‘Negotiation’ was important because nearly all Chinese girls who reached puberty in the seventeenth century married, often while teenagers. Moreover, if a wife failed to produce a son, husbands with sufficient means might take one or more concubines: a peasant girl purchased for the purpose, a household servant, an entertainer, a prostitute – almost anyone except a woman from their own neighbourhood or ‘name’. An active trade in concubines existed in the city of Yangzhou before the sack of 1645, where (according to one contemporary source) ‘daughters are as numerous as clouds’ and
At age thirteen or fourteen,
They are ready.
Who cares if he is old,
If he has gold?51
To ensure that early and widespread marriage, and the frequent resort to concubines, did not produce more children than each household could support, Chinese families employed one or more of four strategies. First, spouses started to reproduce late: the gap between marriage and becoming a mother for the first time averaged three years in China, compared with 18 months in western Europe. Second, wives stopped reproducing early: the mean age of Chinese women when they gave birth to their last child was 33 or 34, compared with 40 for their west European counterparts, and the average span between the first and last child was 11 years, against 14 in Europe. Third, Chinese mothers got rid of the children they (or their relatives) did not want. Many families either surrendered for adoption children they could not feed (especially boys, to families who lacked sons of their own) or sold them (especially girls, who became concubines or prostitutes). Many pregnancies were also either avoided or terminated. Early modern Chinese medical literature described many methods of contraception and abortion; Chinese physicians always placed the health of the mother before that of the foetus; and imperial law criminalized neither procuring nor performing an abortion. Finally, parents could and did murder their unwanted offspring – especially girls. Chinese families intensified their use of all four strategies for child limitation in the mid-seventeenth century – starting to reproduce later; ceasing to reproduce earlier; increasing birth intervals and giving up more children for adoption; and killing off more children at birth.
Infanticide and Abortion
In the words of Francesca Bray, an eminent historian of China: ‘Infanticide is the most effective way of controlling family size in response to sudden crisis. It is also a foolproof way of exercising sex selection if all other means fail.’ Overall, the ruling Qing dynasty (for whom remarkably precise data are available) killed perhaps 10 per cent of all their daughters, many of them at birth, but in the 1640s and 1650s poorer members of the dynasty ‘killed almost twice as many of their daughters’ as their richer relatives. Although no other family compiled figures of similar precision, it seems that in Manchuria, the Qing homeland, peasant families killed between one-fifth and one-quarter of their daughters at birth in ‘normal’ years, and more in years of dearth; while in Liaoning, just to the south, the sex ratio among the last children born to peasant families stood at 500 boys for every 100 girls. No biological circumstance can account for such gender imbalance: widespread female infanticide is the only possible explanation.52 Female infanticide was also common in southern China. According to a county gazetteer from Fujian, ‘When a baby is born, the midwife holds it in her hands for examination. If it is a girl she just throws her into a tub and asks the mother, “Keep it or not?” If the answer is “No”, she calls for water and holds the baby upside down by the feet, dipping her head in the water.’ A poem from Jiangnan, written in the form of an appeal from one woman to others in the region, ended bitterly:
Even before you've heard me out, or sighed a few times in regret,
In one town after another, girls are no sooner born than dead.
