Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Paulo Teodoro de Matos
(FCSH)
Paulo Silveira e Sousa (CHAM-FCSH)
Send message to Convenors
- Location:
- Sala 43, Edifício B2, Piso 1
- Start time:
- 15 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Censuses and vital statistics where a key instrument in the construction of modern states and colonialism. This panel seeks for contributions on the normative framework of the colonial population counts/censuses, social categorization and methodological approaches.
Long Abstract:
The desire to control the population by the central powers is an undeniable factor in the development of statistics. This desire became a necessity, since without the information provided, the implementation of the policies would be chimeric. Furthermore, state capacity was enhanced by the demonstration of power shown through the counts and categorization of the people under its authority. Thus, statistics became a prerequisite for the development of the state, measuring its ability to succeed. This was even more important in the case of colonial populations, given their distance towards the power of the metropolis. Population counts and other population statistics are elements that served to further control these territories, but also to create identities, building a new order. To achieve this goal a normative framework was produced, in order to comprehend the territory and categorize the population.
This panel seeks to deepen the debate on the development of statistics by the European colonial empires since the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present, without dismissing the comparison with other empires, mainly in the following areas: legislative framework for population counts and its application in the colonies; categorization criteria and classification of populations and territories; people employed to perform the task and later broadcast; analysis of the results in statistics and quality assessment operations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In this paper, we will reconstruct the composition of Mozambique’s population in urban and rural spaces between 1750s and 1820s, using data samples from the collection of Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive, methods of historical demography.
Paper long abstract:
From the mid-18th century, demographic statistical production in Europe increased as a result of the expansion of governments' bureaucracy and a surge in topographic and cartographic knowledge. In recent years, important contributions have been made to improve our understanding of colonial populations and their history. Most of this scholarship has, however, focused on former British, French and German colonies in the late 19th and 20th centuries, paying little attention to the Portuguese empire and the early modern period.
In this paper, we partially fill this void in the literature by studying and comparing the composition of Mozambique's population in urban and rural spaces between 1750s and 1820s, using data samples from the collections of Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive.
Our study is divided in four sections. In section 1, we look at the types of primary sources available and discuss their potential and problems. In section 2, we discuss our preliminary estimates for the total urban and rural population in the areas controlled by the Portuguese, their geographical distribution and main over time changes. In section 3, we examine in detail the population composition in these two spaces. Here, we look in particular at ethnic composition, sex ratios, age groups structures, birth/death patterns, occupations, and social and juridical status. Special attention is given to free and enslaved population as well as to people living other forms of bondage in the territory. We will close our study by comparing Mozambican urban and rural population patterns and highlighting main differences and similarities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses the 1797 nominal censuses of Benguela in order to produce a synchronic analysis of the Donas or wealthy ladies of Benguela, the female component of the local colonial elite.
Paper long abstract:
Through the north and south nominal household censuses carried out in Benguela towards the end of 1797, this contribution offers a synchronic analysis of the female component of the local colonial elite: the Donas or ladies who underpinned Portugal's ambitions throughout parts of the African continent prior to the advent of formal colonialism. We are particularly interested in developing a number of profiles that the demographic data lend themselves well for investigation: age, colour, marital status, living quarters, and wealth. In the process, this study provides a quantitative examination of the phenomenon of the Donas immediately following the height of slave trading in Benguela that adds to an existing, modest literature based on individual biographies and hence, largely anecdotal.
Paper short abstract:
Demographic and health statistics in Spanish Guinea have a two-way interaction with colonial power. Colonial control highly limits the production of statistics. But this, in itself, is also a means of control of the land and the people and an instrument during the decolonization process.
Paper long abstract:
Effective control of the Spanish possessions in the Gulf of Guinea only started in the mid 1800s. During the 19th century the administration is basically limited to the city of Santa Isabel, and early population statistic are produced together with actors like the missionaries or explorers. As control was gained over the territory there was a parallel expansion of statistical coverage. Since the 1930s the predominant causal direction would reverse. The introduction of professional statistics into Spanish Guinea due to the failure of the 1930 Census, and the revised 1932 professional census led to better knowledge and control of the island through institutions that developed such as the land registry (catastro). After the Spanish civil war a statistical department was created responsible for carrying out first biennial statistical compendiums and regular censuses. Health statistics provided a tool for control over the people through the introduction of sanitary passports for the control of tryponosomiasis. Analytical tests were carried out every three months in the island of Fernando Póo (Bioko) and annually in the continent, that were required in order for the passport to be stamped. Starting in the 1950s the decolonization process will highly influence the purpose and usefulness of demographic statistics. After an attempt at provincialization, a referendum for autonomy was carried out in 1963, and a professional statistician would be one of the few Spanish civil servants that remained after the independence of Equatorial Guinea in 1968 to assist in the confection of the electoral roll.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the colonial registration of people and land in Ceylon/Sri Lanka from the perspectives of cultural/colonial history and demographic methodology
Paper long abstract:
In 2003 UNESCO declared the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archive world heritage because 'it is the most complete and extensive source on early modern world history'. Our paper aims at investigating and contextualizing one of the most unique records within the entire VOC collection: the eighteenth century thombos or cadastral and census registers of Southwest Sri Lanka, in uniqueness only comparable to the Domesday Book. These records, contained in 568 bundles in the Sri Lanka National Archives, provide us with detailed population data from the early modern tropical world and await structural analysis.
