Marriage and the Family in Eurasia. Perspectives on the Hajnal Hypothesis

Marriage and the family in Eurasia. Perspectives on the Hajnal hypothesis Marriage and the family in Eurasia Perspectives on the Hajnal hypothesis Theo Engelen & Arthur P. Wolf (eds.) Aksant Amsterdam, 2005 Contents 7 1 Life at the Extremes: The demography of China and Europe. General introduction Chuang Ying-chang, Theo Engelen & Arthur P. Wolf 15 2 Introduction: Marriage and the family in Eurasia. Perspectives on the Hajnal hypothesis Theo Engelen & Arthur P. Wolf 37 3 The Hajnal hypothesis before Hajnal. Georg Fertig 51 4 The Hajnal hypothesis and transition theory Theo Engelen 73 5 West of the Hajnal line: North-Western Europe François Hendrickx 105 6 The Hajnal line and Eastern Europe Andrejs Plakans & Charles Wetherell 129 7 South of the Hajnal line. Italy and Southern Europe Pier Paolo Viazzo 165 8 The third pattern of marriage and remarriage: Japan in Eurasian comparative perspectives Osamu Saito 195 9 Strategies for managing household resources in rural North India Monica Das Gupta 215 10 Europe and China: Two kinds of patriarchy Arthur P. Wolf 241 11 An adult life before marriage: Children and the Hajnal hypothesis Paul M.M. Klep 271 12 The European marriage pattern in perspective, or, What if Hajnal had been Chinese? Chuang Ying-chang & Arthur P. Wolf 289 13 Servants and service in Eurasia Hill Gates & François Hendrickx 319 14 Girls’ work in China and North-Western Europe: of guniang and meisjes Hill Gates 343 15 Passion, reason, and human weakness: The European marriage Pattern and the control of adolescent sexuality Jan Kok 1 7 Life at the Extremes: The demography of China and Europe General introduction Chuang Ying-chang, Theo Engelen & Arthur P. Wolf 8 This is the first volume of a projected series of volumes aimed at comparing the demographic regimes of two parts of Europe and China in late traditional times. This volume sets the theoretical stage by examining in detail John Hajnal’s grand comparison of marriage in Europe and “the rest of the world”.1 The volume is intended to introduce our efforts as the latest generation of research in the intellectual lineage founded by Thomas Malthus and developed by John Hajnal, E.A. Wrigley, and the less well-known Dutch sociologist E.W. Hofstee.2 We also acknowledge as our intellectual forebears two Chinese authors – Hung Liang-chi and Ma Yin-chu. In his essays “Reign of Peace” and “Livelihood” Hung antici- pated many of Malthus’ ideas and Ma brought them to bear on Chinese population thinking at a critical point in history.3 Our plan is to move from the general questions discussed in this volume to detailed empirical studies in volumes two, three, and four. Volume two will deal with fertility, volume three with marriage, and volume four with mortality. Additional volumes will deal with household structure, the life cycle, sibling position as a determinant of life courses, and inheritance customs and their influence on demographic processes. We also hope to include in the series trans- lations of important Dutch and Chinese sources and to reprint significant works that are neglected because of where and when they were originally published. We entitle the series “Life at the Extremes” for three reasons. The first is that we plan to compare populations that lived at the opposite ends of Eurasia and consequently developed radically different social forms; the second is that we plan to deal with the life course from birth to death and to include in our comparisons people at both ends of the social ladder; and the third is that in terms of the behaviors that define demography, China and Europe represented 1. John Hajnal, “European marriage patterns in perspective”, in: D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Evereley (eds), Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 101-143. 2. See Hajnal, “European marriage patterns in perspective”, and John Hajnal, “Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system”, Population and Development Review, vol. 8, nr. 3 (1982) 449-494; E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981); E.A. Wrigley, “Malthus’ model of a pre-industrial economy”, in: J. Dupaquier, A. Fauve-Chamoux and E. Grebnik (eds), Malthus Past and Present (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 111-124; E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen and R.S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); E.W. Hofstee, Korte demografische geschiedenis van Nederland (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1981). 3. See C.F. Lung, “A note on Hung Liang-chi: The Chinese Malthus”, T’ien-sha Monthly (October 1935); and Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) for a summary of Hung’s work and for an account of Ma’s ideas and his influence on Chinese population thinking. Hung wrote his essays in 1793 – five years before the appearance of the first edition of Malthus’ Essay on Population. Ma wrote in the late 1950’s while serving as President of Peking University. two radically different adaptations. One was characterized by early and universal 9 marriage, high general fertility, low marital fertility, and high mortality; the other, by late marriage and a high celibacy rate, low general fertility, high marital fertility, and, compared with most pre-modern populations, low mortality.4 One of our major goals will be to assess whether or not these two demographic regimes are best characterized as examples of what Thomas Malthus called “pre- ventive” and “positive” checks. The populations we compare are people born in the Netherlands in the years 1780-1870 and in Taiwan in the years 1860-1925. We choose these particular populations because a large portion of their lives was recorded in detail in household registers established in the Netherlands in 1850 and in Taiwan in 1905.5 These registers record information that is accurate, detailed, and highly comparable. They are two of the best sources of individual demographic information in the world. They report not only the dates that mark the progress of the typical life course – birth, marriage, the births of children, and death – but also the dates of events that mark departures from the typical life course – adoption, divorce, and remarriage. They record who people married as well as when they married and who they were living with as well as where they were living. It is possible to determine for all events that occurred during the years covered by the registers the exact composition of the household in which the subject of the event was living. One can therefore evaluate the extent to which the vital events in people’s lives were influenced by events in the lives of their parents and sib- lings. The hallmark of the work published in this series will be studies that begin with individuals in particular contexts and build from there to comparisons of the populations of two very different societies. From an anthropological point of view, Taiwan and the Netherlands were radically different societies. Taiwan was part of the world’s most enduring tribu- tary state and exemplified in extreme form many of the characteristics of such states – a strictly patrilineal kinship system, an oppressive gender hierarchy, and generational relations that gave parents the ability to control their married as well as their unmarried children. The Netherlands, in contrast, was a parlia- mentary monarchy with a cognatic kinship system, relatively egalitarian gender relations, and generational relations that made it difficult for parents to arrange 4. See Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500-1820 (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1981) for Europe - and the papers in Stevan Harrell (ed.), Chinese Historical Microdemography (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995) for China. 5. The Dutch registers are described in A. Janssens, Family and Social change: the household as a process in an industrializing society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and the Taiwanese registers in Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845-1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), 16-33. 10 their children’s marriages, let alone dictate the course of their adult lives. There were, however, ways in which the two societies were more alike than is com- monly realized. These are important because they provide the common ground that allows us to identify the cause and consequences of the major differences. In the language of the laboratory, they are the experimental constants. One of these is the fact that during the years covered by our study, fertility in both societies conformed to the pattern Louis Henry calls “natural fertility”. There was no birth control and no general desire for birth control. In fact, the cultures of both countries can be characterized as strongly pro-natalist until well after the youngest of our subjects were born. According to the standard set by the Princeton Fertility Project,6 the Dutch fertility transition began in 1899 and the Taiwanese fertility transition in the 1960s. Thus in both cases the births of our youngest subjects preceeded the beginning of the fertility transition by several decades. A second common feature of the two societies during the years that con- cern us is their mixed economies. Despite the fact that the Netherlands is gen- erally viewed as “the first modern economy”, the great majority of the population depended on agriculture until well into the 20th century. In 1850 when the last of our subjects was born 40 percent of all Dutch families were farmers, in rural areas more than 50 percent.

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