Intergenerational transmission of social status and occupations at the Barcelona Area, 16th – 17th centuries

Joana-Maria Pujadas-Mora, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Gabriel Brea, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Anna Cabré, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The intergenerational transmission of social status in preindustrial societies was mainly determinate by blood (nobility), by land inheritance (peasantry) or by bequest of the means of production (artisans). In order to assess those issues, we propose to analyze how in ordered Catalan society the integration in a certain social group of the sons were conditioned by theirs father’s social group. For this purpose we are going to use the marriage licenses issued by the Diocese of Barcelona from mid sixteenth century to mid seventeenth century, collected into the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (within the framework of the project “Five Centuries Marriages” directed by Professor Anna Cabré). The level of transmission was around 66% using HISCLASS and 69% using SCOPCO (n=30,000). The probability of a son of a noble to remain in his father social group was 46%, for a son of a farmer was 39%, and for a son of an artisan, 26%. The analysis is going to be completed with individual data, spitted in two parts. Firstly, we are going to model the son’s probability of remaining or not at the same father’s social group, controlling for the period and place of residence by logistic models. Secondly we try to know the extend of the parents (peasants and artisans) use of parity to transmit their occupation or to diversify their own economy, applying logistic regression models to genealogies of brothers built adhoc with record linkage using a software created in the project (n=13,251).