Household-level predictors of the presence of servants in Northern Orkney, Scotland, 1851–1901

Servants were an important part of the northwestern European household economy in the preindustrial past. This study examines household-level characteristics that are predictive of the presence of rural servants using data from Orkney, Scotland. The number of servants present in a household is related to household composition, landholding size, and the marital status of the household head. In addition, the sex of the particular servant hired reveals that the labor of male and female servants is not fungible. The sex of the servant hired is related to the ratio of male and female household members of working age, the occupation of the head, household composition, and the size of the household\u27s landholding

Sequence Analysis and Transition to Adulthood: An Exploration of the Access to Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century East Belgium

In the population history of European pre-industrial population, late marriage and high level of final celibacy are seen as the most important components of demographic regimes, avoiding an excessive demographic pressure on scarce resources. While during the last decades the scientific approach emphasized the study of individual life trajectories, life transitions are still often considered isolated from each other. In this paper, we look at marriage from an original perspective, as one event on the road to adulthood, whom the position in a given life course is related with other steps like leaving home, establishing a household, and the access to legitimate reproduction through a first birth. Sequence analysis is definitively the appropriate tool for a holistic and integrative approach of the various roads young men and women could take to enter into adulthood. Working on nineteenth century rural regions in East Belgium, we used TraMineR to reconstruct sequences and identified four clusters both for males and females. To complete this exploratory data-mining with an explanatory point of view, we proceeded to univariate ANOVA-like discrepancy analyses of the life trajectories, and then grew a regression tree for our sequences. Results show high level of complexities in rural, supposedly traditional societies, an exercise of individual agency in tolerant but also influent structures that resulted in a high diversity of personal trajectories and a global respect of the social order