الگوی ازدواج غربی اروپا و توسعه اقتصادی

For several centuries before the First World War women's age at first marriage in the west of Europe was higher than in the east (and in the rest of the world). In their low mortality regimes Western Europeans chose lower fertility in part through a higher female age at marriage. This allowed women to increase their human capital both formally and informally in the years before child bearing so that more informed mothers brought up better educated offspring. The demographic pattern influenced the stock of human capital and directly contributed to Western Europe's development advantage. The predicted relations of this economic model of the household are tested with two datasets, one at the county level for England for the second half of the nineteenth century and the other at the national level for Europe 1870–1910.

A distinctive feature of the Western European family in the three or four centuries before the First World War was the late age at first marriage of women (Hajnal, 1965). Even more apparent by the nineteenth century was Western Europe's economic pre-eminence (Landes, 1998 and Broadberry and Gupta, 2006). The present paper explores the relationship between these two European characteristics. Physical capital in the pre-industrial world consisted largely of buildings. Not until the railway age of 1840s did physical capital impact substantially upon an economy (Feinstein and Pollard, 1988). Instead early sustained economic growth is usually attributed to technological ingenuity (Von Tunzelman, 2000 130). Ingenuity suggests human capital was a source of innovation, and, in the absence of widespread schooling, there was also a key role for the family in informal as well as formal education. In addition, the family, or more precisely family formation, contributed to pre-industrial economic–demographic equilibrium. Balancing the size of the population against the productive potential of the economy was a vital means of maintaining living standards in pre-industrial economies (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989 ch 11). T.R.Malthus (1830) observed that the ‘prudential restraint on marriage’ achieved such an equilibrium with a fixed agricultural area in the ‘Old World’, and was unnecessary amid the abundant land of the ‘New World’. The customary justification for ‘restraint’, later average female age at marriage and a higher proportion remaining unmarried, in Western Europe was the need to accumulate or acquire sufficient resources to create a separate household for a married couple.

In a longer term perspective, the likelihood is that declines in mortality in Western Europe from the 15th and 16th centuries required measures to control births, if living standards were not to fall precipitously. The late female age at first marriage was one response, and the consequent smaller number of births created more opportunity for investment in child quality. To the extent that later marriage provided greater scope for women beyond child bearing and rearing, this investment effect was reinforced. As women were the principal eventual socialisers of the next generation, their wider experience was likely to be transmitted in more efficient and greater learning, broadly interpreted. In some historical epochs literacy would be a proxy for such education.