Structural and behavioural changes in the short term preventive check in the northwest Balkans in the 18th and 19th...

Fertility responded negatively to grain insufficiency (proxied by grain price increases), and mortality responded positively in Croatia-Slavonia-Srem in the 18th and 19th centuries, as in most of Europe. Shifts in the intensity and timing of these responses occurred over time as social and economic structures changed. Shifts in the elasticity of fertility with respect to grain supply inversely mimic and lag changes in the elasticity of mortality. Both appear to be induced by increasing land shortage, the collapse of feudalism, and differences in the patterns of adjustment to post-feudal conditions among former civil and military serfs. Generally, responses are stronger for civil and former civil serfs, who may have been in less favorable economic circumstances than the military. Fertility responses in the year of a price shock come to dominate those in the year following, suggesting a shift from contraception to abortion as economic and social conditions apparently worsened and strategies of control intensified. Analysis of monthly responses supports the conjecture based on the annual responses. The shift to the preventive check and strength of the preventive check in the same year as the price shock is unusual in Europe and beyond. Analysis is based on 25 parishes and employs lagged annual and monthly time series analysis with corrections for autocorrelation, in combination with ethnographic and historical data.