Global and local correlations of Hajnal’s household formation markers in historical Europe: A cautionary tale

Abstract

Previous scholarship has assumed global correlations between premarital service in husbandry, marriage age, the extent to which marriage coincided with the attainment of household headship, and the nuclear household structure. According to John Hajnal, these were the four core principles of historical household formation systems. However, whether such correlations applied universally across Europe remains uncertain. We test this possibility by applying both global and local (geographically weighted) measures of correlation to data for 256 rural populations from historical Europe. We demonstrate that local correlations diverge considerably from the global results. The mutual associations between household formation markers exhibit considerable spatial drifts and important spatial gradients, and the numbers of joint combinations of these associations far exceed those predicted by Hajnal. We argue that the global relationship patterns that Hajnal promoted may lead to incorrect interpretations of historical family systems, and may detract from our understanding of their actual mechanics.

Keywords:

• spatial non-stationarity
• household formation
• family systems
• census microdata
• historical demography
• spatial analysis
• geographically weighted correlation