This study focuses on Christian marriages in nineteenth-centuryBosnia in order to analyse the interventions and prohibitions imposedby the Ottoman central authorities. Focusing on Christian marriagesthat attracted the intervention of the Ottoman centre, it highlightshow unions across religious and national boundaries could generatestate concerns extending beyond private and confessional spheres. Thestudy first analyses marriages between non-Muslim women andforeigners and the conditions under which such unions wereprohibited. Secondly it concentrates on marriages between Christianwomen and Muslim men that were restricted by the central authoritiesdespite being permissible under Islamic law. It then examines casesof alleged forced marriage and appeals for annulment. Fourthly, itaddresses clerical complaints concerning second marriages andconsecutive marriages, which are subject to restrictions andprohibitions under Christian canon law. Finally, the study examinesclerical appeals to the Ottoman central authorities to prevent thecollection of marriage taxes by Muslim officials and analyses stateregulations aimed at limiting the costs of Christian weddings,including expensive bridal clothing and dowries.Based on a wide range of archival documents from the Ottoman Archives, the article argues that state interventions in Christian marriages were motivated not only by religious considerations but also by concerns regarding public order, imperial sovereignty, legal pluralism and the management of relations between different religious communities in a politically sensitive border region. The findings demonstrate that marriage constituted an important arena in which state authority, communal autonomy and individual agency intersected, revealing the active role of the Ottoman administration in regulating the lives of its non-Muslim subjects.
This article reinterprets Irish links to Atlantic slavery as a problem of kinship, inheritance, and family memory. It focuses in particular on genealogy as a technology of memory within enslaver families. Responding to a call from Calvert and O'Riordan (2024) to produce 'messier' Irish family histories, the article argues that genealogy functions as a familial technology through which households curate status, manage embarrassment, and negotiate morally difficult pasts. After situating 'geneticised' and affiliative identities within Irish diasporic narratives, the article develops a microhistorical case study of the Daly family of Galway and Jamaica and the MacEvoys of Denmark and St. Croix. Using family-produced genealogies, estate papers, emancipation compensation records, account books, it reconstructs how slave-derived wealth was converted into Irish landed property, ecclesiastical patronage, and intergenerational social mobility. The article further examines architecture and material culture as forms of inherited memory, showing how buildings, interiors, and landscapes preserved the social and economic legacies of Atlantic slavery in Ireland. The analysis shows how successive Daly genealogies domesticated colonial violence by emphasising land reacquisition and Catholic respectability while minimising slaveholding and interracial intimacies. By placing the descendants of the enslaved alongside the descendants of enslavers, it shows how genealogy can both reproduce silences and recover occluded histories of coercive relationships within the 'Irish family.' Methodologically, the article integrates family archives with imperial and digital genealogical sources to track the transmission of wealth, reputation, and silence across generations.
In contrast to most of the Caribbean, the enslaved population on the Dutch-Caribbean island of Bonaire was predominantly owned by the government and not by private enslavers (until 1792 by the Dutch West India Company, after this by the Dutch state). The government-owned enslaved people were forced to produce salt in a harsh and barren landscape. In this study we use a novel database of linked lives based on cross-sectional slave censuses that were taken at irregular intervals between 1758 and 1863 to reconstruct enslaved family life. As the sources often mention not only a mother's name but also that of the (great) grandmother, we are able to reconstruct family trees and kinship networks through the mother's line. We show that the enslaved population of Bonaire grew modestly in the eighteenth century through a relatively high number of children per woman resulting in 82% of enslaved being born on Bonaire. This was supplemented by victims from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, predominantly men, which shifted the sex ratio from a female surplus to a male surplus. We are able to study individual fertility trajectories for the eighteenth century. We uncovered that African-born enslaved women remained childless more often and had longer birth intervals, presumably as a result of the endured conditions during the Trans-Atlantic voyage.
