Familie und sozialer Wandel im ländlichen Kroatien

This study is dealing with the changes of family and social life in two Croatian villages south of Zagreb. It covers the time from the foundation of the villages after the Ottoman wars in the 17th and l8th centuries until the first decades of the socialist time after WWII. The two villages, Lekenik and Bobovac, belonged to two different types of societies within the Habsburg Empire: the feudally organized "Civil Croatia" and the completely militarized society of the "Habsburg Military Border" against the Ottoman Empire. After its dissolution in 1881 the Military Border was united with the "civil" part of Croatia. Beginning with that time the people of the two villages experienced the following political, economic, and social changes within the same political unit. This study is focussed on developments in social life in rural Croatia in different times. On the one hand it deals with the changes of different social, economic, and cultural conditions and on the other hand it does an analysis of the way how people experienced and interpreted these social conditions and its changes. A combination of these two approaches should help to getting a better understanding of the way the transformation processes from an agrarian to an industrial order took place in rural Croatia.