Mortality among farmers and cotters in the Sundsvall area of Sweden during the nineteenth century

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Sundsvall area of Sweden underwent a dramatic economic transformation powered by the exceptional growth of the sawmill industry. Industrialization certainly had a devastating consequences for the health of sawmill employees and their families but also contributed to a gradual reduction in mortality rates among many farmers and cotters. This was particularly true among those who could benefit from the increased market for their produce found in the town and near the sawmills. Much of this study examines the consequences of industrial growth on the population's health. Nonetheless, the marked increase in tuberculosis mortality among women toward the end of the century illuminates the need to consider the social and cultural implications of industrialization rather than simply its economic characteristics when examining mortality patterns.     

Historicizing counterurbanization: In-migration and the reconstruction of rural space in Berkshire (UK), 1901–51

This article uses census data for Berkshire to argue that large-scale counterurbanization began much earlier than is generally recognized in some parts of southern England. This was not just movement down the urban hierarchy, which as Pooley and Turnbull have demonstrated was a long-term feature of England’s settlement system, but in some cases at least amenity-driven migration to rural areas of the kind increasingly recognized as a core component of recent counterurbanization. Despite a reduction of acreage Berkshire’s rural districts saw a 54% rise in population between 1901 and 1951. The sub-regional pattern of growth is assessed to gauge whether ‘clean break’ migration to the remote west of the county (which remained effectively out of commuting range from London throughout the period) was taking place, or whether counterurbanization was confined to the more accessible eastern districts. However, whilst population did increase in both west and east, it was in fact the central districts that grew most impressively. Three case study parishes are investigated in order to gauge the nature and consequences of counterurbanization at a local level. Professional and business migrants figure prominently, seeking to preserve and promote the rural attributes of their new communities, without however cutting their ties to urban centres. It is argued that migration to rural Berkshire in the first half of the twentieth century cannot adequately be described either as a form of extended suburbanization or an anti-metropolitan ‘clean break’. Rather, early counterurbanization marks the first stage on the long road to a post-productivist countryside, in which countryside becomes detached from agriculture, there is socio-economic convergence between town and country, and the ‘rural’ increasingly becomes defined by landscape and identity rather than economic function.     

From temporary to permanent townsmen: migrants from the Malalaua District,Papua New Guinea

An attempt is made to explain how a group of people moved from being newcomers to town in the 1940s to being one of the most permanent and stable residential elements in Papua New Guinea's towns in the 1970s. Circular and permanent migration, as Young maintains, are not 2 distinct processes, and both initial rural urban movements and migrants' decisions to return or not to return home are examined simultaneously. The hypothetical career of a migrant is considered all the way from village residence to permanent urban residence along with the different decision points that might vary this career. In this case study focus is on 2 sets of factors that affect migration decisions: an imbalance in rural and urban economic conditions and the effects of the migration process itself. The people discussed come from what is now known as the Malalaua District of the Gulf Province and are referred to as Malalauas. Historically, there are several feastures of Malalaua urban migration that are important. Malalaua migration began earlier than that of most urban migrant groups in Papua New Guinea. In the 1963 urban population there were a number of Malalauas who first came to Port Moresby before or during World War 2. Migration from the Malalaua District has continued in a steady stream from the 1940s to the 1970s, although there is no evidence on absolute numbers of new migrants in any 1 year. The pattern of Malalaua migration to towns over the entire period has been largely one of the movement of young single adult males and young female adults moving to town on marriage. Both the absolute numbers of migrants and the proportion of Malalauas absent from the District have risen rapidly over the 20 years to 1972. Finally, children are being born to Malalaua migrants in town. Malalauas are possibly the migrant group most firmly established in town. The Malalauas are one of the most longterm and residential groups in Port Moresby. In Papua New Guinea as a whole they must be one of the migrant groups with the greatest commitment to urban living. Economic factors have been very important in Malalau decisions to leave the village, particularly the decisions of adult males. The migration process itself has increasingly affected migrant decisions: factors such as the diminished attraction of a depopulated rural community, a change in tastes towards urban based ways of living, the growth of strong personal and family ties among urban residents, and a simultaneous reduction in such ties with rural residents. It is argued that this 2nd set of factors over time increases in importance relative to rural-urban economic imbalance as an explanation of migration behavior. In general, rural urban economic opportunities have become less important over time. So in the 1970s and 1980s it would be argued that many Malalauas would not respond to increases in urban unemployment of rural incomes by moving back to the village. They would be permanent townspeople. This explanation of migration decisions is dynamic: in the history of individuals and groups the context and thus the explanation of decisions change.     

