Preliminary Programme

In an international and interdisciplinary project we will combine, analyze and compare qualitative and quantitative sources to scrutinize the process of colonization in three countries over a period of 150 years. Our aim is to generate results vital for the understanding how colonization, in all its complexity, has shaped the health outcomes of Indigenous peoples in Sweden, Australia and New Zealand.
“Colonization” as well as means different things in different parts of the world. Sweden, Australia and New Zealand provide fruitful contexts for a comparative study as they are geographically and ecologically distinctive and vary significantly with respect to Indigenous health. So did also the timing and effect of population pressure, state policies, the role of medical advances and land management. However the sources, the quantitative demographic and qualitative evidence, vary significantly over time and place.
This paper aim to compare of available sources (not only censuses) for Australia, New Zealand and Sweden from the 18th and up until the 20th century and discuss how these were created, for what purpose, by whom and how we are able to work with them in analyses of the population development in the respective areas.
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In the 18th century, the Dutch colonial government of Ceylon/Sri Lanka perfected the registration system known as ‘thombos’, which combined cadastral information with a census. An ongoing digitization project allows us to reconstruct the population of the colonized areas by gender and age composition, caste and land ownership. Furthermore, linkage across the surviving 1760 and 1770 thombos allow us to study (e.g. with the help of simulation techniques) rates of mortality, fertility, nuptiality and migration. (Show less)

At this paper we analyses marriage and godparent networks of landlolding and slaveholding kin groups from nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil. Marriage and spiritual kin alliances are key components to understand power strategies and social hierarchies at parish level. Networks stand at the middle level of analysis between qualitative deep descriptions of a few individual trajectories and statistical analysis of aggregate data. Most of Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools focus mainly on the internal fabric of single networks. Few SNA tools target at comparison between networks, or simultaneous relationships among actors. Our main objective here is exploring methods to compare multiplex historical networks. Digging nineteenth century primary sources from the parish of Piranga, Minas Gerais, Brazil, we try to make sense of fragments of biographies found in Catholic Church baptism books, and after-death inventories, and link them in networks. Focusing on elite network structures, we explore the role of marriage and spiritual kinship in bridging and hierarchizing different groups and social placements. (Show less)

From the mid-18th century, demographic statistical production in Europe increased as a result of the expansion of governments' bureaucracy and a surge in topographic and cartographic knowledge. In recent years, important contributions have been made to improve our understanding of colonial populations and their history. Most of this scholarship has, however, focused on former British, French and German colonies in the late 19th and 20th centuries, paying little attention to the Portuguese empire and the early modern period.
In this paper, we partially fill this void in the literature by studying and comparing the composition of Mozambique’s population in urban and rural spaces between 1750 and 1850, using data samples from the collections of Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive.
Our study is divided in four sections. In section 1, we look at the types of primary sources available and discuss their potential and problems. In section 2, we discuss our preliminary estimates for the total urban and rural population in the areas controlled by the Portuguese, their geographical distribution and main over time changes. In section 3, we examine in detail the population composition in these two spaces. Here, we look in particular at ethnic composition, sex ratios, age groups structures, birth/death patterns, occupations, and social and juridical status. Special attention is given to free and enslaved population as well as to people living other forms of bondage in the territory. We will close our study by comparing Mozambican urban and rural population patterns and highlighting main differences and similarities.
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Although history shows many examples of how colonization has exposed indigenous populations to vulnerability, there is a limited quantitative knowledge about their demographic responses to colonization. Swedish parish registers report longitudinal demographic data on persons and include the indigenous populations, the Sami, as their land Sápmi was colonized. The Demographic Data Base (DDB), Umeå University, has digitized these registers, which enables us to conduct event history analyses to find out whether colonization added to the Sami’s difficulties to maintain their traditional use of land and lifestyle. If so, it would be indicated by (1) low survival chances; (2) a desire to leave their space as it was increasingly colonized. We look for differences between the Sami and Non-Sami and between the genders and discuss the results with regard to the theoretical concepts of vulnerable populations and healthy migrant effects.
A dataset comprising 2,249 individuals in two parishes is extracted: one in northernmost Sápmi; the other in the southern part of it. The individuals selected were aged 25 years between 1810 and 1890. Their 25-year birthday constitutes the starting point of the longitudinal observation of them. It continues for as long as they reside in the parishes, but not for more than 20 years. We focus on the events of departure and death using bi-variate Kaplan-Meier estimates and multivariate Cox regression models. They indicate the propensity of experiencing the event and relate this to the individuals’ ethnic belonging and gender, and other demographic characteristics.
Our results reveal there were both differences and similarities between how the Sami and Non-Sami men and women demographically responded to colonization. In the southern area, the propensity to depart was significantly higher among the Sami than the Non-Sami people (60%), but not in the north. Thus, colonization put more pressure on the Sami in southern Sápmi, which added to their vulnerability and triggered them to leave. The colonial effects and number of settlers were less evident in the northernmost areas. As for both areas and ethnic groups, women were slightly more inclined to relocate than men, whereas settlers’ propensity to depart was higher compared to all other occupational groups. This indicates that it was a tough task to run a farm in the cold climate of Sápmi. The results on the life expectancy were less robust due to the limited number of deaths in the dataset since it includes young adult individuals (25-45 years). Yet, we found two significant results. First, the settlers seem to have benefitted from some healthy migrant effects, as their survival chances were markedly higher (87%) than among all other occupational groups. Second, the survival chances of the adult Sami were 30% lower than for the Non-Sami people. In all and even if Sweden’s colonization was not as violent as in other continents, our demographic findings show it certainly limited the life and space of the Sami and reflect some of the vulnerability associated with the colonization of indigenous peoples. (Show less)