Conclusion
In this analysis we have applied graphical techniques and logistic regression to try to understand the correlates of MM in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Slavonia, defining gross MM as death occurring within sixty days of a birth, BM as death occurring 61—730 days after a birth, and net MM as the difference between these.
MM was high by the standards of the time and probably higher than MM in the rest of Croatia in the early twentieth century.Physiological factors such as age, parity, multiple birthing, and birth intervals show expectable results. These results increase our confidence in the reliability of the data derived from family reconstitution. However, our interest is mostly in social and economic factors. The data show that in this region, peripheral to emerging centres of industrialization and political power, competing interests in Austria and Hungary limited economic development. Globalization of world grain markets, competition from cheap foreign grain, and inferior local transportation infrastructure were important constraints on such development. Macro-level social structures were slow to change, the emancipation of civil serfs occurring in 1848 but of military serfs only in 1871.
Maternal mortality as customarily defined, within sixty days of birth, was as high as or higher than that in other, contemporary European countries, indeed higher than most historical levels except those in seventeenth-century England. Rapid changes
in socio-economic conditions—the collapse of serfdom and imposition of money taxes and amortization burdens, increasing monetization, and the decay of the joint family system—appear to have exacerbated MM, as well as other indicators of demographic vulnerability such as responses to food supply and the infant mortality rate.
Periods of military mobilization also exacerbated MM. Some of these effects were felt not only within sixty days of birthing but also extend out two years, suggesting that nursing, as well as parturient mothers were made more vulnerable by these changes.
Nevertheless, crisis effects are stronger for MM than for BM, suggesting that it was the absence of males that was determinative.The most plausible general hypothesis to explain these changes is that withdrawal of male labour from family subsistence far ming resulted in extra burdens of heavy labour imposed on females, some of whom were pregnant or nursing. Such withdrawal of male labour would have occurred during military mobilizations and would have been worsened by increased participation in wage labour to meet the growing need for cash. Similar exacerbation would have resulted from losses in economies of scale, especially in the availability of labour by non-pregnant or nonparturient females, as the joint household system decayed. These hypotheses are supported at the micro-level by evidence that the most socially vulnerable of women, brides new to the household, had higher levels of mortality and a more rapid increase in that mortality overtime.
In general, no part of this historical borderland between Europe and Asia, between the Habsburgs and the Turks, between Christianity and Islam, between feudalism and capitalism, tells a pretty story. In this account with general sources sharpened by demographic analysis, we see that the burdens of change fell more heavily on the peasant than on the lord, on the poor than on the rich, on women than on men, and on the most vulnerable women in particular. That was the price of progress, in a transformation that indeed ultimately left everyone better off, even if out-migration was until 1945 the safety valve that may have permitted re-balancing of land and labour. It is ironic that the same factors of economic globalization, development of cheap transportation, and the collapse of ancient social systems leading to the difficulties here depicted, also facilitated their solution, as the victims of structural change escaped to the New World.
Some of these conclusions could be reached from a reading of the general economic, social, and ethnographic history of the region. Others could not be. Nowhere in that history would we have seen that MM increased over time, or that it bore more heavily on the youngest wives. Nowhere would we have seen that the episodic and secularly increasing diversion of male labour from family farming impacted wives, or that losses of household economies of scale increased the labour burden of women and diminished their sources of support as mothers. The demographic evidence here presented not only reinforces that from the broad historical sources, it adds a critical and often more penetrating insight into the standard of living and its changes. The ghost of the Reverend Malthus serves us well.