Eurasia Project on Population and Family History

The Eurasia Project on Population and Family History represents an innovative and important genre of comparative historical research. Lead scholars in this project include James Lee, Cameron Campbell, Tommy Bengtsson, Norika Tsuya, Satomi Kurosu, and George Alter, as well as many others. The first two volumes of research from the project, Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 and Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, appeared in 2005 and 2010, and the most recent volume Similarity in Difference: Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 is about to appear. The first volume addresses variations in mortality, the second addresses fertility, and the most recent addresses nuptiality. Taken together, the three volumes provide an encompassing treatment of the main parameters of demographic behavior. (Also of interest is Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (2005), which provides a rigorous analysis of what is known about real wages and living standards across many locations in Europe and Asia.)

The EAP project is an approach to historical demography that is intended to provide a substantially more detailed understanding of the historical trajectory of demography in different parts of the Eurasian land mass—population size, nuptiality, fertility, mortality, etc., as well as a more empirically constrained set of hypotheses about the causes of changes in these factors over time. This research represents an important example of collaborative “large science” in the historical social sciences, in that it involves research teams at a number of centers in Europe, Asia, and the United States who have agreed on a set of standards on the basis of which to represent and analyze the demographic data they have collected. In the aggregate, the study makes use of 2.5 million longitudinally linked individual records in over a dozen locations across Eurasia. Research teams are focusing on detailed demographic records in community-sized locations across Eurasia, including Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and China, and these researchers aim to provide analysis of their findings that is sufficiently structured as to permit rigorous comparison across cases.

​The researchers describe the project in these terms: "New data and new methods … have begun to illuminate the complexities of demographic responses to exogenous stress, economic and otherwise.… Combined time-series and event-history analyses of longitudinal, nominative, microlevel data now allow for the finely grained differentiation of mortality, fertility, and other demographic responses by social class, household context, and other dimensions at the individual level” (Bengtsson et al., 2004, pp. viii-ix). Their goals are ambitious -- to provide detailed, analytically sophisticated multi-generational studies of a number of populations across Eurasia. The studies are intended to permit the researchers to probe issues of causation as well as to identify important dimensions of similarity and difference across regions and communities.

​A key to this approach is to have assembled comparable micro-level longitudinal demographic data in different geographic locations across Europe and Asia. The research groups have attempted to arrive at a micro-picture of the individual-level demographic events with individual, relationship, and household characteristics; to put together a timeline of “stress”; and to see how outcomes for people’s demographic events behave in relationship to the patterns of change in environmental and economic characteristics. This allows them to probe the ways in which varying social and economic institutions—family structure, economic niche structure, state food subsidy practices—influence people in different places.

The project has also made important innovations in the statistical methods that can be used within historical demography. Alter (1988), Lee and Campbell (1997), and others have led the way in creating methods based on event-history analysis for allowing statistical analysis of demographic events at the individual-community level, and this is an important innovation relative to the techniques used to establish large population parameters of demographical behavior. George Alter's use of these methods is described in a prior post.

​An important historiographic feature of this work is the decision the researchers have made about the scale of groups to be studied. The work is not intended to tell the demographic story of the nations in which the communities under study exist, but rather to provide detailed snapshots of local populations over extended periods of time. Lee, Campbell, and Bengtsson write, “Our focus on comparison of communities, not countries, represents a new approach in social science history. While we generalize about certain aspects of human behavior, we do so within the cultural, economic, and historical contexts of specific communities, not at the national level” (Bengtsson et al., 2004, p. 7).

​This research is distinguished by several important features. First, it attempts to combine aggregate and individual levels, building aggregate conclusions from analysis of individual-level data. Second, it is deeply comparative, in that these groups deliberately attempt to identify similarities and differences at both extremes of Eurasia and within Europe and Asia. Third, this research project examines the “large-scale processes and implications of the fertility and mortality transitions,” and to do so in a way that permits comparison across regions. Finally, the research attempts to evaluate the large hypotheses (especially Malthusianism) concerning differences in demographic regimes between Europe and Asia. So the Eurasia Project on Population and Family History is both micro and macro, with a coherent method for joining the two levels; it is comparative; and it is intended to provide a basis for discovering causal relationships among factors that influence demographic outcomes.