The Dutch thombos are the culmination of Portuguese, indigenous and Dutch administrative practices. Well into the 20th century extracts from the thombos were used in court to claim landownership. The importance of the thombos for Sri Lanka's history is widely acknowledged and they carry the potential for extensive and detailed research into rural life in Sri Lanka in the 18th century. It allows for thematic research into historical demography and family composition, the island's migration history and colonial knowledge formation. However, the thombos are complicated records and working with these records requires ethnographic knowledge of Sinhalese society, Sri Lankan geography and Dutch bureaucracy.
Our paper addresses the following questions:
(1) Why were these records kept?
(2) Who produced them and under what circumstances?
(3) What data can be extracted from the records? (e.g. ethnic and caste composition of the population and migration)
We will also demonstrate innovative methods to reconstruct fertility using colonial census data.
Paper short abstract:
Our propose for this communication is to discuss a methodology to transform the different age groups in each colony in the equal age groups. This process will thus allow a coherent comparative demographic treatment, as well as a better understanding of the population of the colonies at this period.
Paper long abstract:
The fact that the statistical charts gathering people from different colonies of the Portuguese empire are organized using aggregations of different ages raises problems of analysis and comparison. We rehearsed a methodology that aims to transform this heterogeneous organization of ages in aggregating it by the same age groups and more in line with the possibility of a stronger demographic treatment. This methodology consists in reorganizing the age brackets of the population histogram. The population density, which is calculated for each age group, are derived and then used to estimate the effective population of each desired class. This methodology will also allow a comparative approach to different colonial realities, including the various categories / types of people that arose in different colonies. For this first essay we will use data from the Azores, Angola and India. This communication is part of the project 'Counting Colonial Populations: Demography and the use of statistics in the Portuguese Empire, 1776-1875' (financed by Foundation for Science and Technology: PTDC / EPH-HIS / 3697/2012).
Paper short abstract:
With this proposal, we plan to analyze the seven censuses conducted in Transylvania by the Austrian authorities (after 1867 Austro-Hungarian ones) in order to capture the way how modernization of data collection, but, especially the information contained in these records, had been specialized
Paper long abstract:
Transylvania in the second half of the 19th century saw an accelerated process of modernization in terms of economic, social and cultural activities. Historians believed that this has had a strong impact, among other things, on the way the authorities had recorded the population of the province. Moreover, it is considered that the first truly modern census was conducted in Transylvania in 1850-1851, marking also the transition from "pre-statistical" to the "Statistics" as far as the method of accounting the demographic potential of the province is concerned.
With this proposal, we plan to analyze the seven censuses conducted in Transylvania by the Austrian authorities (after 1867 Austro-Hungarian ones) in order to capture the way how modernization of data collection, but, especially the information contained in these records, had been specialized. As it is well known, in the Habsburg Empire lived individuals belonging to more than ten ethnic groups and six denominations. Also in Transylvania coexisted in this period many peoples and religions, therefore we examine the criteria used by the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian authorities for defining ethnicity, to reassess the demographic policies of those who held power in a multinational state.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the censuses conducted within the Kingdom of Hungary (as part of Austria-Hungary) between 1869 and 1910, with the aim of highlighting the reaction of the Romanian population and society at the census procedures and results.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on the censuses conducted within the Kingdom of Hungary (as part of Austria-Hungary) between 1869 and 1910, with the aim of highlighting the reaction of the Romanian population and society at the census procedures and results. Since population statistics represented one of the main gears of shifting the official demographic balance in favour of the Hungarians (who only reached 50% of the country population in 1910), each new census and the modifications brought by it, together with the results, opened the path for debates within the Romanian society, reverberating in press articles, published books and correspondence. We believe it interesting to see how rather technical statistical issues and definitions (e.g. the `mother tongue` defined as `the language the respondent used most frequently`) were turned into subjects of debate and how the evolution of the censuses` categorization and classification system was perceived by a population who was, at the time, in a clear defensive position against the state.