of residence

Notes: (a) For first marriages, included only in the discrete-time event-history models; (b) for remarriages, included only in the discrete-time event-history models; (c) included only in remarriage analysis.

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Satomi Kurosu and Christer Lundh

Individual-Level Variables The major individual-level variables of the EAP marriage model are the gender and age of the marriage candidates, and in the cases of remarriage, the duration of widowhood (see table 3.6). Gender and age were the major determining factors in the timing of marriage as well as remarriage, and were also important for the risk of remaining unmarried. In many societies there is a culturally ascribed “appropriate” age for marriage, which tends to vary between men and women, with the former generally being older. Gender determines the range of life course choices, which are usually culturally bound. Age influences capacities for childbearing and working, and is also associated with the physical appearance in general, all of which may affect the chances of marriage and remarriage. Gender and age by themselves are important determinants of marriage and remarriage chances. For first marriages, age is included as a covariate in the discrete-time event-history models to control for exposure to the risk of marriage. In Cox proportional hazard models, age is the baseline hazard and is not included as a covariate for first marriages. In models of the relative risk of first marriage, age is a mere control variable. In analyses of remarriage, age is also included as an explanatory variable whose influence on the risk of remarriage is subject to interpretation. For remarriage analysis, discrete-time models include another control variable: time (years) since the end of previous marriage. For remarriages, the baseline hazard in Cox regressions is the time since the end of the previous marriage. Household-Level Variables Marriage was an issue for the household and family as much as it was for the individual. Our analysis therefore takes into consideration household demographic and socioeconomic context. The major variables at this level are the presence of co-residing parents and siblings, and the socioeconomic status (SES) of the parental or own household. In cases of remarriage, the presence of co-residing children is also included as a covariate (see table 3.6). Our previous analyses of mortality and reproduction found that the presence or absence of specific household relations were more important than household size and structure. For survivorship, the presence of parents and parents-in-law in a household were especially important (Bengtsson et al. 2004); for reproduction, it was the presence of mother and mother-in-law (Tsuya et al. 2010). Accordingly, our analysis of

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marriage examines the effects of the presence of parents and siblings. Similarly our analysis of remarriage examines the influence of the presence of parents and own children in the household. We introduced the presence of parents to account for the effects of normative orientations and preferences regarding marriage, as conditioned by the respective family system. It also accounted for the stronger bargaining power and larger social network necessary for marriage in the Asian context. Parents had a strong incentive to secure a spouse for a child in order to achieve the overriding goal of perpetuating the descent line. They were also often interested in recruiting a daughteror son-in-law who could contribute labor to the household or care in old age. In some European contexts the loss of a parent could mean an opportunity to take over a farm. In the last section of this chapter and with more detail in chapter 5, we examine the effects of parental presence separately for father and mother, and for different combinations of parental ages: present and age below 50, present and age 50–60, present and age 60 and above, and dead or not present. For Shimomoriya and Niita, age cutoff point for parents is 55, which was considered the average timing of retirement. Therefore the category consists of ages below 55, 55 and above, and absent or dead. We include the age of parents as a variable because it measures their working capacity and may suggest whether or not they have retired. Also the absence of the father or mother could have different influences on marriage chances because of the gendered roles of parents. Marriage could function as a means to replace the loss/absence of parents in a rural household. In the local history chapters for Japan and China, where parents played a key role in arranging children’s marriages, the presence of parent(s), disregarding age, is used as covariate, since it could be assumed that parental presence rather than survival status (measured by age) better captures their influence on first marriage. A co-residing sibling indicates a resource or hierarchical competition depending on societal context. In the last section of this chapter and in chapter 5, sibling effects are measured with counts of the number of brothers and sisters present in the household. Parity and the marital status of siblings are included as variables in the model in order to capture the practice of culturally prescribed orders of marriage practiced in populations of complex households, such as in China, Japan, and parts of Italy. For example, in societies where the eldest marry first, having an elder unmarried sibling meant a delay for marriage among

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Satomi Kurosu and Christer Lundh

the younger siblings. The sibling variable is therefore differentiated by sex and marital status in Italy, Japan, and China. For Japan the relationship to the head of the household is also considered as it measures access to resources (Tsuya and Kurosu 2010a) and could affect the likelihood of first marriage of individual men and women. For remarriage, the presence of parents and children are used to examine the potential influence of co-resident kin on opportunities for and costs of remarriage. The parental presence variable consists of four categories: both parents present, only the father present, only the mother present, and no parent present. Because of the earlier age of remarriage among our East Asian populations, the presence of parents is assumed to increase bargaining power and have a positive influence on marriage chances. Co-residing children are measured in three different ways. First, to examine the effect of the dependency of co-residing children, we construct four categories: no co-residing children, only minor children, both minor and adult children, and only adult children. Second, in order to assess the effect of the sex composition of coresiding children, we use the following four categories: no co-residing children; no son, only daughter(s); no daughter, only son(s); and at least one son and one daughter co-residing. Third, in a similar manner we examine the sex and presence of minor/adult children in the household (see chapter 6 for details). While variables for the presence of kin in the household and the age of parents and siblings are time-varying for almost all the study populations, in the case of Scania they refer to the situation in the parental home when the individual was 12. This is also the case for the socioeconomic status of unmarried individuals who were working as servants outside the parental home; that is, the socioeconomic status of the father when the individual was aged 12 was used in these cases. Household socioeconomic status is expected to affect marriage. The theoretical link between household socioeconomic status and marriage in preindustrial populations is, however, complex. Relationships vary according to the wider social context. Economic privilege could increase marriage chances for youth in Europe as it enables the setting up of independent households and facilitates the preparation for marriage. In Asia economic privilege made the recruitment of brides and grooms easier. Access to resources could also delay marriage. Choosing the right partner was more important if property was involved, and it might have required a longer search. Wealthy individuals or families could afford to wait longer to find the right match, and in some

