Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on 19th century rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I show that negative rainfall shocks and long-run shifts in...

Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on 19th century rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I show that negative rainfall shocks and long-run shifts in...

Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on historical rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I demonstrate how negative rainfall shocks and long-run...

English fertility history is generally regarded as having been composed of two re-gimes: an era of unregulated marital fertility, from at least 1540 to 1890, then the modern era, with regulated marital fertility, lower for higher social classes. We show there were in fact three fertility regimes...

For a French village, we reconstitute most families and build accurate measurements of economic conditions. Combined with marriage contracts (systematic in this written-law area), we are able to control for wealth, Stem households and social status of father and husband for a representative...

Divorce is, irrespective of the perspective of approaching the phenomenon from the point of view of the society typology, a form of social deviance that has as effect the dilution of family image and norms. We do not discuss here of a dilution of the traditional norms concerning family, as...

Our research on life expectancy started from analysing mortality in the counties of Bihor and Sătmar. We focused on different elements influencing mortality rate. The frequent mortality crises and daily life in the countryside in north-western Transylvania resulted in a low life expectancy at...

The parish registers of civil status, although the main sources of documentation for historical demography, are used with significant results by the other sciences such as history, ethnography, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, etc. The perspectives of approaching the rural community and...

More often than not, the State did not acknowledge the matrimonial norms as settled by the Church. This relation seems to have altered towards the end of the 19th century, when the State succeeded in imposing on the Church the respect for the general civil framework. Yet, the change was not...

Life expectancy at birth or middle age was tightly connected to mortality structure. Major mortality crises in certain years greatly reduced life expectancy in the area. High mortality rate influencing all age groups led to a considerable decrease of average age. From the point of view of life...