Introduction

The task of the social sciences was succinctly put by C. Wright Mills (1959): to show how the lives of little people were shaped by the passage of great events. This chapter is about how the life chances of peasant women, in their most primal experience, childbirth, were shaped by the blind and impersonal forces of institutional and market change.

Insights into the standard of living in the past may rely on different kinds of data. General historical accounts give a broad but often imprecise view. Detailed economic information is often unavailable or difficult to interpret. A third source is information on the plausible impacts of changes in standard of living on the demographic rates and health of populations. Where demographic data are more reliable and more specific than economic or social indicators, we may reverse the indicative arrow and obtain a closer insight into the conditions of life.

In this chapter we seek to combine all forms of evidence. General information on regional economic history is relatively abundant. Detailed economic information is sporadic and inspecific; good time series are especially rare. Demographic information is often reasonably good, indeed quite good if derived from family reconstitution of parish records. Thus our best practical approach to understanding the economic and social history of the region is through examination of the demographic record, a record of the results of levels and changes in the ‘standard of living'.

We briefly recapitulate and refine earlier analyses of demographic responses to economic and social stress in the population of Slavonia in a period of tumultuous structural change r.1750—1900 and then focus on maternal mortality (MM). Our motivation is to contribute to the long-running debate on the costs of industrialization and more broadly on the costs of development in general.

This chapter will show that:

• The strength of short-term Malthusian responses to food shortage, as proxied by grain prices, was high by contemporary standards and increased in times of crisis and over the long term.

• The physical stature of military recruits in the broader region diminished until about 1850, then rose.

• MM was often higher than that in other regions of the same historical period.

• The expectable physiological patterns appear: MM is most severe at the first birth, usually increases with age for each parity, and is higher for multiple births.

• MM increased episodically in periods of military mobilization when male labour was withdrawn from family farming and replaced by female labour. Military parishes show higher levels of MM than civil parishes.

• MM increased over time, commensurate with monetization, land shortage, general immiseration, diversion of male labour to wage earning, and decay of the joint family system that provided household economies of scale in labour.

• The rate of increase in MM was greater for new brides (primiparous females), who were traditionally at the bottom of the household hierarchy, than for more established wives.

• The infant mortality rate shows some of the same episodic structure and increase over time as MM, confirming the impacts of economic and social change on infants, perhaps through stress on their lactating mothers or declines in surrogate nursing.

• The mortality of mothers after the immediate postpartum period (‘background mortality (BM)) also shows some of these effects, suggesting their influence through maternal depletion, as well as through more rapidly acting disease and obstetrical difficulties (MM).

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