The apple never falls far from the tree: siblings and intergenerational transmission among farmers and artisans in the Barcelona area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

This article aims at studying the intergenerational transmission of status within farmers and artisans in the preindustrial area of Barcelona from a siblings’ attainment perspective in a context of impartible inheritance. The data source used are the Marriage License Books from the Barcelona's Diocese compiled in the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database, which for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a rich and continuous demographic and socioeconomic information through the use of the multilevel regression analysis. Our main findings points out the important family impact on the social fate of children. First-married children were the maximal inheritors of parental statuses in all social groups, especially for farmers and artisans, the former being more linked to ascription than the latter. However, farmers were found to be the group with the highest intergenerational occupational inheritance although artisans were who transmitted at most their social group. This divergent effect is due to the different strategies, or in a way a same strategy, used on non-first-married children to whom, families from the two social groups, when not able to transmit the same parental occupation, preferred to position the offspring in artisans’ careers thanks to a favourable context of a flourishing manufacturing industry at the countryside.