​The Eurasia Project approach tends to downplay the “large” common institutions at the national level and to emphasize instead the local institutions that directly contact and constrain individuals. These researchers also emphasize the degree of variability that exists across societies and local settings with regard to demographic behavior. Some of the local and regional social and cultural regimes that the authors identify and explore as causal variables in explaining outcomes include family structure, public provisioning systems for food emergency, wealth and class, and land tenure.

​Another important implication of this research pertains to the viability of the Malthusian hypothesis about macro-demography. The authors find that their results refute the Malthusian conclusions and generalizations about positive and preventive checks and Europe versus Asia. They find that family practices, demographic institutions, and economic settings vary sufficiently across the map of Eurasia as to make it impossible to arrive at grand differentiating statements about European and Asian demography (or English and Chinese demography). In particular, they find that the evidence shows that Chinese demographic behavior resulted in fertility rates that were broadly comparable to those of Western Europe.

​There are still some important generalizations to be made about Europe and about Asia with regard to demographic patterns; but there are also cross-cutting similarities in some regions of Europe with some regions of Asia, and there are important differences across both Europe and Asia. This finding illustrates a highly important common thread that emerges from comparative economic history in many areas—that regions contain substantial variation within their boundaries, and that these variations may sometimes be as significant as those across regions.

This body of research represents a pivotal contribution to the way that we think about the past and pursue its history. The contributors show the highly complex and diverse patterns of the standard of living and demographic behavior in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging from these studies is not one of a great divergence between East and West during early modern times, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity of population behavior to economic fluctuations. Perhaps once and for all we can put Malthus out of the center stage when we think about historical population behavior!

Percent of unmarried males by age . Source: Similarity in Difference, chapter 3

Guest post by Elizabeth Anderson on race in American politics

Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author most recently of The Imperative of Integration. This contribution extends a question posed in a recent post on the conservative war on poor people (link). Thanks for contributing, Liz!

American Conservative Politics and the Long Shadow of Slavery

Elizabeth Anderson

An “outright Marxist!”  That’s what Rafael Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz’s father, declared of President Obama on the campaign trail in April 2013.  His accusation is common on the right.  Google “Obama Marxist” and you will get about 4.95 million results.  “Obama communist” yields 40 million.  It’s a strange charge against a man who vigorously supported the bail-out of Wall Street banks as a Senator, and expanded it to other major firms as President.  Yet the charge is nothing new.  Conservatives have long accused anyone to their left of communism or fellow-traveling.  Rick Perlstein traces this practice back to the 1950s.

In fact, it goes back a century before.  George Fitzhugh, author of the famous proslavery tract Cannibals All! wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison in 1856 declaring that “every theoretical abolitionist at the North is a Socialist or Communist.”  J. H. Thornwell, one of the most distinguished ministers of the antebellum South, delivered a sermon in 1850 on “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in which he characterized the conflict over slavery as one in which slaveholders, Christians, and the “friends of order and regulated freedom” stood together against “abolitionists, atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, [and] jacobins” who were united on the other side.

This fact about the origins of one aspect of conservative rhetoric opens a window to the larger structure of American conservative thought.  Consider Romney’s notorious 47% speech:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president . . . who are dependent upon government . . . who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing . . . . These are people who pay no income tax . . . . I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This was spoken by a presidential candidate who supported the Wall Street bailouts, who did not complain about massive state subsidies to wealthy farmers or the oil and coal industries, and who paid 14.1% of his income in federal taxes—less than the 15.3% effective payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare that falls on wage workers, over and above the income tax.  Counting state and local taxes, which are highly regressive, we have good reason to believe that the 47% he resents pay substantially higher total tax rates than the top 1%.

Romney, however, knew his audience. Tax breaks and subsidies for better-off whites are not what most conservatives oppose.  Their core objection is “free stuff” thought to disproportionately benefit blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and other traditionally subordinated groups.  As Lee Atwater explained, the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy” for winning white voters is all about opposing policies that disproportionately help blacks and promoting policies that disproportionately hurt them:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-ger, n-ger, n-ger." By 1968 you can't say "n-ger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

While conservatives, even those belonging to or sympathetic to the Tea Party, support Social Security and Medicare, they condemn programs such as means-tested welfare, which are perceived as disproportionately benefiting blacks and Latinos, whom they see as undeserving.  A key driver of public opinion on domestic policy in the U.S. is racial resentment: in particular, the idea that blacks are too lazy to take responsibility for their lives but want to live off the hard-earned wealth of whites, either through crime or the public dole.

