A Global History of Child Death: Mortality, Burial, and Parental Attitudes by Amy J. Catalano (review)

In the past decade, historians have published important—often lengthy—new books on death, several of which extend beyond individual national contexts: Peter Stearns’s Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective (2007); Erik Seeman’s Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (2010); and Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015). These and other national histories by Drew Gilpin Faust, Pat Jalland, and Julie-Marie Strange, among others, mark a renewed interest in death studies, but, like Philippe Ariès’s classic The Hour of Our Death (1981), tend not to concentrate primarily on the particular issues related to child mortality. Catalano’s Global History of Child Death addresses this gap in the literature, taking the broadest possible coverage from prehistoric to modern times, extending from the cremated body of a three-year-old child buried some 11,500 years ago in the North American Arctic to the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings. Catalano’s survey draws upon research in archeology, history, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, and art history. The book is divided into two main sections, the first on “Mortality and Burial Practices through History,” and the second on “Indicators of Parental Attitudes toward Child Death.” Specific topics cover the causes of child mortality, funeral and burial practices, gravestones and other monuments, social directives for grieving parents, parental expressions of grief, and mourning practices. Both sections also include significant, arguably disproportionate, material on child sacrifice and infanticide.

Given the far-reaching scope of A Global History of Child Death, there are understandable limitations on what it can accomplish. Yet, for a number of topics the literature review is dated and, at least from a historian’s view, often idiosyncratic. There is an entire chapter on “America and England in the 17^th to 20^th Centuries,” for instance, but Catalano, an expert in children’s literature, does not include books by Faust, Jalland, or Strange in the bibliography. A conclusion and more overall historical contextualization of case studies would help readers navigate the quick transitions between different times and places. The lack of contextualization leads to some surprising statements, including the idea that ancient Romans “thought that the regular practice of killing abnormal children removed a defective gene from the evolutionary process” (40). The scholar with whom Catalano engages most directly is Ariès, but even in this case readers would benefit from more direction in terms of the author’s position on key debates.

While A Global History of Child Death includes case studies from across the world, the greater emphasis is on Europe and America. At times, the portrayal of non-Western histories lapses into a kind of Orientalist narrative. For example, Catalano blithely recounts, “One of the first efforts in the Eastern hemisphere to put an end to female infanticide was in 1789 by the British government” (47). Along with this wholesale treatment of “the Eastern hemisphere,” there is no mention of the extensive work by scholars, such as Padma Anagol, Satadru Sen, Daniel Grey, Lata Mani, and Antoinette Burton, explaining how British campaigns against infanticide, like the debates over sati, age of consent legislation, and widow remarriage, cannot simply be described as humanitarian efforts without understanding the colonial projects that such reforms sought to advance. In other examples, readers learn that “the Papuans practice cannibalism” (note the present tense) and that the Japanese routinely ate child victims of the 1783 famine, only to discover, through the footnotes, that the sources for these statements were published in 1912 and 1916 respectively (98, 135).

The strength of A Global History of Child Death is the way in which it models, in an accessible format, the myriad of sources and methodologies scholars use to understand social and individual responses to the death of a child. Catalano prompts readers to ponder the limitations as well...