A lost family-planning regime in eighteenth-century Ceylon

Abstract

Based on Dutch colonial registers (thombos), this paper reconstructs fertility for two districts in Ceylon, 1756–68. It overcomes challenges in data quality by establishing the outer bounds of plausible estimates in a series of scenarios. Among these, total fertility rates (TFRs) averaged 5.5 in one district, but only 2.7 in the other. These figures exclude the victims of infanticide, a custom noted in European travelogues between about 1660 and 1820. Sex ratios among children differed depending on the number of older siblings, and overall, 27 per cent of girls are missing in one district and 57 per cent in the other. There was little significant variation either in the TFR or the sex ratio by socio-economic status, suggesting that poverty was not a key factor in motivating infanticides. Instead, we argue that at least parts of Ceylon had a forward-looking culture of family planning in the eighteenth century, which was lost in subsequent decades.

Keywords:

• Ceylon
• Sri Lanka
• Own-Children Method
• wartime mortality
• pre-Transition family planning
• reverse fertility transition
• sex ratio
• infanticide
• total rearing rate
• fertility

Notes

1. Fabian Drixler is at the Department of History, Yale University, 320 York Street, PO Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520-8324, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. Jan Kok is at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

2. The creation of the raw database that formed the starting point of this research was funded by the Spinoza prize awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht University), and by a subsidy from Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. We are grateful to Mrs Sujeewa Bandara and Dr Albert van den Belt for their dedication to the digitization of the thombos, and to the Sri Lanka National Archive for offering the necessary facilities. We also thank Satomi Kurosu, Alicia Schrikker, Nadeera Rupesinghe, and Subodhana Wijeyeratne for their comments and insights. The paper has also benefited from the critiques of anonymous reviewers.