An Agro-Town Bias? Re-examining the Micro-Demographic Model for Southern Italy in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, there has been an orthodox view established that 18thcentury Southern Italy had a distinctive micro-demographic model based around a number of facets, 3 key ones being a proliferation of neo-local small nuclear households, an exceptionally low average age of first marriage for women (with low levels of life-time singles), and a low incidence of household service. This view, however, has been forged on the back of geographical biases in data selectionparticularly in favor of Apulia, a region with a high incidence of large latifundist estates and agro-towns. What this article shows using a less geographically biased database compiled from the Catasto Onciario and State of Souls register is that while nuclear households and low ages of women's marriage may have been characteristic of the agro-town areas of the Kingdom, this did not apply for everywhere in the South. In fact, some regions displayed complex household levels comparable to parts of Eastern Europe and some regions had average ages of marriage for women that would not look out of place in parts of Northwest Europe. An explanation for such regional divergences has been sought in the tenurial complexity and diversity seen in the South. The view that the South had a low incidence of service, however, does indeed still hold, with only minor variations across regions.

How Many Household Formation Systems Were There in Historic Europe? A View Across 256 Regions Using Partitioning Clustering Methods

“…However, we have good reasons to expect that filling this gapif doing so is ever possiblewould only strengthen our results, as at least the Italian sub-regional variation in household formation patterns would not reveal a specific distinct monolith-like cluster within our data structure, but would instead be partitioned between the existing cluster structure that we have derived. Nevertheless, further research including Italy might prove useful, given that part of its suggested micro-demographic variability has recently been claimed to have been forged on the back of geographical biases in data selection (Curtis 2015). As for now, however, our results confirm that the claim made about Italy-i.e., that it is "a burial ground for many of the most ambitious and well-known theories of household and marriage systems" (Kertzer 1991b, 247) may have wider pan-European implications, and cannot be dismissed as a mere peculiarity of the Mediterranean.…”