My current research on abolitionism and the struggle for free labor finds that this idea has been a deep theme of American conservative opinion since before the Civil War.  Although in the antebellum era, racists typically supposed that blacks were incapable of taking care of themselves, while today they are thought to be willfully refusing to do so, the complaints about black behavior are remarkably similar.  In response to an emancipation petition submitted to the Virginia legislature, hundreds of citizens submitted proslavery petitionsin 1795.  Echoing other petitions, this one from the free whites of Lunenberg County worried that emancipation would bring

Want, Poverty, Distress and ruin to the free Citizen; the Horrors of all the rapes, Robberies, Murders, and Outrages, which an innumerable Host of unprincipled, unpropertied, vindictive and remorseless Banditte are capable of perpetrating; Neglect, famine and Death to the abandoned black Infant, and superannuated Parent; inevitable Bankruptcy to the revenue; Desperation and revolt to the disappointed, oppressed Citizen; and sure and final ruin to this once happy, free, and flourishing Country . . . .

Thomas Dew, in his 1832 article “Abolition of Negro Slavery,” predicted that abolition would lead blacks to idleness, drunkenness, destitution, and thence to crime.  William Harper predicted in Cotton is King, an 1860 compendium of proslavery thought, that emancipation would reduce blacks to paupers and lead them “from petty to greater crimes, until all life and property would be rendered insecure,” and that if they got the vote, they “would be used by unprincipled politicians” to advance dangerous schemes.

White conservatives saw their fears confirmed during Reconstruction.  This cartoon reveals their view of the Freedman’s Bureau, described as “an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man:

Then it was the Freedman’s Bureau.  Today it is food stamps, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Not only the content, but the style and emotional register of conservative politics have been constant.  The hysteria, apocalyptic sensibility, and intransigence of Tea Party conservatives on full display in the recent government shutdown crisis (complete with a confederate flag) mirrors that of the South in the run-up to the Civil War through the Reconstruction Era.  American conservatism continues to operate under the long shadow of slavery and its legacy.

Eurasian Population Project

In the historical demography hall of fame there is but a single bust -- that of Thomas Malthus. (I'm joking -- there is no historical demography hall of fame.) Malthus is the theorist with the most enduring theories and hypotheses about population behavior across the world. Most central among his theories is a causal hypothesis about population change: different cultures embody significantly different mechanisms for adjusting population size to available resources. Malthus believed that Europe and Asia differed in exactly this way: the family norms of Western Europe controlled fertility according to the level of available resources, whereas the family norms of Asia controlled population size through excess mortality when resources were short. These were the preventive and positive checks that Malthus described in An Essay on the Principle of Population.

The most basic importance of the Eurasian Population Project is precisely its refutation of Malthus's core theory. (The Coursera offering described earlier in a post on "A New History for a New China" provides a good introduction to the EPP; link.) EPP scholars have demonstrated that there is no fundamental difference in the population dynamics of Europe and Asia, at least along the lines postulated by Malthus. The first set of findings of this group are presented in Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 [2004]. 

[Our study] is an international comparison of short-term mortality responses at the microlevel in past times…, designed to improve our understanding of the individual and family demographic responses to social and economic pressure. Its hallmarks are geographic breadth, temporal depth, and detailed longitudinal data. It examines not just one people, but a variety of micro-populations in West Europe and East Asia; not just one period, but a period of 80 to 150 years, largely from the nineteenth century; not just one community but one hundred communities with 2.5 million longitudinally linked individual-level records; and not just mortality, the subject of this book, but in later volumes of this series, the entire range of demographic behavior, including reproduction, nuptially, and migration. (4)

In particular, there is evidence from sites across Asia that demonstrate a mortality responsiveness to changing economic circumstances that is highly similar to that found in Western European sites. And specifically on Malthus' view of Asian demographic behavior:

Contrary to the Malthusian claim that the positive check was more important in the East than in the West, we demonstrate that mortality responses at least to short-term economic pressure were just as great, indeed often greater, in the West as in the East. Contrary to the neo-Malthusian characterization of mortality as a function of ecology and human biology, we demonstrate the importance of human agency not just in the East, but in the West as well. (5)

There is a crucial methodological assumption that distinguishes the EPP approach from traditional historical demography. This has to do with its focus on communities rather than national populations. 

