Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth

The United States is experiencing a period of low birth rates, primarily reflecting late marriages (aided by effective birth control techniques).[1] While low birth rates may harm the U.S. by holding back the number of productive workers, most historians of Europe have worried more about the Malthusian potential of overpopulation to outpace food production than about having too few people.

In fact, late marriages throughout much of European history prevented overpopulation.

Historians (and other social scientists) have compared family composition in northwestern Europe with families in other parts of the world, from southern Europe to China. Three academic papers, when combined, provide persuasive evidence that the family model of northwestern Europe not only prevented Malthusian excess but may have helped spark the Industrial Revolution.

Let me begin with John Hajnal’s 1982 article in Population and Development Review. Hajnal compared the age of marriage in preindustrial northwestern Europe (using figures from Denmark primarily, backed up by others), with those in India, China, and other parts of Europe. He found that late marriage—over age 26 for men, over age 23 for women—was the norm in northwestern Europe as early as the 1600s, while early marriage—before age 26 for men and before age 21 for women—was typical in the other areas studied.

Additionally, most of northwestern Europe had single households, with just one man and wife and their children. The other countries tended to have joint households, in which sons married and brought their wives into the family home.

The household size in each situation did not differ a lot, however. The reason was that European households included non-family members. These non-family members were primarily unmarried young people working as servants or farmworkers in other people’s homes. Doing so, they delayed marriage and built up savings that would enable them to start and sustain their own nuclear households in the future.

The difference in family composition also shows up in a 1996 paper by Jack Goldstone.[2] His study of Chinese families revealed a strong effort to keep women at home. “At no time were young women permitted to work outside the family household (either natal or married) or to work under the supervision of non-family members,” he wrote. This reflected a cultural attitude that viewed women as “bearers of family purity and integrity.”[3]

This difference began to matter, says Goldstone, when textile factories formed in England in the eighteenth century. There was already a cultural pattern of working outside the home. “Young women could migrate to factory sites, and men employed by factories could bring wives (and children) to work with them.” By offering more than a woman could make at home, by spinning thread, for example, factories could obtain workers at low cost (and thus have an efficient operation).

In contrast, in China, even until the early twentieth century, “female work outside the conjugal household was limited to circumstances of extreme duress.”[4] To drastically oversimplify: no women, no factories.

A paper by Philip C. C. Huang does not directly address the different family patterns, but his argument is consistent with them.[5] Huang believes that an agricultural revolution in England enabled farms to produce much more food with less labor (thus freeing labor to work in the new factories). In contrast, labor productivity in agriculture in China’s Yangzi delta did not increase in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in fact, in a process Huang calls involution, families had to work harder by cultivating more intensively (three crops a year instead of two, for example), putting in more labor, not less.

In a sometimes desperate effort to bring in income, families made cloth in their homes, just as families did in Europe. Women spent many hours spinning, but “the payment for such work was so low as to provide only about half the subsistence of an adult woman.  . . . That being the case, cloth production could not in itself become a viable alternative to farming for supporting a family,” writes Huang.[6]

Suppose an entrepreneur could offer such women jobs in a cotton mill at a little more pay? If Hajnal and Goldstone are right, that happened in Europe. But Chinese cultural patterns foreclosed that opportunity. That may help explain why the Industrial Revolution did not take place in China.

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 [1] Lyman Stone, Declining Fertility in America, American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC, Dec. 17, 2018, https://www.aei.org/publication/declining-fertility-in-america/.

[2] Jack Goldstone, “Gender, Work, and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England but Late to China,” Sociological Perspectives 39, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 1-21.

[3] Goldstone, 8.

[4] Goldstone, 10.

[5] Philip C. C. Huang, “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China?” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May, 2002):  501-538.

[6] Huang, 517-518.