No abstract

By matching the population registers with the land tax roster, the authors examine how a family's socioeconomic status, represented by the size of landholding, affected fertility behaviors among Korean women in a village of Jeju Island for the period from 1914 to 1925. Landholding is an important indicator of a family's socioeconomic condition, especially for this historical population, the majority of whom were engaged in agricultural work. The authors' discrete-time event history model shows that women in households with larger landholding sizes had a greater risk of birth than their counterparts in households with smaller landholding sizes. However, the relationship is not linear, showing no significant difference between the two highest groups of landholding. The authors interpret the nonlinear relationship in light of economic and agricultural conditions of the island. They highlight potential contributions of their findings for historical studies of population and families in East Asia.

Using a unique data source of genealogies of upper-status families, called Bulcheonwye families, we assess how the extent of family succession through adoption changed over five centuries from 1450 to 1949 in Korea. Our analysis shows the continued increase in the share of adopted sons among total family successors up to the end of the 19th century when three out of ten family successors were adopted. The trend of the increasing role of adoption is closely related to the declining number of sons per family, suggesting that not only the rising influence of Confucian culture but also demographic changes increased the demand for adoption. Finally, our comparison provides evidence that the likelihood of achieving high social status was significantly higher among adopted sons than biological ones, suggesting that the socioeconomic potential of adopted sons could be an important factor for adoption decision.

While the urban area was increasingly filled with middle-and low-status residents, the rural area was dominated by high-status settlers whose number increased because of migration from the city and natural growth. Remarkable differences existed between urban and rural marriage features such as marriage age and rate of remarriage. The more sincere adoption of the high-status marriage culture in the rural area may be attributed to its occupational homogeneity. In the rural agrarian settings, landlords, selfcultivators and tenants shared a similar living pattern and value system based on the agricultural cycle. The urban area, however, exhibited a variety of work patterns of local functionaries, artisans and merchants. Many middle-and low-status people might well have found the high-status culture of the rural area incompatible with their own.

Despite the emerging literature on multigenerational stratification beyond two-generation models, our understanding of how disadvantages are transmitted over multiple generations at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy is limited, with the lack of data on the extremely disadvantaged. We fill this research gap by investigating the legacy of the nobi system, a system by which individuals were treated as property and owned by the government or private individuals, upon social mobility across four generations. The formal abolition of the nobi system in 1801 provides an opportunity to assess the extent to which nobi great-grandfathers still mattered for great-grandsons’ upward mobility, more than six decades after the dismantling of the system. Korean household registers, which were compiled every three years during 1765–1894 in two villages on Jeju Island and incorporated a variety of individual demographic and social status information, allow us to link families across generations. We identify the social status of adult males recorded in 1864–94 registers as well as that of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. Logistic regression results show that the odds of attaining high status were substantially lower for adult males whose great-grandfathers were nobis than for those whose great-grandfathers held high- or middle-status positions, even after controlling for the social statuses of fathers and grandfathers. Despite the abolition of the nobi system and the rapid expansion of high-status positions throughout the nineteenth century, the upward mobility of descendants of nobi great-grandfathers was considerably restricted, revealing the continuity of disadvantages over multiple generations.