Introduction
This chapter is located at a crossroad. On one side, it is a partial synthesis of research done within the framework of the Eurasian Project for the Comparative History of Population and Family, where we explored the influence of the economic structure and conjuncture on demographic behaviour (Bengtsson and Campbell 1998; Bengtsson and Saito 2000: 12—16 for first presentations).
On the other side, it addresses the classic ‘standard of living debate' about the first phase of economic modernization that emerged in England during the late 1950s.1 These vigorous discussions expanded to include more and more countries (with an emerging debate about the comparison between East and West), an increasing number of dimensions (regional disparities, differentials by gender, social status, ethnicity, etc.), new data (especially family budgets and the study of heights and handicaps through military records), as well as new methodological approaches. This volume is an illustration of this dynamic and an attempt to advance the debate.This chapter examines the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the standard of living of rural areas in a region experiencing rapid economic development. In Section 2 we start with a discussion about the standard of living debate in Belgium, we then present two neighbouring but very different rural areas of eastern Belgium: the East Ardennes and the Land of Herve. Our objective is to understand how inhabitants of the countryside facing different local conditions coped with such a fundamental and rapid modernization of the regional economy. We use the technical and intellectual tools of our discipline, historical demography, to measure their successes and failures. Section 3 develops a structural approach emphasizing progressive adaptations over the medium term, 10—40 years. Our inspiration comes
from the study of demographic regimes. Since the discovery of the homeostasis of pre-industrial populations, research in this field has shown the complexity and the variety of interactions between demographic behaviours, as well as between demographic and economic structures.
More recently, historical demography and the history of the family, which developed as largely independent disciplines, have engaged in a new dialogue (see issue 2000-2 of the Annales de Demographie historique), and the family system has emerged as the decisive cultural determinant of demographic responses to economic insecurity (Alter 1988; Lee and Campbell 1997; Reher 1997; Neven 2000, etc.).We consider how the Industrial Revolution changed the rural economy, family system, and demographic regime. This interdisciplinary approach to rural society reveals a paradox observed by present-day demographers in numerous Third World countries: high life expectancy in a context of poverty and even pauperization (Preston 1996: 533-4). To understand this paradox, Section 4 adopts the analytical approach developed in the Eurasia Project for dealing with the complex problem of the sensitivity of the demographic behaviours to economic stress. We observe the effects of short-term variations in the cost of living on life course transitions (death, childbirth, marriage, migration). By integrating longitudinal individual data and economic series, we can compare the vulnerability of the inhabitants of our two study areas, the Land of Herve and East Ardennes. This analysis highlights the difference between ‘voluntary’ (marriage and migration) and ‘involuntary’ (fertility and mortality) demographic responses. Although much in this study is peculiar to the Belgian context, we believe that these results are also relevant for a broader discussion of the transition from uncertainty to economic and demographic security.
2.