At times of economic adversity, poor families in China may have killed as many as half their children at birth.53
Infanticide was also widespread in Russia, where early modern households often consisted of three or four families (usually related) living together, and many women married at the age of 12 or 13. Children born out of wedlock and children born to the very poor seem to have been killed by their parents far more often than in the West – at least in part because both Church and State took a relatively lenient view of the matter. The medieval Russian version of St Basil's Rule forgave women who killed their children ‘from simplicity or ignorance, or because of scarcity of necessities’; and although the comprehensive law code issued in 1649 decreed death for a mother who killed a child conceived in adultery, ‘If a father or mother kills [their legitimate] son or daughter’, the penalty was that ‘they shall be imprisoned for a year’, and after that ‘they shall not be punished’.54 The law said nothing about foundlings and orphans (a draft decree of 1683 establishing state orphanages remained a dead letter until 1712) – perhaps because Russia's harsh climate reduced their numbers anyway. The available records show that maximum sexual activity among the rural population took place just after the harvest, which produced a peak in births just before the next growing season. This in turn produced a peak in infant mortality because the short growing season made it essential for Russian women to work in the fields at seedtime and harvest, which meant that those who were still infants at that point might either receive solid foods too early or else get insanitary ‘pacifiers’ that killed them. As the Little Ice Age reduced the length of the growing season still further, the few surviving demographic records show an increase in infant mortality.55
Abortion and infanticide were also common in western Europe. In 1660, according to the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, the local clergy ‘have made a calculation that in the past year, six hundred women have confessed that they had killed and destroyed the fruit of their womb’.56 Throughout the seventeenth century, infanticide constituted the commonest capital crime tried by the Parlement of Paris, the law court with the largest jurisdiction in early modern Europe. Its cases show that virtually all those accused were women, half of them spinsters and another quarter widows; and that their numbers rose in times of economic hardship. One quarter of the women tried for infanticide admitted that they had also attempted unsuccessfully to terminate their pregnancy.57
The increasing frequency of abortion and infanticide in the seventeenth century led many European states to pass harsh legislation against offenders. An English statute against infanticide in 1624 explicitly targeted unmarried mothers (‘lewd women’), as even its title made clear: ‘Act to Prevent the Murdering of Bastard Children’. Studies of prosecutions brought under the new law show that all the victims were illegitimate (mostly born to young women in domestic service) and that almost all died on their first day of life (most through strangulation, suffocation, exposure or drowning, though a few had been beaten to death or thrown into a fire). In Germany, the government of Württemberg in 1658 issued a law that enjoined the denunciation of all women suspected of killing their offspring: almost 130 cases came to trial over the next 40 years: the average age of the mothers was 25; almost all were single; and almost all were sentenced to death.58
Nevertheless, many infanticides in early modern Europe evidently went undetected, despite the diligence of neighbours (many of whom devoted considerable time to watching whether or not single women produced bloodstained laundry once a month). Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from the French city of Rennes, where workmen replacing old drains in 1721 found one that contained about 80 skeletons of infants – and yet no one had been charged with their deaths. The total of murdered infants, in Rennes and elsewhere in Europe, would surely have been higher had not two institutions offered legal opportunities for fertile women to avoid raising children in times of crisis: foundling hospitals and, in Catholic countries, nunneries.
‘Get thee to a nunnery’59
In Italy, by 1650, perhaps 70,000 females lived in nunneries, most of them in towns. Nunneries housed 8 per cent of the total female population in Bologna, 9 per cent in Ferrara, 11 per cent in Florence and 12 per ce
