Page 209 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Urban Opportunities

the number of births and deaths (table 7.1), consistently showing a surplus
over the decades, despite occasional years of deficit. The eighteenth centu-
ry ushered in a more favourable socio-economic climate across the wider
Inner Austrian region. The north-eastern Adriatic area experienced these
changes even more directly with the establishment of the free port of Tri-
este. Although this cameralistic ‘experiment’ encountered significant chal-
lenges, and its success remained uncertain even by the mid-century, the
development of transportation and infrastructure immediately provided
tangible economic prospects for the hinterland of Trieste. The expansion
of the maritime city and the growth of its mercantile economy in the lat-
ter half of the century further enhanced these opportunities, positively
impacting the demographics.
The natality and mortality in the long nineteenth century are shown in
detail in table 7.2, which refers to the area of the Tomaj curacy. The birth
rate maintained its pre-industrial level until the twentieth century, except
for the 1830s, well above 40 per thousand. Only in the twentieth century
did a more consistent decline begin, heralding the end of the demograph-
ic transition. The final transition phase became evident, as elsewhere in
Slovenia, after the First World War, when the birth rate fell by 12 per thou-
sand points (Šircelj 2006, 56). The death rate had already fallen at the end
of the eighteenth century, after (in rough terms) exceeding 40 per thou-
sand in the 1780s. In the nineteenth century, it was on average almost
10 points lower than the birth rate, and exceeded the birth rate only in
certain years. Such cases were common until the 1850s, and they usually
occurred in conjunction with poor harvests and general deprivation due
to bad weather, economic crises, or other factors that worsened the stan-
dard of living and compromised the population’s immune resistance. The
years of deficit, when the number of deaths far exceeded the number of
births, were 1805 and 1806, 1809, 1816, 1821, 1846 and 1855. A mortality
crisis, when the number of deaths increases by two times or more than
the normal average and can have a long-term negative impact on the re-
production of the population (Bertoša 1989, 8; Livi Bacci 1999), occurred
only in 1809, but the successive negative years of 1805 and 1806 left an
even larger gap in the population. The general increase in mortality due to
the climatic consequences of the eruption of the Tambore volcano in 1815,
which caused the so-called two years ‘without summer’ (1815 and 1816),
appeared in Tomaj in 1816. It was somewhat less pronounced than, for ex-
ample, in Istria, where the mortality took lives mercilessly in 1817 (Jelenić
2021, 169−70). The year 1821 saw the last episode of pronounced mortal-

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