The prohibitions on marriage associated with the liturgical seasons of Advent, Lent, and Rogation have been among the many influences on the timing of marriage in English populations up to the eighteenth century. The degree to which the liturgical seasons continued to have an impact in England into the nineteenth century remains unclear. Using all 51,139 marriages recorded in the Tasmanian Civil Registers between 1838 and 1899, this paper addresses the impact of the prohibited periods on the timing of marriage in the English colony of Tasmania. It reports exact measures for the whole population, and for the principal religious denominations, of the degree to which English settlers and their descendants timed their marriages in response to the requirements of the churches. The paper also offers an alternative methodology for resolving the procedural problems that arise when using aggregate monthly data. In order to calculate index rates, the paper uses the exact date of marriage and the rites used in the ceremony as recorded in the Civil Registers, the precise dates for the prohibited periods of Advent, Lent, and Rogation for each year, the actual number of days in each prohibited period, and the exact number of marriages in each year and each liturgical period for the six decades between 1840 and 1899. It found no evidence of continuing respect for the prohibited periods for the whole population, nor for any of the Protestant denominations, irrespective of whether earlier or later starting dates for the Lenten period were used. Significant evidence of avoidance of marriage in Advent and Lent, but not Rogation, was found only among those marrying according to Catholic rites, more strongly with later rather than earlier start dates for Lent, but the influence of the prohibitions declined over the course of the study period.
Through a close study of Richard and Helen Tute's divorce experiences (1897-1913), this paper captures the historical nuances of imperial family histories through the lens of marital breakdowns. Specifically examining the Tute case, this essay explores how the Indian Civil Service's (ICS) requirement of junior civil servants to remain single until they reached a senior rank affected individuals who were already in relations or married by the time they joined the Service. The empire's marital requirements often worsened existing marital problems for couples and sometimes contributed to tears in the marital fabric of colonial couples. Such strained marital relations could also have consequences for the Empire and its 'respectability.' Consequently, marital breakdowns brought anxiety to the empire's administrative circles for many reasons, but primarily because of the desire to ensure that colonized subjects did not question the 'morality' of those who governed them. Thus, using divorce as a lens, this paper complicates and scrutinizes our view of imperial power, and its impact on individual lives of those who served the Empire and in the process lays bare shortcomings in the ideology of moral superiority on which the British Raj was based, which were revealed when its moral expectations were flouted by its administrators.
This special issue marks the thirtieth anniversary of The History of the Family and celebrates the retirement of Jan Kok, whose scholarship has profoundly influenced historical family demography over the past decades. Using life course theory as its central organising framework, this introductory article applies core concepts such as life span development, agency, time and place, timing, and linked lives as analytical instruments to examine both Koks scholarly trajectory and the contributions assembled in this special issue. This article first interprets Kok's academic career as a life course in itself, thereby situating his intellectual development within broader historiographical debates, institutional contexts, and collaborative research networks. It then extends this perspective to the collected contributions, allowing for a more systematic reflection on ongoing efforts to disentangle the complex interplay of social, economic, demographic, cultural and biological factors shaping families and societies across time and space. Finally, the discussion considers what these contributions reveal about emerging directions in historical family demography, future challenges facing interdisciplinary research on families, and the continuing evolution and ambitions of our journal.
Single motherhood has long been a feature of European family systems, but its meaning and determinants have changed substantially over time. Using longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic and Demographic Database (SEDD), covering southern Sweden between 1905 and 2015, we examine the changing demography of single motherhood from a long-term life course perspective. We analyze how the relative importance of different routes into single motherhood (i.e. non-marital childbearing, divorce, and widowhood) changed over time and how single motherhood was structured by socioeconomic status (SES), age, migration experience, and place of residence. The results show marked changes across periods in both the composition and selectivity of single motherhood. Although unmarried mothers made up most single mothers throughout the period, divorce and widowhood were more strongly associated with single motherhood than unmarried status, net of other factors, until 1974. Socioeconomic status, age, migration experience, and urban residence were important predictors of single motherhood, but their associations varied across periods, not least around 1974-1994. Over the twentieth century, net of other factors, single motherhood in Sweden shifted from being linked to marital dissolution, migration experience and low SES to being less stratified and increasingly reflecting transformations in union formation and family norms as Sweden had returned to high levels of non-marital fertility.
