Page 13 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

An Introduction to Long-Run Micro Perspectives on Uplands

neglected in social and economic history.’ Her attention is directed on one
side on detecting connections between the innkeeping and transport ac-
tivities of these figures, representing a ‘largely forgotten link,’ and their
marital and familial contexts on the other. The cases she presents from the
market town of Innichen show that innkeeping offered opportunities for
social advancement, as well as that the wealth of women was significant
and played an important role. People started as craftsmen, then became
innkeepers and successively, not least through their linked transport ac-
tivity, advanced to merchants. Inns were enterprises that required literacy,
numeracy and organizational skills, allowing innkeepers access to public
offices in the local communities. The study also reveals the prominent role
of women, who could provide fair amounts of capital through inheritance,
as well as innkeeping skills they acquired in their family of origin, in the
case they were innkeepers’ daughters. Lanzinger also shows how innkeep-
ers’ marriages were often characterized by professional endogamy and that
husbands and wives tended to originate from places along transit routes,
even from relatively distant places.
Aleksej Kalc tackles questions related to rural-urban mobility in the case
of Tomaj on the Karst. A first phase of ‘population stagnation’ was fol-
lowed by a period of growth between the 1720s and the mid-nineteenth
century; next came another stagnation, determined by emigration. Kalc
identifies the ‘Trieste factor’ as influencing these dynamics. Nevertheless,
he points out how the rural population responded – both demographical-
ly and economically – in different ways to the urban opportunities based
on their distance from the city and from transport routes. Near the city,
urban demand for commodities and labour offered opportunities that en-
abled demographic growth. Farther away, as in Tomaj, people temporarily
or permanentlyleftthe village toemigrate tothe city.‘Triesterepresent-
ed an opportunity even before the general rural-to-urban move took off in
the second half of the nineteenth century,’ so that older, ‘well-established
relations and social networks facilitated that.’ In Tomaj, although agricul-
tural land remained the basis of the family economy, emigration seems to
have been a means of integrating income sources and acquiring profes-
sional skills, more than a simple expulsion of ‘exceeding’ family members.
Later it became also a means through which ‘social modernization’ and
‘new cultural values’ were introduced in the village. This way, and ‘viewed
from a long historical perspective,’ the city of Trieste ‘left its mark on the
traditional rural village framework.’
The tendency to a greater degree of formalization of their economic and

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