Our focus on comparison of communities, not countries, represents a new approach to social science history. While we generalize about certain aspects of human behavior, we do so within the cultural, economic, and historical contexts of specific communities, not at the national level. In contrast with the dominant thrust in academic research, we ignore contemporary nation-state boundaries and standard historical chronologies. Thus while our results illuminate the behavior of specific Belgian, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and Swedish populations identified in map 1.1 from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century, we draw from them implications for the demography not of specific countries, but of social and economic systems. This strategy of comparing individual contexts rather than countries avoids the problem of representativeness normally inherent in community studies. (7)

The research programme that holds together the numerous local projects encompassed by the Eurasian Population Project is innovative and important. It frames a significantly new way of designing research into large-scale social processes extended over a long period of time.

At the same time, it seems fair to ask whether the data currently available through the EPP is broad enough to achieve the group's ambitious goals. The studies of each site are very data-rich; but there is of necessity only a very limited number of sites that will receive this kind of intensive data collection and analysis. Let's assume that the effort results eventually in two dozen careful local inquiries from Sweden to Japan. This is only a minuscule selection of sites from the universe of possibilities. So what makes us think that the patterns and processes that are identified in these studies are actually more general features of the totality of demographic behavior?

The answer we give to this question seems to depend quite a bit on our background assumptions about social variation. How much variability is there across Scandinavia, North China, or Japan when it comes to social and political arrangements, marriage institutions, and economic institutions? If we think that most of the institutional arrangements show a lot of variation, then it is hard to justify the idea that one or two careful local studies will be good indicators of the more regional patterns. If, on the other hand, we think that the relevant institutional arrangements are substantially more widespread and stable, then the local studies are more likely to be reliable as indicators of larger regional patterns.

James Lee, Cameron Campbell, and Wang Feng conclude their essay on comparative mortality patterns with this nuanced statement that highlights both variation and universality:

In spite of the popularity of convergence theory, human society remains divergent, a product of specific historical processes. This divergence transcends national boundaries between the northeast Asian and northwest European communities, respectively, but persists between continental boundaries. The irony, of course, is that while the Eurasian Project is an initial step to produce a non-national history based on individual data, not aggregate data, written at the community level, not the country level, our preliminary efforts to produce a social scientific history for the twenty-first century have to some extent also reconfirmed the meta-geography of the nineteenth century. (130)

I believe this approach to historical demography is one of the genuinely important innovations in the historical social sciences in quite a long time. It represents a very different way of trying to gain access to the kinds of processes and mechanisms that have led to important social outcomes in the past two centuries. And it provides a different kind of "microscope" through which to interrogate the past, one that depends on substantially larger and more collaborative research efforts by scholars throughout the world while working with a substantially more localistic conception of where the action is to be found.

Life-course histories and methods

source: G. Alter, "Completing Life Histories with Imputed Exit Dates" (link)

I talked recently with George Alter, a leading historical demographer at the University of Michigan and author of Family and the Female Life Course: The Women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880. (Here is George's presidential address to the Social Science History Association in 2010; link.) Alter has been a long-standing partner in the Eurasian Population and Family History Project, a genuinely innovative "large science" effort to bring together demographic studies of locations from Sweden to Japan.

George and I talked about something that is of interest to philosophers of the social sciences, but is rarely discussed -- the comings and goings of methodological innovations in some areas of the social sciences. There are a handful of "big picture" questions that define the philosophy of social science, and these don't change very rapidly over time and discipline. For example: What is a good explanation? What is the logic of causal inference? How do facts about individuals relate to facts about structures? These are questions that are broadly applicable across many social-science disciplines, and often the answers are fairly similar in different disciplines as well. But it turns out that specific disciplines are sometimes confronted with problems of data analysis and inference that require new methods and new analytical tools, and there may be moments in which significant methodological change occurs in a relatively short period of time.

George's field is historical demography -- the effort to reconstruct the population history of regions and countries through the registers and censuses that still exist for our study. This means examination of marriage behavior, fertility, mortality, emigration, and other key demographic trends. But it also means searching out the causes that can be traced of changes in these variables. So the field of historical demography is descriptive, but it is also analytical and causal; historical demographers are interested in identifying large social factors that influenced population behavior in centuries past.