Photographs represent a rich yet underutilized source of demographic and economic information, whose integration can move analyses beyond an illustrative role and foster methodological innovation in historical demography. In this research note, we demonstrate how computer vision techniques can be applied to extract complementary data from non-textual sources, alongside conventional demographic and socioeconomic records such as population registers and censuses, thereby constructing the Photo-BALL database as an extension of the BALL database. For this purpose, we applied image classification, detection, and captioning using deep neural networks. Specifically, from the collection of images preserved in the County Archive of Baix Llobregat covering 1870-2020, we automatically segment regions containing people, which are then classified according to perceived sex and age. Whenever an image depicts a labour activity, it is identified through image captioning, a process that attributes natural language descriptions to photographs. Finally, the year associated with each image is inferred using automated date estimation, which integrates both colorimetric and object recognition features. Combining these three dimensions (sex, age, and activity) with temporal attribution, we constructed a visual census spanning 1870-1970 and compared it with demographic and socioeconomic structures estimated from the BALL database, with particular attention to women's work. While women's labour activity is often invisible in official censuses and population registers, which typically recorded only teachers, seamstresses, or domestic workers, in the rare years when female occupation was documented, most women were employed in the textile industry. In contrast, the visual census reveals a diverse presence of women across sectors such as hospitality, healthcare, and sports, highlighting occupational activities that are largely absent from administrative records. In this sense, integrating both types of data provide a more comprehensive understanding of socio-occupational structures, uncovering patterns of labour participation, gendered roles, and household economies that remain invisible in conventional sources.
Situated within the broader historiographical discussion of women's agency in colonial port cities across the Indian Ocean World, this article examines the lived experiences of women who formed relationships spanning cultural, linguistic, and religious lines. Drawing on detailed case studies from Galle (Sri Lanka) and Melaka (Malaysia), the article rethinks marriage, intimacy, and social connectivity in the eighteenth century. A comparative look at their testamentary decisions reveals the lives of widows and the ways they were able to exercise agency within a colonial order shaped by both patriarchy and racial hierarchy. Despite their differences, these women all contributed to the social cohesion in culturally highly diverse spaces through acts of marriage, child-rearing, and the maintenance of familial relationships. By bringing to light these women's participation in informal credit networks in particular, the article highlights how individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds helped weave the horizontal connections that sustained urban life under colonial rule. In doing so, it challenges persistent portrayals of VOC societies as isolated enclaves centered on European settler families and male authority, showing instead how family histories illuminate the complexities of empire as it was lived. Ultimately, it argues that these intimate relationships formed the connective tissue of VOC colonial society, linking households, economies, and imperial worlds across continents.
Is high fertility related to shorter lifespan? Evolutionary theories predict negative physiological effects of fertility on women's later-life survival. However, kin and especially one's own children may contribute positively to women's survival in old age. Family members may transfer resources and provide caretaking assistance as women age and be a source of social support that contributes to health and survival. This paper focuses on the extent to which negative effects of childbearing on survival are possibly suppressed by positive family network effects on survival at age 50-85. We use multi-generational life course data from three historical populations: five parishes and a town in Southern Sweden (SEDD, 1813-1968), the St. Lawrence Valley in contemporary Canada (RPQA, 1670-1799) and the Krummh & ouml;rn region in northern Germany (KH, 1720-1874). Using Cox proportional hazard models, we analyze the effect of fertility on survival and the relation between kin and survival in later life. We find that women with a larger number of births have higher mortality at advanced ages in Canada and Germany. In both populations, the presence of (adult) daughters is associated with lower mortality, particularly at advanced age (50-70). We conclude that the negative effect of childbearing on survival is partially counterbalanced by the help of adult children, depending on the local context.
This article examines domestic authority as a central legal and social mechanism underpinning colonial governance in the Dutch East India Company empire. Existing historiography often characterizes domestic dependency as a condition in which enslaved individuals, deprived of property rights and legal autonomy, were subjected to private jurisdiction in the domestic sphere and subjected to the broad discretion of household heads. This study corrects this view based on an analysis of the Dutch East India Company empire. It argues that domestic authority was not an entirely secluded private sphere but rather a constitutive element of public colonial order, operating alongside - and interacting with - the discretionary application of law by officials across multiple social and legal spheres. Based on a survey of legal codes (the Statutes of the Indies and colonial by-laws), criminal court records from the Council of Justice and the Alderman's Court from Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope, and other colonial reports, the article traces references to domestic authority and household disciplinary practices in relation to slavery. They challenge prevailing narratives portraying slavery in Asia as 'mild' or even 'benign', exposing households as spheres in which nominally limited 'domestic correction' frequently escalated into severe violence. We argue that these practices were not isolated abuses but deeply embedded in - and reinforced by - the broader colonial power structure, positioning domestic authority as a central instrument of state governance rather than a private domain.
