The Shaping of a Settler Fertility Transition: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century South African Demographic History Reconsidered

Jeanne Cilliers () and Martine Mariotti

No 173, Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History

Abstract: Using South African Families (SAF), a new database of settler genealogies, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of women’s fertility in settler South Africa between 1700 and 1900. Differences in parity rates across geographic regions suggest couples knew how to limit fertility prior to the global onset of the first fertility transition. We date the start of South Africa’s fertility transition to cohorts born in the 1850s, having children from the 1870s. This timing is similar to other settler communities and earlier than many European countries despite somewhat different economic and social circumstances.

Keywords: South Africa; Fertility; Genealogies; Settler demography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 N01 N37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2018-03-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://lup.lub.lu.se/record/955d45a5-1fbc-459e-8099-be09649c68d6 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The shaping of a settler fertility transition: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South African demographic history reconsidered (2019)
Working Paper: The Shaping of a Settler Fertility Transition: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century South African Demographic History Reconsidered (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0173

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History Department of Economic History, Lund University, Box 7083, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tobias Karlsson () and Benny Carlsson ().