The attraction of the rural: Characteristics of rural migrants in Sweden

This paper investigates the characteristics of rural migrants in Sweden divided into periurban and remote countryside using register data at the individual level. The results show that during the two years of investigation, 1987 and 1993, there was a concentration of the population in general but the periurban countryside gained migrants from the cities. In addition, the migration pattern had an aging effect on the population in rural areas. It is also shown that migration selectivity is relatively stable during the study period. The countryside is less attractive than urban areas to those with high income and high education but when the two types of countrysides are compared to each other the periurban is more attractive. Despite the renewed interest in rural living which has been reported in other studies, remote rural areas are less attractive to migrants than periurban areas in Sweden.     

The elusive role of scientific medicine in mortality decline: diphtheria in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia

The designation of the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus as the cause of diphtheria in the early 1890s and the subsequent development of the antitoxin treatment in the years immediately following were at the time and continue to be viewed as triumphs of scientific medicine. I focus on these two developments to illustrate the problems that arise in attempting to answer the questions regarding the role that changes in medical practice--in this case, the use of antitoxin as a cure--played in lowering death rates at the time. Changes in diagnostic techniques, the selection of cases to be included, and ultimately the agendas of the persons constructing them affected the numerators and denominators of these rates. The data suggest that the antitoxin had some effect on already declining diphtheria death rates, but because of changes in understandings of the disease and contemporaries' presentation of the data, the size of that effect and its role in mortality decline more generally elude us. Our analysis of the past depends on numbers that reflect not only changing treatments but also changing understandings of disease at the end of the nineteenth century.     

An Occupational Study to Track the Rise of Adult Male Mule Spinning in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1777–1813

This study utilises occupational data abstracted from parish records to track temporal change in the number of adult males who were spinners in Lancashire and Cheshire. The baptism registers of 1813 show that over 80 per cent of adult male spinners in the two counties lived in thirteen parishes only. Two-thirds of the spinners resided within a radius of 10 miles of Manchester town. Manchester and Stockport, in particular, were at the vanguard. Approximately 60 per cent of the spinners lived in the parishes of Manchester, Stockport, Prestwich with Oldham, Bury, Bolton le Moors and Blackburn. The marriage registers of these places contain no entries for bridegrooms who worked as spinners before 1780, the year of the introduction of Crompton’s mule. Thereafter, their number increased markedly. The adoption of the mule was rapid, faster than has been shown previously. Analysis of the trends in the ratio of spinners-to-weavers suggests that cotton spinning by hand and by jenny became effectively redundant in the six parishes during the 1790s. By this time, female cotton spinners in these places had been displaced. The demise of the jenny in cotton spinning, around twenty-five years after its introduction into Lancashire, implies that it was not a major factor to explain why the industrial revolution took off in Britain rather than elsewhere.     

A forgotten plague

Dysentery, or rödsot, as the disease was previously known in Sweden, continues to be a major scourge in developing countries. However, the disease has almost disappeared in the West. Very different circumstances prevailed before infectious diseases declined as some of the major causes of death during the 19th century. In that era, 10,000 people could die of dysentery in a single year in Sweden. The demographic consequences of dysentery in Sweden and the causes of the disease and its disappearance are discussed in this article. It is shown here that despite the devastating effects of dysentery epidemics, most government actions were targeted at cholera. Considerable regional and local differences are revealed as the disease is mapped over Sweden. Clusters of high mortality formed, and even in hard-hit Jönköping County some parishes were almost never affected. It becomes apparent that the outbreaks have been the result of complex interactions between different variables and have led to widespread disease of uneven and often epidemic proportions.

For the statistical analyses the digitized source material of the Demographic Data Base (DDB) at Umeå University has been used, containing statistical demographic data gathered from parishes from all over Sweden. Other sources drawn upon include published statistical data, reports from district medical officers, newspapers, parish registers, and maps.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

近20年新加坡的中国新移民及其数量估算

本文研究近20年来中国移民进入新加坡的原因、过程和发展趋势,并根据历年新加坡人口统计中的常住人口和非常住人口数量、华人出生率、移民数量和族群比例等数据,推估出新加坡的中国移民新数据。结论是,近30年来,新加坡政府大规模吸收高素质移民,以弥补人口数量不足,确保华族占总人口75%和发展高新产业。进入新加坡的移民总数达164万人,占2009年新加坡居民总数的近33%。其中,华人移民约占80%,主要来自马来西亚和中国。从1990年到2009年,进入新加坡的中国移民潮逐渐加速,总量约50～60万人,约占新加坡总人口的10%～12%。     

