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Thursday 25 March 2021 12.30 - 13.45
B-6 ECO16 Geospatial Economic History of Southeast European Regions, 1840-1940: a Cross Examination of Population and Economic Geography
B
Networks: Economic History , Spatial and Digital History Chair: M. Erdem Kabadayi
Organizer: M. Erdem Kabadayi Discussants: -
Grigor Boykov, Efe Erünal & Petrus Gerrits : Analysing and Mapping of Settlement Patterns and Population Densities of Southeast European Regions, 1840-1920
This paper aims at examining the settlement patterns and at proposing a geospatial analysis of the population densities fluctuations that occurred in the period 1840s-1920s. It will therefore account for the changes that occurred during the transition period from Ottoman imperial into national rule in today’s Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, ... (Show more)
This paper aims at examining the settlement patterns and at proposing a geospatial analysis of the population densities fluctuations that occurred in the period 1840s-1920s. It will therefore account for the changes that occurred during the transition period from Ottoman imperial into national rule in today’s Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey, which came as a consequence of three major wars – the Russo-Turkish War (1878-79); The Balkans Wars (1912-13); and the World War I (1914-1918). The study focusses on five Balkan regions, centered on five cities (Ruse, Plovdiv, Vranje, Bitola, and Edirne), 15 towns surrounding them, and approximately 1,500 villages in their immediate vicinities. The territory examined by the paper covers roughly 20 NUTSIII units, which is the applied analytic resolution of the study.
Analysis of population data is split in three temporal cross-sections: i) 1840s when the entire examined territory was still under Ottoman rule; ii) 1880s/1890s almost immediately after three of the regions (Ruse, Plovdiv, Vranje) were integrated into national states, while two remained in the Ottoman state; iii) 1920s after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that triggered social engineering projects geared toward ethnic and religious homogenization of population in the Balkan states. Thus, the selected geographical spread of the regional data, analyzed in the paper, has the potential to shed light on the changing dynamics of confessional composition and population density fluctuations in a wider, Balkans-range context. The study relies on population data extracted from the Ottoman population registers for the 1840s; Bulgarian and Serbian censuses and Ottoman population registers for the 1880s/90s; and Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, and Yugoslavian censuses for the 1920s.
The population data in the three temporal cross-sections is spatially analyzed by a customized HGIS tool, which uses as a base map of a Digital Elevation Model at the resolution of 30 meters. The geographical spread of the villages in five regions will provide a maximum altitude inhabitability index, as territories laying higher than this index will be extracted by the GIS software from the general population density calculations, therefore providing far more realistic picture of factual density on three dimensional topography than any analysis that does not take into close consideration the peculiarities of local geography. The paper will offer confessionally separated (Muslims and Christians) population density statistics in chronological sequence thus accounting for ongoing changes in the period 1840s-1920s. The general regional fluctuations as well as density fluctuations of the confessional groups in those regions will allow a precise assessment of the consequences of transition from imperial to national rule in terms of population composition. (Show less)

Efe Erünal : Understanding Intergenerational Life and Occupational Cycles in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire through Record Linkage
This paper aims to investigate life and occupational cycles of upper-class Ottoman families in the mid-nineteenth century Bursa, a former capital of the empire. A longitudinal micro dataset will be created by linking individuals and their family members in the city of Bursa across three genres of sources: two waves ... (Show more)
This paper aims to investigate life and occupational cycles of upper-class Ottoman families in the mid-nineteenth century Bursa, a former capital of the empire. A longitudinal micro dataset will be created by linking individuals and their family members in the city of Bursa across three genres of sources: two waves of Ottoman population registers (1830-1838, 1838-1844), a household-based tax survey (1845) and probate inventories from the 1840s. As a research team (ERC Starting Grant, urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr) working on the industrialization and urbanization from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, we have transcribed and inputted data from these sources using customized data entry templates for a relational database.
Family histories will be constructed by following the family members in the mentioned sources and in the Ottoman archives. The dataset will contain detailed information concerning household structure, kinship and neighborhood relations, consumption patterns, occupational and inter- and inner-city mobility, business partnerships, by-employment, post-mortem property devolution, and intergenerational wealth accumulation in one of the largest and most significant political, judicial, and commercial centers of the Empire. The data will also shed light on the impact of gender and ethno-religious characteristics on these aspects in a city that has substantial Greek, Armenian, and Jewish population and female labor force working for the silk industry, in the nineteenth century.
The data, however, has its own biases and limitations. Pre-census population registers recorded only males with their ages in households, whereas the 1845 tax survey recorded usually only the breadwinners of the same households. The number of dwellings in neighborhoods in each registers match to a great extent and population registers and the 1845 tax survey cover almost the same households. Due to this dual coverage we can make use of combined and more efficient use of economic and demographic data on urban households, however, the additional use of probate registers provides even a more decisive qualitative advantage of record linkage. The probate registers are the most detailed and vocal elements about urban populace amongst the three document genres. Surely, they have bias issues since the rich and middle-class tend to generate more probates. Nevertheless, their combined use with population registers and tax surveys clearly overweighs any bias limitations.
To my knowledge for the first time contemporaneous and long-series of data are being used together for Ottoman history. Because of this reason, this research will be an important start to assess the bias inherent in documents by making complementary use of them. Demographic history of the Ottoman Empire is in its infancy, due to the recent opening of the population registers in 2011. Due to that there have been no systematic studies of tax surveys with population registers and researchers lack datasets and theoretical insights. Therefore, microstudies focused on family universes would enable us to utilize the sources’ full potential and explore new methodological, conceptual, and theoretical approaches. (Show less)

Akin Sefer, Aysel Yildiz : Migration Networks in the Ottoman Balkans in the Nineteenth Century
Labour migration for a temporary period to earn a living, known as pe?alba or gurbet, has been a well-known phenomenon in the modern history of the Balkans, and thus has prompted many historians to produce significant studies on the socio-economic and cultural impacts of this phenomenon in the transformation of ... (Show more)
Labour migration for a temporary period to earn a living, known as pe?alba or gurbet, has been a well-known phenomenon in the modern history of the Balkans, and thus has prompted many historians to produce significant studies on the socio-economic and cultural impacts of this phenomenon in the transformation of the region in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Due to the lack of statistical records, however, academic literature on the history of labour migration in the Balkans has largely been limited to the study of anecdotal sources and ego-documents. This paper aims to present systematic evidence from the Ottoman archives to document how this phenomenon was reflected in Ottoman statistical records and to analyze the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of migration in this period. Based on the Ottoman population and tax records from the 1840s, we will explore into the major characteristics of this phenomenon in the town of Bitola and its surrounding villages, including Krushevo.

This paper will analyze the migration networks and patterns in the Ottoman Balkans by focusing on the Ottoman district of Bitola in the mid-nineteenth century. A significant part of the population in this region, according to these records, were on the move in this period. Thus, an in-depth analysis of this district gives us an important opportunity to demonstrate the geographical scale of migration centered in this district, both inward and outward. Indeed, the migration networks were well-established not only between this district and the neighboring ones, but they also extended to distant regions, from Vienna and Belgrade in the West to Istanbul, Damascus, and Egypt in the East. In addition to the geographies of migration, these records provide invaluable details about the seasonality of labor migration and the profile of the migrants, including their names, occupations, ages, family and neighborhood networks, and income. Based on this data, the paper will also investigate the impacts of these networks on the political, economic and demographic transformation in this region, and identify the possible variations with regard to migration patterns between rural and urban localities within the region. (Show less)



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