When Protoindustry Collapsed Fertility and the Demographic Regime in Rural Eastern Belgium During the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

The story of the Demographic Transition is often told as a contrast between a dynamic urban-industrial sector and a static and traditional countryside. Rural areas are viewed as bastions of stability that resisted the transforma tive economic and cultural forces emanating from urban centers. This stereotype ignores the transformation occur ring within the rural sector, in both its relationships with the urban-industrial world and its own internal economy. Look ing at their demographic regime, especially the fertility pat tern, we see that to a large extent, inhabitants of East Bel gian countryside were able to cope with rural deindustriali zation, population pressure and urban industrial develop ment. It is not reasonable to see their late transition to low marital fertility as a lack of adaptive capacities, when they showed exactly the contrary throughout the century. When John Cockerill arrived in a town named Venders to build spinning ma chines in 1801, Eastern Belgium already had a strong industrial base in textiles and iron products. In the following decades Cockerill and his sons helped to make Venders the first center of mechanized textile production on the Euro pean continent. Then, they moved to the Chateau of Seraing in the Liege basin to build an empire of coal, iron, steel, and machine-building. This industrial transformation had profound implications for the surrounding countryside, which underwent a process of de-industrialization and agricultural consolida