nt in Siena. By then France boasted at least as many nuns, while Spain had 20,000, with many more in Germany, the South Netherlands and Poland.60 The cities of Russia and the Balkans also included a significant population of cloistered females, as did those of Catholic Europe's colonies – and in every region, the number of nuns increased markedly in the course of the seventeenth century. Why? Many nuns, like Isabel Flores de Oliva (later canonized as Santa Rosa of Lima), took the veil through a religious vocation; others did so because some disability placed them at a disadvantage in the outside world; others still sought temporary refuge in the cloisters from abusive husbands or while their husbands were away. A few, no doubt, felt attracted by the lavish lifestyle of certain convents, where servants and slaves made up half the population (and in some nunneries even outnumbered the nuns). But a considerable number of young women in the seventeenth century entered convents against their will. Elena Cassandra Tarrabotti (1604–52), daughter of a Venetian patriarch, was one of them. Her father sent her to a nunnery at age 13 claiming that, because of the economic depression, he lacked the money for an appropriate dowry. There she wrote several books – with titles like Innocence undone or the father's tyranny and The nun's hell – lamenting her lot. ‘Consider it a fact,’ she thundered in one of them, ‘that more than one-third of nuns, confined against their will, find their senses opposing their reason, and subject themselves unwillingly and out of fear to the outrageous misfortunes cruelly created for them’ by their fathers. It would be a kindness, she continued provocatively, if parents strangled their daughters at birth rather than condemn them to a life behind bars against their will.61
Although Tarrabotti's works went straight onto the Index of Prohibited Books, the proportion of daughters of patrician families forced to take the veil increased as the seventeenth-century crisis deepened. In Venice, in 1642, 80 per cent of them became nuns, and in 1656, 90 per cent. Although patricians justified their ‘sacrifice’ of a daughter as an act of exemplary piety, they doubtless consoled themselves with the fact that marriage dowries averaged 1,500 scudi, whereas it cost only 400 to place a daughter in even a prestigious convent. Regardless of motive, incarcerating daughters in a cloister proved highly effective in reducing the number of elite women available to marry and reproduce: 40 Venetian patricians married annually in the 1580s, but under 30 in the 1650s.62
Many convents also accepted foundlings. Indeed, some institutions installed a special ‘wheel of fortune’ to make it easier for mothers to abandon their unwanted offspring: they could place their babies on the wheel outside anonymously and then rotate it inwards for collection within. At the Foundling Hospital of Milan, where desperate mothers left some 400 babies a year, use of the ‘wheel of fortune’ (scaffetta) followed the fluctuations in grain prices with sickening regularity: in a year of food scarcity four or five infants might be placed on the wheel in a single night (Fig. 15). Likewise, in Madrid, where almost 15 per cent of all children baptized in the mid-seventeenth century had been abandoned by their parents, the city's Foundling Hospital took in about 500 children a year; while the Foundling Hospital of Seville averaged almost 300 admissions a year – increasing notably during periods of economic adversity. In cities that lacked a Foundling Hospital, such as London, up to 1,000 infants a year were ‘found on the streets, stalls and dunghills of the capital’, their number likewise rising and falling in step with the price of bread.63
Parents who abandoned their babies on dunghills probably did not intend them to live, so their action might be seen as infanticide; others, however, not only left their child in a public place but also wrote a heart-wrenching note of explanation. By chance, about 150 notes have survived from the Madrid Foundling Hospital in the 1620s. All were small – some of them very small, written on a scrap of paper torn from a book or on the back of a document, and in one case on the back of a playing card – and stated whether the child had been baptized or not, and usually its name, date of birth and saint's day. A few provided a brief explanation (parents too poor; mother abandoned by her lover; mother died in childbirth; mother unable to produce milk; in one case ‘a well-known lady who does not wish to be found out’). The saddest messages of all were those written in the first person (Plate 6):
15. Children abandoned at the Foundling Hospital of Milan.
The upper graph shows the time at which parents delivered the children they could not feed to the Foundling Hosital of Milan. In daytime, foundlings were delivered to the staff, but the number rose after dark, with most infants left anonymously on the ‘scaffetta’ or ‘wheel of fortune’. The lower register leaves no doubt about this: the hour that saw most infants abandoned changed according to the season of the year (between 5 and 6 p.m. in December and January; between 9 and 10 p.m. between June and August), presumably to spare the distraught parent the shame of being seen. Although these data come from the eighteenth century, the same patterns prevailed a century earlier.
My name is Ana. I have been baptized. My parents are honourable people who, because they are poor, entrust me to Our Lady and St Joseph. I beg you to entrust me to someone who will look after me.
