ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into marriage practices and change therein in what is currently Albania during the first decades of the twentieth century. Albania was a part of the Ottoman Empire until the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), and it was only with the help of the Great Powers that an independent Albania was created shortly before WWI. Soon the new country got drawn into the war, partly occupied by the Austro-Hungarian army and partly by troops of the Allied Powers. The chapter draws on recent pioneering work that sampled and transcribed a hitherto forgotten key source of information on marriage practices, a census taken in 1918 during the Austro-Hungarian occupation. This census is compared with a 1930 census sample in order to measure shifts in patterns between cohorts observed in 1918 and cohorts observed in 1930. While admittedly coarse, these best available data provide an idea of the extent of change occurring in marriage patterns through looking, for example, at proportions of ever-married men and women; age differences between spouses; and the development of urban-rural differences. In doing so, the chapter aims to provide building blocks for future work delving deeper into the implications of observed trends for gender relations.
