Women's experience of child death over the life course: A global demographic perspective

Recent population change has seen increases in life expectancy, reductions in family size, and postponement of fertility to older ages. We analyze the effect of these dynamics on the experience of child death over the life course for the 1950-1999 annual birth cohorts of women around the world. The paper draws on age-specific fertility and mortality rates from the UN World Population Prospects 2019 (estimates and projections) to assess trends in the frequency and timing of child death using formal demographic methods. We discuss the variation in woman's exposure to offspring mortality according to the demographic regimes prevailing in different world regions. Our analyses predict a global reduction in the overall frequency of child death over a woman's life course. We expect the largest improvements in regions of the Global South where child death is still common for women. In spite of persisting regional inequalities, we show evidence of a global convergence towards a future where the death of a child will become ever more infrequent for women. We anticipate that global population aging will be accompanied by an aging of generational relationships where life events such as the death of a child are experienced at older ages. Given these results, it seems likely that `child death' will increasingly come to mean the death of an adult child for younger generations of women.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the various assessments of the size of India’s population that have emerged in the book. It also comments briefly on some general issues. These issues include: the matter of past fluctuations in the size of the population and how they may—or may not—have been related to changes in the resource base; the degree to which trends in India’s population may—or may not—have corresponded to the population trends that were common to both Europe and China; the existence and influence of different demographic regimes; and the question of why before the nineteenth century there is such a chronic scarcity of data relating to India’s population.

Famines, Plague, and Influenza

Much of this chapter focuses on the huge crises—of famine, plague, and influenza—which affected India’s population during 1871–1921 and which influenced the growing nationalist agenda. While millions perished in these crises, the overall level of mortality and accompanying population growth of the period were probably quite similar to those of 1821–71. Eastern and southern areas of the subcontinent experienced considerable population growth. The existence of distinctive demographic regimes, in particular in the north and the south, is documented. From the period 1871–1921 there emerged more stable and somewhat improved mortality conditions. The chapter discusses the reasons for this development. It concludes by mentioning several of the pioneers of India’s family planning movement.

Archaeological Demography as a Tool for the Study of Women and Gender in the Past

In the last 20 years, demography has re-emerged as a key research area within archaeology. This research has refined archaeological demographic methods and examined the relationships between demographic, cultural and environmental change. Here, I discuss how the results of the growing corpus of archaeological demographic studies can contribute to gender archaeology, aiding the incorporation of women into narratives of the past. By considering the important role of women in the demographic regimes of small-scale societies, I explain how archaeological demography can provide insights into the behaviour and lives of women, without relying on the often problematic identification of gendered artefacts, activities and/or places. Archaeological demography as a tool for gender archaeology also permits a move away from the female empiricism of simply adding women into archaeological narratives, to provide an alternative framework for the analysis of gender roles and practices. I demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach using an example from the Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern France.

Sex, Death, and Aristocratic Empire: Iranian Jurisprudence in Late Antiquity

In the Iranian Empire (226–636 CE), jurists drawn from the ranks of the Zoroastrian priestly elite developed a complex of institutions designed to guarantee the reproduction of aristocratic males as long as the empire endured. To overcome the high rate of mortality characteristic of preindustrial demographic regimes, they aimed to maximize the fertility rate without compromising their endogamous ideals through the institutions of reproductive coercion, temporary marriage, and “substitute-successorship.” Occupying a position between the varieties of monogamy and polygyny hitherto practiced in the Ancient Near East, the Iranian organization of sex enabled elites not only to reproduce their patrilineages reliably across multiple generations, but also to achieve an appropriate ratio of resources to number of offspring. As the backbone of this juridical architecture, the imperial court became the anchor of aristocratic power, and ruling and aristocratic dynasties became increasingly intertwined and interdependent, forming the patrilineal networks of the “Iranians”—the agents and beneficiaries of Iranian imperialism. The empire's aristocratic structure took shape through a sexual economy: the court created and circulated sexual and reproductive incentives that incorporated elite males into its network that was, thanks to its politically enhanced inclusive fitness, reliable and reproducible. In demonstrating the centrality of Zoroastrian cosmology to the construction and operation of the relevant juridical institutions, I seek to join the approaches of evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology to reproduction that have been pursued in opposition, to account for the historical role of sex in the consolidation of the Iranian Empire.

Urban and Rural Variants of Pre-industrial Demographic Regimes in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Preliminary research in nineteenth-century Brazilian demographic data already indicates patterns different from the Old Regime model formulated for Europe. For Brazil there emerge four demographic regimes, involving degrees of isolation of population, access to natural resources, kinds of work, and relationship to the world economy: 1) subsistence economies; 2) plantation economies; 3) the slave population; and 4) urban areas, mostly ports. The slave population maintained its numbers by steady importation from Africa; the cities, by purchase of slaves and immigration from Europe.