Tim Riswick

Radboud University | RU · Institute of Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies

My contribution will focus on the project 'Population and society in Taiwan and the Netherlands' and offer a reflection on how and why life courses in these societies were compared. Moreover, I will reflect on what are, in my opinion, the most important findings resulting from this project, and discuss what kind of research can and should still be...

Child survival depends on the allocation of resources within the household. The size and composition of the sibling set influences parental division of resources and can in turn affect survival chances. In spite of recent advances in research on sibling effects, previous studies have often used the resource dilution hypothesis, which neglects the s...

This special section contains a collection of articles that study how children are affected by their sibship size and composition by examining their influence on several demographic outcomes across time and space. The importance of the specific historical context, as put forward by the conditional or gendered resource dilution model, seems to be ju...

One of the biggest challenges in the transition to open science is making data interoperable. Ideally, existing schemas and vocabularies are (re-)used to describe data, but these are generally problematic for historical data, as they exclude historical concepts and are insensitive to temporal variations in meaning. Therefore, the subdiscipline of h...

Based on unique individual-level cause of death data, this article presents an analysis of the development of infant mortality and the underlying cause of death pattern in the city of Amsterdam in the period 1856–1904. We contribute to the discussion on the development of infant mortality and its determinants and test the newly-constructed ICD10h c...

The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated important difference...

Link: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol46/25/default.htm Background: Many studies have observed that religion plays an important role in determining inequalities in mortality outcomes before the mortality decline in late 19th century Europe. Yet, it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly caused the mortality advantage observed for Je...

L’adoption a été historiquement une stratégie familiale importante en Asie de l’Est pour assurer la continuité de la famille. Cependant, l’adoption d’enfants hors du foyer peut également être considérée comme une stratégie pour faire face aux enfants en surnombre. Ce sujet est au centre de notre article, qui étudie qui est donné en adoption et pour...

The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated that important diffe...

The focus of this article is on how a newly created database on causes of death in Amsterdam (1854–1940) may offer innovative insights by combining it with the available information from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN). By doing so, it illustrates how future research can help to provide new perspectives on ongoing debates on historic...

Although the historical Dutch and Taiwanese populations studied are very different, sibship size and composition influenced the survival of infants and children in both. In general, the presence of siblings led to higher infant and child mortality risks. This is in line with what we know about sibling rivalry and parental investment, which suggest...

Link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/w8g9e/ Little is known about health outcomes after adoption in historical non-Western settings and previous studies have found contradictory results of the influence of adoption on mortality risks. This study investigates if, and how, adoption of infants increased child mortality risks compared to non-adopted...

Link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4jb3u/ Adoption has been an important historical Eastern Asian family strategy to ensure family continuity. Adopting children out of the household can, however, also be seen as a strategy for dealing with excess children. This topic is the focus of our article, which investigates who was given away for adopt...

This edited volume has been compiled to thank and honor Theo Engelen on the occasion of his retirement from the post of full professor of historical demography. Moreover, the book is also a token of the authors’ gratitude for all the efforts made by Engelen as dean and as rector to maintain and improve the reputation of the Radboud University in ge...

Criteria van waarde spelen vanzelfsprekend altijd een rol. Die vanzelfsprekendheid wordt vandaag de dag echter niet tot nauwelijks gezien noch geproblematiseerd. Het is daarom belangrijk om meer aandacht aan bovenstaande vragen te besteden en om dat wat we als vanzelfsprekend achten als vreemd te gaan beschouwen. Om dat juist nu te doen is niet mee...

Tijdens mijn master had ik zelf de mogelijkheid om over mijn eigen grenzen als historicus heen te kijken door een essay te schrijven bij het zogenaamde Atelier ‘Sociale theorie en geschiedenis’ van Onno. Destijds was ik van mening dat we als historici door het gebruik van sociale theorie een beter begrip kunnen krijgen van historische leefomstandig...

Dit is een bundel van dankbaarheid, geschreven door collega’s die in allerlei organisaties, commissies en wat dies meer zij met Onno Boonstra hebben samengewerkt. Zij betreuren zijn vertrek uit academia, maar wensen hem een welverdiend otium.

The proposal for my PhD-project which was honored by the N.W. Posthumus Institute (2013)