Preliminary Programme

The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of nation states in the Balkans and in the Middle East mark a decisive transformation for the history of this region in political, economic and social terms. Proposed paper aims to explore the urban economic change brought by this transformation from an economic and labor history perspective. The performance and occupational structure of four urban economies, Ankara, Bursa, Edirne, and Manisa will be analyzed in detail for the period 1845 – 1945, focusing on three cross-sections 1845, 1935 and 1945.

After extracting the micro occupational data on individual basis of the entire households in these four cities from an 1845 Ottoman survey, the data on occupations and economic activity fields will be coded into HISCO and PST. Following this exercise the occupational data for the same cities will be extracted from the 1935 and 1945 Turkish Population censuses. The aggregate data coming from Turkish national censuses will be again re-coded according to broad categories of HISCO and PST. After these conversions the structural change of these urban economies and shifts within and between major sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and the services; as well as questions of labour mobility and acquired and/or necessary skills to move among sectors will be examined for the period between 1845 and 1945. (Show less)

Drawing on data from the Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics the paper compares occupational structure in Russia for two cross-sections: 1897 and 1959. Cross-section 1897 reveals the occupational structure of the Russian Empire at the time of the country's first wave of industrialization, which started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted until the revolution and Civil War of 1917-21. Cross-section 1959 presents the balance-sheet in terms of occupational structure at the end of Stalinist industrialization, which started in 1929. The first wave of industrialization was a spontaneous, market-driven process of industrial expansion, the second wave was state-led and took place in the non-market environment of a country largely sealed off from the outside world. The paper analyses the shifts in occupational structure between the two cross-sections using two different coding-schemes (HISCO and PSTI) to test for different results, and investigates to what extent Soviet non-market industrialization produced a distinctive pattern of occupational change. (Show less)

This paper examines the census occupational data of India and traces changes in the occupational structure of its labour force from 1881 onwards. India’s census tabulations of occupations are problematic with frequent alterations in occupational classifications as well as the uncertainty about female occupations, subsidiary employment and those described as general labourers, especially for the period before Independence. It is, therefore, important to review possible causes of errors and uncertainties in the enumeration and classification of occupations and the ways in which estimates are to be made. In this paper, an effort is made to tabulate principal-subsidiary occupational matrix tables, which will go a substantial way towards a better understanding of changes in female, subsidiary, and caste-related occupations that took place during the period of rural commercialisation under British rule. (Show less)

This paper offers, first, new estimates of workers in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, by taking subsidiary occupations into account, on a yearly basis for the period between 1885 and 1940. With the new three-sector time series and revised estimates of the LTES’s net output in the tertiary sector over the same period, we would also like to examine the levels of differentials in labour productivity between the three sectors and trace how the sectoral productivity differentials changed over the period in question. The results suggest that differentials in average labour productivity between primary and secondary industry were not as wide as both Gerschenkronian and dual structurist arguments have assumed. In the early stages of Japan’s industrialisation the traditional sector of manufacturing was larger than previously thought. Initially, the overall level of average labour productivity in the secondary sector was more or less comparable to that in the primary sector. (Show less)