Historical family demography moves through its own life cycle. Early beginnings in cross-sectional regression analysis of samples grew into explicitly longitudinal approaches as family historians drew on life course concepts and analytical methods from contemporary social statistics. Realizing the potential of a full life course approach was long limited by the small numbers historians could reliably trace across time. In the mid-2020s, historical family demographers, particularly in North America and Europe, find themselves sometimes having better data for understanding life course changes than contemporaries studying live cohorts. The constant historians' advantage remains: by studying the past we can often follow people to their deaths. To that advantage, family historians now add digitized data for complete national populations, which has enabled construction of large multi-wave panels in many countries, or the sources to construct panels at lower cost than previously. Beyond the benefits of studying more lives over longer periods, these new data sources allow historical family demographers to innovate in three key ways: causes, connections, and continuous measures. Larger panel samples allow us to infer causal effects by comparing the evolving lives of siblings and neighbors sharing common early environments, but with diverging later life experiences and outcomes. Family historians have a special advantage in contributing to important open debates in the social sciences about the influence of early life on adult outcomes. These approaches draw on the connections that large data let us make between people at different points in their life, and the ease of linking smaller data sources into registers and censuses. Finally, complete datasets on national populations allow us to compute creative new continuous measures of social context at the individual level.
This article examines illegitimacy in the Azores from a long-term perspective (c. 1600-1910), using the island of S & atilde;o Jorge as a case study. It combines an island-wide approach with a bottom-up analysis centered on the parish of Ribeira Seca, drawing on parish registers, family reconstitution, nominal population lists, ecclesiastical documentation, and judicial records. While the chronological scope spans the early modern and modern periods, the analysis of individual life courses focuses primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article argues that illegitimacy in S & atilde;o Jorge cannot be adequately understood as moral deviance or as a straightforward consequence of poverty. Instead, it constituted a structural - and often transitional - feature of local society, shaped by enduring constraints on access to marriage, a marked degree of social tolerance towards non-marital motherhood, and locally embedded forms of accommodation. Despite very high levels of non-marital fertility, child abandonment remained comparatively limited, pointing to informal mechanisms that integrated single mothers and their children into family and household structures. The analysis shows that a substantial proportion of children born outside marriage later acquired legitimate status through parental marriage or paternal acknowledgement. Reproduction prior to marriage often did not represent a break with matrimonial norms, but rather a sometimes prolonged and uncertain path toward the formation of a legitimate family. By situating S & atilde;o Jorge within both the Azorean and broader European contexts, the article identifies an exceptional insular trajectory and suggests that its high levels of illegitimacy are best explained by the interaction of demographic constraints and a distinctive local cultural configuration.
How do meritocratic institutions evolve over time, and under what conditions do they serve as vehicles for social mobility versus instruments of elite reproduction? We examine these questions through the Joseon Dynasty's civil service examination system (1393-1894), one of history's longest-running experiments in merit-based bureaucratic selection. Drawing on comprehensive individual-level data covering over 14,000 successful candidates across five centuries, we analyze how family background, geographic location, incumbent status, and demonstrated ability shaped examination outcomes. Our findings reveal the persistent influence of elite family backgrounds alongside consistent evidence that the formal examination pathway functioned as a meritocratic selection mechanism. Preliminary examination performance substantially predicted subsequent success, independent of family origins; yet, this meritocratic channel coexisted with alternative pathways - direct entry, incumbent retaking, and irregular examinations - that systematically advantaged elite families. At the macro level, we track measures of formal equality of opportunity and substantive equality of opportunity across royal reigns, revealing a trajectory from initial openness through progressive elite capture, to partial reform, and ultimately decay. We conceptualize this system as a layered meritocracy - an institution maintaining multiple selection logics simultaneously - and argue that this multiplicity explains both its remarkable longevity and its eventual hollowing as elite families increasingly bypassed competitive channels.