From Promising Settler to Undesirable Immigrant: The Deportation of British-born Migrants from Mental Hospitals in Interwar Australia and South Africa

This article examines the process by which British-born migrants to Australia and South Africa were deported from mental hospitals in the 1920s and 1930s. It shows how men and women who arrived as permanent settlers could be re-classified as immigrants subject to expulsion. Debates over who was responsible for those who through mental illness or alcoholism were deemed ‘undesirable’ were conducted at the levels of both high diplomacy and petty bureaucracy. Tracing the history of deportation as a means of social engineering within the empire, this article highlights the tension between the transnational ideology of white supremacy and its expression in national terms. Using the case files of those deported from two settler colonial mental hospitals, Callan Park in Sydney and Valkenberg in Cape Town, as well as official deportation paperwork, it also traces how such diplomatic decisions were refracted through the process of attempted implementation. These files show firsthand both the social history of deportation and the mechanisms through which the settler colonial state aimed to shape its population by excluding not only those perceived to be racially other, but also those judged to be racially unfit. The process of determining domicile and of deportation itself reveals much about the frequently precarious circumstances and life histories of these migrants and their often far-flung networks, as well as the ways in which migrants and their families were able to negotiate the regulatory mechanisms of both the state and the asylum.     

Satisfaction with Sunbelt Migration

Migration to non-metropolitan areas of high environmental amenity and low population is a lifestyle choice made by a small percentage of people on or about the age of retirement from the workforce Although the proportion of older people involved is low, their numbers are significant to host towns. An aspect of retirement migration which has received little attention by researchers in Australia is the extent to which such moves realise hoped for benefits for the migrants. This paper reports results of interviews undertaken in 1986 with 146 people who had migrated, on or about retirement, to the New South Wales north coast town of Port Macquarie. Several indicators of life and place satisfaction were used They all showed high absolute and relative levels of satisfaction. Although there was tittle dissatisfaction with the results of moves, search behaviour undertaken prior to moving and a number of personal characteristics of migrants, are analysed to explain some variance in satisfaction levels.     

Stages of agricultural improvement in the uplands of Scotland's Grampian region

Studies of the improving movement in North Scotland have revealed a sharp contrast between agricultural holdings on the east and west coasts. This paper suggests that in the Grampian uplands a transitional pattern is evident, with a period of planned village development followed by greater emphasis on smallholdings as the prospects for rural industry declined through the nineteenth century. Evidence is drawn from an extensive study area embracing the upland parts of the Gordon and Moray districts of the Grampian region. But particular attention is given to the former Gordon estates in the parishes of Inveravon and Kirkmichael, for the planned village of Tomintoul (celebrating its bicentenary in 1976) in Kirkmichael parish and the legacy of nineteenth-century smallholdings in Glenlivet and Inveravon provide very clear illustrations of the two stages. Research is facilitated by the survival of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century estate maps for these two parishes as well as the availability of census enumeration books for the late nineteeth century. Criteria affecting the siting of planned villages are considered and the significance of these growth centres for current rural planning strategies is brought out.     

The public life of the Swahili stonehouse, 14th–15th centuries AD

Houses are an important subject of archaeological research, normally explored through the households they contain. This has established a deliberately social agenda for the archaeology of houses, yet has had the unintended consequence of creating bounded worlds for study. Although household archaeologies explore the ways that households contributed to broader social and economic realms, it is rare to think through the public role of houses for non-residents and the larger population of the settlement. This paper seeks to explore this more public aspect of houses using the data from archaeology at Songo Mnara, a 14th–15th century Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. This was a time when stone-built domestic architecture was first emerging in this region. The archaeology of the houses provides data for a series of ways that the house was at the heart of the economic and political life of the town, as well as demonstrating a spatial continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces. It is therefore suggested that the domestic and residential functions of the house for a particular household should be balanced with an appreciation of the broader world of the house itself.     

