Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/94kl4cl56m
Problem of Determining the Beginning of Demographic Transition in Croatia and Slavonia
Nikola Anušić
; Department of History, Faculty of Croatian Studies of the University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The demographic transition theory describes changes in the natural movement of the population that occur as a result of the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. To that extent, an initial phase of demographic transition must be accepted as a direct reflection of the level of modernization. In Croatian historiography the early sub-stage of the demographic transition (Stage 2 of the Demographic Transition Model – DTM) is traditionally placed in the period between 1881 and 1890, when rates of natural increase began to rise due to high birth rates (above 40 per thousand) during circumstances of mortality dropping (up to and under 30 per thousand). This paper analyses economic and social indicators of development in Croatia-Slavonia during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Various modernization preconditions of the demographic transition process are re-examined in order to (re)define the transition process more accurately. Although liberal political and educational reforms of ban (viceroy) Ivan Mažuranić achieved basic prerequisites for a more intense modernization, which is evident in changes regarding the economic infrastructure, the growth and diversification of industrial production, the increase of employment in industrial production, etc., underdeveloped agricultural production still had a disproportionate predominance and the employment in industrial production was still extremely low until the end of the century. From this, it can be concluded that the process of industrialization in Croatia-Slavonia in the 1880s and the 1890s was in a rudimentary stage without real transformation capacities in the economic, social, or demographic sense. Therefore, between 1881 and 1890, in Croatia and Slavonia, the preconditions for the initiation of the demographic transition process were not met according to either of the two European models, and the statistically registered changes in the natural movement of the population must be attributed to periodic transition phenomena characteristic of preindustrial agrarian societies.
Keywords
demographic transition; Croatia-Slavonia; the nineteenth century
Hrčak ID:
302158
URI
Publication date:
17.5.2023.
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