Preliminary Programme

Demographic data are only scarcely available for Albania at the beginning of the 20th century. In addition there is not much known about different fertility patterns of people staying at their place of birth in comparison with migrants. This paper investigates the influence of migration on fertility in Albania based on the census of 1918. First results point to a lower fertility of within Albania migrants compared with non-migrants, but that has to be controlled for occupational structures yet. (Show less)

Even to this day, scholarly understanding of why, when and how people began to control fertility within marriage during the 19th century remains unclear. The decisive factor in the fall in fertility in the second half of the 19th century was the fairly universal spread of stopping, i.e. having no more children once a specific ‘desired’ number was reached (fertility control was therefore parity-specific). During this time, couples adopted stopping and spacing behaviour in an effort to reach their ‘ideal family size’. Initially, the explanation was sought in the fact that couples adjusted their (marital) fertility to changing societal (e.g. industrialisation and urbanisation) and demographic circumstances (e.g. the fall in child mortality). The European Fertility Project, however, has shown that in addition (and perhaps pre-eminently), cultural variables (such as secularisation and linguistic networks) are important as well.

During the past decades, various researchers emphasized the importance of migration for the fertility transition in 19th century Western Europe. However, due to the limited registration of migratory movements in historical sources, the link between migration and fertility is scarcely investigated in historical perspective. Moreover, the results of the research often point in the opposite direction because the migration process of the investigated migrants differed in various settings. Some came from the neighbouring rural areas, others from just over the border, yet others from much further; some came alone, others with their entire family; some returned soon, others stayed their whole lives; some came to work, others to find a partner, yet others with unclear motives. Due to their varying socio-economic and cultural background, the various groups of migrants wrote a different fertility history. Detailed information on both the reproductive behaviour and the migration process is thus crucial when investigating the 19th century fertility decline.

In this paper, I will investigate the impact of migration on the fertility transition in the city of Antwerp (Belgium) during the second half of the 19th century. During the 19th century, the port city of Antwerp underwent major socio-economic and demographic transformations. In the first half of the 19th century, due to a shortage of investments, the textile production which had been one of Antwerps main industries, imploded, whereas the harbour activities developed strongly. From 1850 onwards, Antwerp evolved from an inland port to an international port characterized by an intensive exchange of goods. Because of the massive (male) immigration to the port city (mainly because of the new employment possibilities), Antwerp developed into the biggest city of Belgium, with about 273 thousand inhabitants at the end of the 19th century. Antwerp’s fast urbanisation and demographic expansion had a great influence on the fertility behaviour of the indigenous and foreign inhabitants. By paying specific attention to the migratory characteristics of Antwerp immigrants, different strategies of birth control can be identified among various migrants. In this research, attention will specifically be paid to the spacing behaviour of immigrants and the influence of individual characteristics (sex, age, place of origin, socio-economic status) and more general characteristics of the migration process (length of residence, migration network, migration distance, individual or family migration, direct or multi-stage migration) on their reproductive behaviour. Moreover, by comparing the fertility pattern of various groups of migrants profoundly, an interesting debate on the migration-fertility theories (socialisation, adaptation, selection or disruption hypothesis) may emerge.

The historical demographic database which has been built since 2003 by the Leuven Research Group of the Family and Population (CESO, K.U.LEUVEN) will be used in this research. The database contains longitudinal and intergenerational data at the individual level and offers a unique combination of features. It spans nearly eight decades of time (1846 to 1920) and covers three successive generations (cohorts 1820-1870). After ample evaluation of the pros and cons of different data gathering strategies, a letter sample has been chosen. In this database, all persons whose family name starts with the letter combination COR* are selected in the historical sources (population registers and vital registration records). The database contains extensive micro-data on individual life courses, migration processes and family patterns, and is one of the few historical databases that contains this type of micro-level data in an urban environment.


SARAH MOREELS
Centre for Sociological Research,
Research domain Family and Population (K.U.Leuven)
Email: sarah.moreels@soc.kuleuven.be (Show less)

In the consequence of 18th century immigration the neighbourhood of Budapest – similarly to Hungary – has become a multiethnic and multicultural region where Hungarians, Germans, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs and Jews lived together until World War II. The immigrants came from regions of very different culture where marriage customs and the level of fertility were also varied. Historical sources like 18th and 19th century population censuses make the analysis of fertility and marriage possible by settlements in this very heterogeneous geographic space. The paper first of all examines the changes in the ethnic composition of about 200 settlements (villages and small towns) between the end of the 18th century and World War I, then the level of integration of the 18th century immigrants on the basis of the statistics of the spoken languages around 1900. After that it analyses the fertility differences in the context of ethnicity and integration on the basis of the census data at the end of the 19th century. The analysis starts at the level of the about 200 settlements of county Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun, then focuses on a smaller district close to Budapest, north of the capital. (Show less)

Recent research has questioned the view that urbanization and industrialization have brought about a radical change in the significance of the family traditions and society. In his study – now a classic – The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson claimed that industrialization affected the family economy, upsetting the traditional relationships between spouses and other members of the family and separating work from “life”. According to him, members of the family were, with the coming industry, torn away each day at the sound of the factory siren. Researchers of the Chicago school report that migration from the country into the towns tore people up by their roots, far from their established social networks based on kinship. Many scholars have demonstrated that adapting to industrial way of life, to an urban home and work in a factory alienated migrants, in particular, from their own traditions. Yet studies reporting that entire families were recruited by factories and that industrialization as a whole in fact depended on families moving from country to town and from one country to another have a very different story to tell. In her study “Family and the industrial time” Tamara K. Haveren has demonstrated how the traditions brought by the immigrants from their homeland appear to have served as a major means of adapting to the new homeland. Relationships with the extended family, rather than being severed, in fact often became stronger in the new cultural environment.

The mass post-war emigration from Finland to Sweden provides excellent substance for debating the effects of industrialization and urbanization on family. In my paper I wish to examine narratives told by immigrants from Finnish Lapland in the industrial towns of Southern Sweden. What happened, when at a single stroke, people moved from a rural environment and small farms to factories and city suburbs. They mostly came from very large families and yet they ended up building small families themselves. How do they talk about being raised in a large family, and how do they discuss having children of their own? This study is based on interviews conducted in Gothenburg by me. (Show less)