Nuptiality: Local Populations, Sources, and Models

71

circumstances might even find remaining unmarried an attractive option. We expect to find such results both in Europe and Asia. In the Chinese context, for example, where families practiced hypergamy when seeking spouses for their daughters, economic privilege could delay marriage because the pool of prospective partners with the “right” characteristics was quite small at the upper end of the hierarchy. The comparative chapters use a common three-category socioeconomic status scale of lower, medium, and higher status for all populations, in order to make the comparison easier to interpret (table 3.7).14 The three categories are constructed from the specific indicators of socioeconomic status appropriate to each population, reflecting a relative gradient in the standard of living. In the local chapters, socioeconomic status is measured by country-specific indicators. In several settings we have landholding. For Scania and Casalguidi, information from taxation registers on the type of land tenure and Table 3.7 Three categories of socioeconomic status (SES) used in event-history analysis of marriage and remarriage in seven Eurasian populations Study population

Type of information

Scania

Sart and Pays de Herve

Casalguidi

Shimomoriya and Niita Liaoning

Shuangcheng

Lower SES

Medium SES

Higher SES

Household land tenure and land size Head’s occupations or ego’s occupation when the head is not the father Family tax

Landless

Semi-landless

Day laborer

Artisan, industrial worker, peasant, cultivator Low taxed

Farmer (at least 14 acres, 1/16 mantal) White collar, officials, a few notables

Household landholding Occupation and institutional affiliation Occupation and places of origin

No landholding

0>, 60 Age unknown Absent or dead Number of brothers Number of sisters

60 Age unknown Absent or dead Presence and age of mother

60 Age unknown Absent or dead Number of brothers Number of sisters

60 Age unknown Absent or dead Presence and age of mother

60

Age unknown

Absent or dead

0.95

Number of sisters

0.24

0.44

0.00

0.06

0.34

0.53

ref.

0.72

0.29

0.44

0.99

ref.

pvalue

0.00

889

23,955

0.82

0.91

1.45

2.95

1.70

1.46

1.00

5.09

5.48

4.92

4.82

1.00

Relative risk

Sart 1812–1899

0.00

0.00

0.14

0.00

0.05

0.16

ref.

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

ref.

pvalue

0.00

790

29,127

0.87

0.87

1.76

1.09

1.60

1.13

1.00

2.25

2.25

1.63

1.72

1.00

Relative risk

0.00

0.00

0.05

0.74

0.08

0.64

ref.

0.05

0.05

0.24

0.19

ref.

pvalue

Pays de Herve 1847–1899

0.00

394

8,698

0.90

0.73

1.67

—

1.10

1.29

1.00

1.42

—

1.43

1.56

1.00

Relative risk

Casalguidi 1820–1858

0.03

0.00

0.02

—

0.62

0.12

ref.

0.16

—

0.15

0.06

ref.

pvalue

0.00

691

8,678

1.00

1.00

0.70

1.22

—

0.97

1.00

0.66

0.98

—

0.79

1.00

Relative Risk

0.63

0.60

0.00

0.57

—

0.87

ref.

0.00

0.94

—

0.05

ref.

pvalue

Shimomoriya and Niita 1716–1870

0.00

27,080

332,688

1.06

0.96

0.89

0.78

1.00

1.06

1.00

0.90

1.03

0.93

0.98

1.00

Relative Risk

Liaoning 1789–1909

0.01

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.93

0.00

ref.

0.00

0.62

0.01

0.23

ref.

pvalue

0.00

7,808

316,587

1.09

0.91

0.96

0.35

1.14

1.16

1.00

0.96

0.64

1.01

0.96

1.00

Relative risk

0.00

0.00

0.18

0.00

0.01

0.00

ref.

0.19

0.00

0.80

0.29

ref.

pvalue

Shuangcheng 1870–1913

Sources: See table 3.1. Notes: Cox regression estimates of relative risks for Scania, Sart and Pays de Herve. Complementary log-log estimates for Casalguidi, Shimomoriya and Niita, Liaoning, and Shuangcheng. The multivariate model controls for adult mortality and fluctuations in grain prices including one year lags, time period and village/parish. Complementary log-log models also control for age. For Sart the higher and medium socioeconomic groups have been merged. For Shimomoriya and Niita, only two age categories for co-residing fathers and mothers are used: “below 55” (reference) and “55 and above.”

0.06

0.97

Number of brothers

589

1.60

Absent or dead

Overall p-value

1.42

Age unknown

Number of events

1.23

>60

14,185

1.14

50–60

Person-years at risk

1.00

60

13,621

1.48

50–60

Person-years at risk

1.00