NOTES
1.
In his 1989 introduction to a collective volume, Peter Scholliers shows how British historians E. Hobsbawm and R. Hartwell took up the debate of inter-war economists Keynes and Kuczynski, starting a continuous flow of research (cf.
Scholliers 1989: especially 6-8).2.
We do not want to impose numerous references, some of them very local, on an international audience. One of us has published an exhaustive bibliography of the studies about the population history of Belgium, and we take the liberty to refer to this publication. For the research on demographic crises, look in Oris (1994: notices 2028 to 2149, 178-88).
3.
4.
In the Land of Herve, cohabitation between an old parent and the last children staying at home was ended by death or occasionally by the out-migration of the elder in 77% of the cases. Only 33% of these living arrangements ended because of the departure of the children. The large majority of the ‘stayers' did their ‘duty' until the end. Trends for all series (see Figure 15.1 as well as Figure 15.2) have been estimated using the Hodrick-Prescott method. For a critique, see Harvey and Jaeger (1993).
5.
6.
7.
Prices in Verviers have been built from the Prix moyen des grains et des autres produits alimentaires vendus a Verviers, a series which was annually published in the Expose de la situation de la Ville de Verviers, 1851—1910. For the years 1879 and 1889, they have been completed by the Moniteur belge.
As we noted above, dairy production, which was the essential component of the Hervian economy in the second half of the nineteenth century, was traditionally a female task (Segalen 1980: 87—104). Consequently, we can suspect a greater pressure on adult women in the Land of Herve, than in more traditional rural areas like Ardennes.
In this context, even the evolution of the matrimonial market analysed through the sex ratio of unmarried people aged 18-44 had no clear influence on marriage levels (Neven 2000: 457).