How did institutional differences shape the relationship between family structure and labour mobility in early modern maritime markets? Using biographical data on more than 3,300 Dutch and French sailors captured during the Revolutionary Wars (1793-1802), this research note examines how household composition varied with recruitment distance. On Dutch vessels, marriage rates declined steeply from 81.0% among locally recruited men (<= 50 km) to 47.7% at long distance (>200 km), a 33-percentage-point drop reflecting the international recruitment of unmarried workers from Denmark and northern Germany. French ships showed a flatter 14-point gradient, from 63.5% to 50.0%, consistent with nationally structured recruitment and a more regionally bounded labour market. Age patterns suggest that this Dutch gradient was driven above all by the recruitment of younger single men at greater distances, rather than by a uniform age decline. Fathers with co-resident children were virtually absent across all distance bands in both fleets, while co-residence with parents increased modestly with distance. Literacy patterns indicated positive skill sorting rather than deteriorating human capital. These findings show that institutional structures, particularly Dutch market openness versus French regulatory boundaries in practice, mediated household strategies and created distinct geographies of family life in the late eighteenth-century maritime labour market.
Religion is one of the most well-studied variables in the social sciences and was already studied by classical sociologists like Durkheim, Merton, and Weber. Religious association is indicative of the social circles that people belong to and the social norms that they adhere to. Therefore, religious conversion is generally deemed a relatively rare phenomenon. Yet, there are individual characteristics - such as social changes like schisms, unification, and secularization - that can make people more likely to change religious affiliations. With aggregated census data and regularly updated historical data on religious association from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN), this research note explores how permeable religious boundaries in the Netherlands were over time, how this differed between individuals, and what this says about Dutch society as a whole. This required rigorous standardization of historical source material, as information on religious association is locked away in abbreviations in the margins of the 19th- and 20th-century Dutch population registers. As such, this research note showcases the usefulness of the IISG List of Religious Denominations and IISG Taxonomy of Religions as tools for studying religious denominations. Secondly, this research note shows that with the use of standardized tools it becomes possible to study groups in society that were hitherto treated as footnotes in handbooks on the (religious) history, such as the new Christian movements, as detailed information on their members' life courses can now be disclosed.
This research note explores excess mortality among institutionalised children and adolescents in the Netherlands from the 1860s to the 1960s, linking a recent case study of the Catholic Good Shepherd institution to broader, comparative questions in historical family demography. Public debates have increasingly framed mortality as definitive evidence of institutional violence, exemplified by the 2024 documentary De meisjes van de Goede Herder. Yet the underlying demographic analysis, while confirming excess mortality among both boarders and nuns, highlighted the limits of available sources and cautioned against drawing overly deterministic conclusions. This research note situates that case within a wider institutional landscape that included Protestant, Catholic and 'neutral' homes, and argues that mortality in these settings was shaped by shifting populations, evolving institutional regimes and historically contingent notions of death. Surveying institutional histories of neutral and Protestant reformatory homes, orphanages and post-war girls' homes, the article shows that although sickness and death frequently appear in narrative sources, systematic mortality analysis is largely absent. This absence hinders our ability to determine whether Catholic institutions were exceptional or whether elevated mortality reflected broader structural risks inherent to institutional care: social selection of highly vulnerable children, exposure to infectious disease, overcrowding, limited medical resources and confessional interpretations that sometimes sacralised early death. The article outlines a research agenda for comparative institutional mortality studies, emphasising the need to integrate demographic reconstruction, life-course analysis, and qualitative contextual evidence. It argues that understanding excess mortality requires disentangling background vulnerability, institutional conditions and wider public health trends. Rather than reinforcing speculative interpretations, a comparative and methodologically rigorous approach can illuminate structural risks and institutional responsibilities, contributing to contemporary debates on care, accountability and the historical conditions under which children (and those who worked with them) faced heightened risks of death.
Relying on local-level information in late-18th-century Spain (almost 17,500 locations), this article (1) shows that average child sex ratios were extremely high, a result that cannot be explained by female under-registration, (2) identifies which regions were more prone to suffer from 'missing girls', and (3) explores the factors that might be behind this phenomenon in 18th-century Spain. Our results show that, broadly speaking, Southern Spain exhibited an excess of male children. Those areas showing relatively high child sex ratios are associated with precarious economic conditions and a marriage market that resulted in (almost) universal female marriage and a large spousal age gap. Lastly, our model only explains a small part of the variation in child sex ratios, thus suggesting that it is likely that unobserved social and cultural factors, which are more difficult to measure, were also playing a role in triggering gender-discriminatory practices during infancy and childhood.
