The impact of market integration on arranged marriages in Matlab, Bangladesh.

Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a source of conflict between parents and daughters in which parents often have more power. The process of market integration may alter parental investment strategies, however, increasing children's bargaining power and reducing parents' influence over children's marriage decisions. We use data from a market integrating region of Bangladesh to (a) describe temporal changes in marriage types, (b) identify which women enter arranged marriages and (c) determine how market integration affects patterns of arranged marriage. Most women's marriages were arranged, with love marriages more recent. We found few predictors of who entered arranged vs. love marriages, and family-level market integration did not predict marriage type at the individual level. However, based on descriptive findings, and findings relating women's and fathers' education to groom characteristics, we argue that at the society-level market integration has opened a novel path in which daughters use their own status, gained via parental investments, to facilitate good marriages under conditions of reduced parental assistance or control.

The impact of social experiences of physical and structural violence on the growth of African enslaved children recovered from Lagos, Portugal (15th-17th centuries).

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this article is to examine the impacts of physical and structural violence on the well-being of early modern enslaved Africans by comparing the growth of children in an archaeological sample recovered from Lagos, Portugal with that of modern children known to have lived under socially oppressive and racist political regimes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The age of 18 individuals was estimated from the length of developing teeth. Long bone lengths for age in the enslaved African sample were compared with two black juvenile known age samples: the Raymond Dart (South Africa) and Hamann-Todd (United States) collections. Z-scores were calculated for all samples using black children in the South Africa Long Bone (SALB) database as the reference. The similarity of growth across the samples was tested and skeletal growth profiles (SGPs) were devised for the three samples. RESULTS: The children in the Lagos, Raymond Dart, and Hamann-Todd samples were all small for age compared to the SALB reference. While children in the Dart sample tended to be the smallest for age and in the Hamann-Todd the largest, with the children in the Lagos sample falling between them, the three samples did not show significant differences in growth status. DISCUSSION: The growth deficits shown in this study demonstrate the severe impacts of physical and structural violence on the lives of these children. Although uncertainty remains regarding the timing of growth insults relative to arrival, slavery in Portugal as materialized in these individuals was as violent as in other countries.