Introduction
Economic, social, and demographic quantitative analysis has paid much attention to the short-term relationship between economic (the prices of consumer goods in particular) and demographic time series.
In the last few years, research in this field has further developed thanks to new and stimulating methodological approaches. With reference to the numerous studies on demographic and economic short-term variations in England, carried out after Lee (1981), Bengtsson and Reher have recently suggested the existence of a school which we may call ‘the economic history school of short-term analysis'. This school is not only characterized by its choice of problems and its sampling method but also its choice of statistical techniques (Bengtsson and Reher 1998: 100—1). The work presented here might not necessarily be included in this ‘new' school, but it follows the same method of research in terms of the analytical techniques adopted.The area considered in this research is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, over the time period from 1823 to 1854. Although the general picture was in constant evolution during this period, population trends in Tuscany still reflect the crisis of the old regime. Depending on the context being considered—whether urban or rural, whether mostly composed of paid workers or of owners working their land, and so on—a bad harvest or a sudden rise in prices had a negative influence on the consumption of indispensable goods and therefore on the living standards of a significant part of the population. Since levels of consumption can have a relationship with some demographic variables, mortality in particular, the assumption made is that variations in the latter during this short period can be used as a reliable indicator of living standards.
More precisely, the aim of this chapter is to identify how different ‘territories', each with their own economic, social, and demographic characteristics, experienced different demographic outcomes when faced with fluctuations in wheat prices. Once
the close relationship between fluctuations in wheat prices and mortality has been established, we indicate how such a link became particularly strong only in the case of specific age groups. The correspondence between prices and mortality fluctuations was not necessarily direct and was linked to economic and social factors. To disentangle this complicated ‘knot’, we first contrast the demographic reactions of the urban population with those of the rural population, and then undertake a deeper analysis of the reactions of the rural population. The rich and detailed statistical documentation produced by the Tuscan Public Records Office permits us to consider the mortality reactions of infants, children, youths, adults, and the elderly to fluctuating wheat prices in forty-three different agrarian regions.
2.