A64
Almost certainly, Ana pleaded in vain. Most of those who entered a Foundling Hospital, whether in Madrid or elsewhere, died there – for the simple reason that almost half of all foundlings were abandoned within their first week, and at that vulnerable age, without the immediate intervention of a wet nurse, they would die. Moreover, since ‘mortality tends to increase with admissions’, life expectations fell as admissions rose: in the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence, one-third of the 700 foundlings abandoned in the famine year 1629 died on their first day; half died within a week; and almost two-thirds died within a month. Leaving a newborn baby on the ‘wheel of fortune’ may thus not technically have been infanticide, but the effect was much the same: it provided an additional method, brutal but effective, of rapidly reducing the number of mouths to feed in a crisis.65
III. Migration
Voluntary Migration
Well over one million West Europeans responded to economic adversity in the seventeenth century by migrating to find a better life abroad. So many Scots left the kingdom to make a living in Poland in the seventeenth century that the Poles invented the word szot (Scot: meaning ‘tinker’); and, in all, between 1600 and 1650 perhaps 100,000 Scotsmen, or one-fifth of the kingdom's adult males, went to live abroad. In western Europe, only Portugal also suffered losses on this scale through migration: in the course of the seventeenth century perhaps 250,000 people set sail for its overseas colonies.66 At the same time, further east, tens of thousands of Russian and Polish families – the majority of them unfree peasants – fled to join the Cossacks living on the rich ‘black earth’ lands in the south, and in the case of Russia (and in lesser numbers) also to Siberia (see chapter 6 below).
Thousands of Chinese families, too, elected to escape adversity by migrating overseas. Many, especially from the mountainous southeastern provinces, left for the Philippines and Southeast Asia, either as settlers or to ‘service’ the European colonies there. By 1700 some 20,000 Chinese lived in a special suburb of Manila known as the Parián (and its population would have been much larger but for the periodic massacres carried out by the Spaniards and their Filipino allies); and several thousand more lived in Batavia (now Jakarta), which became a ‘Chinese colonial town under Dutch protection’.67 The establishment of European colonies on Taiwan after 1624 created another opportunity for Chinese ‘co-colonization’. Almost immediately, the governor of Fujian province allowed ‘several tens of thousands’ of those destitute through famine to migrate to the lands around the main Dutch settlement, providing each person with three taels of silver and every family with a cow. By 1683, when Qing forces annexed the island, some 120,000 Chinese lived on Taiwan alongside the indigenous population. In each of these locations – Manila, Batavia, Taiwan and so on – virtually no Chinese settlement had existed a century before.68
Thanks to the unp
aralleled prevalence of war in the seventeenth century, many more men than ever before left home to join an army. In India, perhaps one-tenth of the active male population of Hindustan formed part of a sophisticated military labour market because the Mughal emperors, like their Afghan predecessors and their British successors, raised Rajput troops on their northwest frontier and sent them to fight on the eastern and southern borders of their empire. Many of them married and settled there. A similar system of military expatriation characterized the Spanish empire. Every year, troops raised in the towns and villages of Castile left for the Netherlands where, in 1640, Philip IV's troops included over 17,000 Spaniards. Many of these expatriates, like the Rajputs of Mughal India, married and settled abroad, never planning to come home. As a Spanish patriarch told his younger brother when he left for the wars, ‘I don't want you to enjoy the countryside in the Netherlands, but the war. The war must become your home.‘69 Every state found recruiting easier in years of economic adversity. In the words of the reluctant Spanish warrior who met Don Quixote on the way to join his regiment:
Necessity drove me to the wars;
If I had money truly I would never go.
Or, as a French general put it just after the ‘Great Winter’ of 1708–9: ‘It might well be said that “it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good”, for we could only find so many recruits because of the misery of the provinces … The misfortune of the masses was the salvation of the kingdom.‘70
Other forms of ‘voluntary migration’ during the mid-seventeenth century also mirrored economic conditions. For example, up to 6,000 people came to London every year, most of them either boys who became ‘bound apprentice’ to a merchant or artisan in return for instruction in his craft, or females and males who came to work as domestic servants until they had accumulated enough savings to become financially independent and marry – a goal that became more elusive whenever economic circumstances deteriorated. In the English capital, as elsewhere in western Europe, these migrants made up 10 per cent or more of the urban populations.
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