Mobilité de la population et pauvreté dans une vicomté normande de la fin du Moyen-Age

Important in number and spread very evenly throughout the fifteenth century, the Norman rolls of the monnéage are a very important source for statistical study of the population of Normandy. The information about names they provide allows one to grasp the importance of mobility of population in urban and rural areas. Information about the different categories of exempted persons permits a study of the problem of poverty. The region under scrutiny in this article is the vicomté or vice-county of Bayeux and the city of Caen. Documents concerning this region reveal a highly mobile population, a fact which war by itself cannot explain. The highest rates of mobility are to be found among the populations of the different parishes of Bayeux and Caen. As one might expect, the poor are amongst the most mobile of all. Moreover, the persistence of poverty throughout the fifteenth century, as seen in the rolls of the monnéage, raises the problem of the continued stagnation of this part Normandy.     

The spatial anatomy of an epidemic: influenza in London and the county boroughs of England and Wales, 1918–1919

From uncertain origins in the spring of 1918, an apparently new variant of influenza A virus spread around the world as three distinct diffusion waves, infecting half a billion and probably killing around 40 million people. This paper examines the spatial structure of influenza transmission during the ten–month course of the epidemic in England and Wales, June 1918–April 1919, using the weekly counts of influenza deaths in London and the county boroughs as collated by the General Register Office, London. In addition, a particular case study of the borough of Cambridge is presented. From mid–1916, Cambridge contained, as well as its undergraduate population, a large naval contingent billeted in both the colleges and the town. It therefore affords the opportunity of studying the effect of the epidemic in contiguous groups with widely differing demographic characteristics. Through the application of a range of statistical methods (average lags, correlations and regressions), it is shown that the three waves that comprised the pandemic had fundamentally different spatial and temporal characteristics. The first, moving through a population that was a virgin soil to the new virus strain, was explosive in its north to south progress across the country. The second wave was somewhat slower in its rate of diffusion and displayed a south to north drift. Finally, the third wave reverted more closely to the form of the first. The spread of all three waves, however, was underpinned by a clearly defined process of spatial contagion. The Cambridge study showed the special characteristics of this pandemic in terms of the ages of those attacked: high rates were experienced across the age spectrum, a feature also seen internationally.     

‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’: TOURISM DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE IN LIJIANG,CHINA

Although “home” is an established topic in the literature, what home means for an in situ, non‐travelling population that nevertheless is confronted by the influx of great numbers of tourists and migrants is an important question that has not been widely researched. This article examines the construction and practice of home in a highly mobile world, in the case of Lijiang Ancient Town, a World Heritage site in Yunnan, China. Situating Lijiang in the context of China's emerging consumer society, this article has two objectives. First, I will sketch a conceptual framework within which to address the construction of home in relation to mobility, displacement and socioeconomic changes. The second objective is to examine the multiple ways in which Lijiang's town residents dwell in displacement. Even as Lijiang ancient town largely falls into the hands of migrant businesspersons, town residents employ spatial strategies to maintain a public–private boundary, reconcile themselves to living under the same roof with tourists, or forsake their homes for economic benefit. Hence, this article contributes to the geographies of everyday life by illustrating individuals' multiple forms of strategic rationalization in handling socio‐spatial transformation.     

Modified innovation diffusion — A way to explain the diffusion of cholera in Linköping in 1866? A study in methods

This article seeks to simulate diffusions of cholera from different water sources in the town of Linköping in 1866. The innovation diffusion theory, developed by Hägerstrand, has been used and modified. The article also investigates if it is possible to ascertain which water sources were contaminated during the cholera epidemic of 1866. The modifications of the theory of innovation diffusion resulted in a simulation model, which took into consideration the distribution of the population and barriers. The model corresponded with reality both in graphic and cartographic comparisons. With the help of the model, three water sources were identified as having been the probable cholera spreaders.     

Mobilité de la population et pauvreté dans une vicomté normande de la fin du Moyen-Age

Important in number and spread very evenly throughout the fifteenth century, the Norman rolls of the monnéage are a very important source for statistical study of the population of Normandy. The information about names they provide allows one to grasp the importance of mobility of population in urban and rural areas. Information about the different categories of exempted persons permits a study of the problem of poverty. The region under scrutiny in this article is the vicomté or vice-county of Bayeux and the city of Caen. Documents concerning this region reveal a highly mobile population, a fact which war by itself cannot explain. The highest rates of mobility are to be found among the populations of the different parishes of Bayeux and Caen. As one might expect, the poor are amongst the most mobile of all. Moreover, the persistence of poverty throughout the fifteenth century, as seen in the rolls of the monnéage, raises the problem of the continued stagnation of this part Normandy.