Page 210 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksej Kalc

ity in the post-Napoleonic period (Illyrian provinces), which was affected
by diseases related to food scarcity and malnutrition. This was especially
the case with dysentery, which appeared with all its force in Tomaj in 1819,
causingmostofthedeaths.Twentyyearslaterdeath ratesfellwellbelow30
per thousand and population growth recorded its historical moment. Mor-
tality increased again in the 1840s and hit hard in 1846. This time, too, var-
ious gastrointestinal infections were deadly. In 1855, the cause of increased
mortality was cholera. This typically ‘urban’ disease, which first appeared
in the north-eastern Adriatic in the 1830s and repeatedly hit Trieste and
the Istrian coastal cities, found its way to the countryside through the pop-
ulation’s contact with the cities. One death from cholera per year was also
recorded inthevillage of Tomajin1836and 1849.In 1855, whenareal epi-
demic broke out both in Trieste and in the Koper district, with more than
10 percent of the city’s population infected and thousands dying (Železnik
2010), the disease took a greater toll in Tomaj as well, more precisely 20, or
a good half, of all deaths that year. However, the Tomaj parish, where the
deaths increased by 30 percent, was less affected than the neighbouring
Povir parish, which saw the mortality more than doubled.
Mortality rates continued to fluctuate from the 1860s until the end
of the century, often surpassing birth rates. This trend was particular-
ly evident during the agrarian and general economic crises of 1873 and
1874 when many people succumbed to lung diseases like angina. Although
cholera reappeared in Trieste and Istria in the mid-1860s and mid-1880s,
it did not affect Tomaj at this time. In summary, from the 1860s onward,
mortality ceased to condition natural growth, unlike in earlier periods, and
its trajectory decisively declined in the twentieth century. It surged again
during the war years of 1915−18, registering a 30 percent increase com-
pared to the preceding years, while the birth rate dropped by 45 percent at
the same time. The decade following the First World War saw a rapid de-
cline in mortality, dropping from 26.1 per thousand to 13.8 per thousand
between 1910 and 1931. This, coupled with an increased birth rate in the
immediate post-war years, led to population growth reaching the histori-
cal maximum. However, natality, which remained at 26.1 per thousand in
the first half of the 1920s, declined to 17.8 per thousand in the second half.
Child mortality, a characteristic feature of pre-modern demography and,
for a long time, of the demography of the industrial age, was always a key
factor in mortality. Table 7.5 shows that children under the age of six ac-
counted for 55 percent of all deaths in Tomaj from the 1830s to the First
World War. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century and often in

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