The problem that Alter and some of his colleagues confronted in their research was a technical and logical one: how to extract the most useful information from population registers. And it turns out that answering this question requires developing radically new tools of analysis.

Most readers will find the methods used in some parts of this study unfamiliar. Some of these methods, like hazard models, have only recently become common in the social sciences, and there have been few previous applications in family history. The development of a new methodology, which is presented below in Chapter 2, was dictated by the characteristics of the Belgian population registers, from which data on nineteenth-century Verviers have been drawn. (13)

A population register differs from a census in a crucial respect: it provides an exhaustive chronological list of the births, deaths, entries, exits, and marital changes of the population present in the region over a specific period of time. This turns out to be a very tricky problem, and one that was not easily handled by traditional techniques of demographic analysis. Traditionally demographers made use of "snapshots" of a population at a time: the size of the population, the percent employed in a given industry, the percent married, etc. But demographic processes are temporal processes; so looking at snapshots frozen in time tends to lose an important dimension of the phenomena. And the method that will work well for population registers needs to be custom-designed to do a good job of representing temporality.

Alter describes the alternative methodology he and other demographers have developed to handle this particular set of problems in chapter two of Family and the Female Life Course. It is a complicated story, but fundamentally it comes down to a shift of perspective on demographic process -- a shift from persons and events to intervals of time. This means moving away from counting individuals to counting "person years". Alter characterizes this shift with the following tables:

 

And here is another take on the same data, this time arranged by age of the person rather than absolute date:

Each of these ways of looking at the data highlights different aspects of the demographic history of this small group.

The information contained in the population register can be transformed into a data set representing person-years and status during that interval. And it is then possible to use these data elements to compute age-specific rates of various demographically important states. Alter emphasizes that these methods permit a much more fine-grained use of the information presented by a population register.

There is much more information in the population registers than in the censuses and vital registers considered separately. The additional information comes from the linkage of information from the census to the demographic events and the linkage of events occurring in the life of each individual in the population register. (32) 

Alter then undertakes to adapt statistical methods to the problem of assessing the causal importance of various sets of factors for the occurrence of other factors; for example, the effect of "living with parents between 25 and 30" on "lifetime fertility". The tool that Alter turns to is the statistics of hazard models. Here is a brief description of hazards models from Wikipedia:

Proportional hazards models are a class of survival models in statistics. Survival models relate the time that passes before some event occurs to one or morecovariates that may be associated with that quantity of time. In a proportional hazards model, the unique effect of a unit increase in a covariate is multiplicative with respect to the hazard rate. For example, taking a drug may halve one's hazard rate for a stroke occurring, or, changing the material from which a manufactured component is constructed may double its hazard rate for failure. Other types of survival models such as accelerated failure time models do not exhibit proportional hazards. These models could describe a situation such as a drug that reduces a subject's immediate risk of having a stroke, but where there is no reduction in the hazard rate after one year for subjects who do not have a stroke in the first year of analysis. (link)

There is an unexpected difficulty that this method must confront -- the problem of what demographers call censoring. Essentially this comes down to the simple fact that a given population register leaves parts of an individual's life undocumented before and after the period covered by the register. So a woman who has not yet given birth at the age of 31 in 1835 (the end of the population register period) will be classified as childless; whereas she may well have a child in the next five years. But to add this woman into a raw count of women with and without children has the effect of under-estimating fertility. Alter shows how "life tables" can be used to address this problem. Essentially it is possible to use the data included in the population register itself to compute age-specific estimates of relevant variables (first marriage, first child, etc.) and then compute the average age of marriage from the life table. Here is an illustration:

This post doesn't suffice to explain the methodology that Alter develops. Interested readers will need to work through Alter's analysis with the same rigor they would apply to learning a new piece of physics. But this brief description does serve to highlight a key fact about research in the social sciences: social science methodology is not finished. Different fields of research encounter new problems with new sources of data; but they also sometimes raise issues about better ways of handling data that has long been available. This means that there will often be times of lively activity and change in the methods of a social science. It also means that it is very interesting to follow the details of the development of a discipline during these periods of change.

(It is interesting to re-read William Sewell's essay, "Three Temporalities: Towards an Eventful Sociology" (in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation) in light of Alter's remarks about the temporality associated with demographic change.)