Next time you feel like whining about the price of gas, check out a few of the findings from an international research project that shows how everyday economic stress affected the lives of ordinary people in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Nowadays we barely notice changes in the cost of food. But back then, a 10 percent increase in the price of grain typically raised the chances by as much as 15 percent that a child or parent would die, according to the innovative analysis of some 2 million individual records of Europeans and Asians who lived in rural communities in Belgium, China, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

“The goal of the Eurasia Project is to analyze how economic hardship influences the family and individual behavior that affect the most important life outcomes—to stay alive, to marry and to have children,” says James Z. Lee, a University historian, sociologist and co-author of the first in a five-volume series detailing the project’s findings. “Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900” was published this year by MIT Press.

The collaborative project started 10 years ago and now is led by a group that includes Lee, who is affiliated with the Institute for Social Research (ISR), and Lund University economic historian Tommy Bengtsson, among others. They have discovered that some long-standing beliefs about the differences between Eastern and Western societies are myths.

A Population Studies Center Brown Bag will be held at noon Nov. 22 in ISR 6050. Bengtsson and Martin Dribe, also of Sweden’s Lund University, will discuss “Deliberate Control in a Natural Fertility Population: Southern Sweden 1766-1865.”

During bad times, people in the West were even more likely to die than people in the East. Mortality patterns in the West were more selective, defined mainly by socioeconomic status—property ownership, in particular. In the East, age and gender were the most reliable predictors of mortality, with young females at a distinct disadvantage.

Overall, the results of the complex analysis of household, parish registries and other individual-level records suggest that human agency, not biology, must have shaped mortality patterns long before the era of modernization, Lee says. “Even in ancient regime societies, families were active agents, not passive victims of natural forces.”

The project pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of past societies that results in a more nuanced understanding of human behavior, says Lee, who also is affiliated with the Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research and is director of the Center for Chinese Studies.

Instead of employing the standard demographic approach of analyzing the impact of famine, plague and other crises on large groups of people, the Eurasia Project analyzes the impact of everyday economic pressures on individuals and families, manipulating archival data to construct complex multi-generational histories.

In a classic agrarian crisis, the price of food increased by 50 to 100 percent or more. Such crises were rare. Smaller fluctuations of 10 to 20 percent from one year to the next were much more common, and by focusing on these smaller but more common annual fluctuations, this research has revealed a much more refined picture of how pressure affects families and individuals, not entire populations.

The book was co-authored by University of California, Los Angeles sociologist Cameron Campbell. With Bengtsson and others scheduled at the upcoming annual meetings of the Social Science History Association this week and the Population Association of America next April, both the project’s findings and its methods are attracting increasing attention.

“Until about 10 years ago, we didn’t have the methods or the data to study individual lives in the past,” Lee says. “Now, we apply new statistical techniques such as event history analysis that were developed or refined at ISR to historical panel data from household registers in different regions of the world. As a result, we have been able to generate new insights showing that our understanding of the past was far too simplistic.”