Demography and social structures in historical Southeast Europe

Project number: P 38285-G
Duration: 1.11.2021 - 31.10.2025
Funding: FWF

Historical demography in and about Southeastern Europe is still less developed compared to the leading centers of this research, which are mainly located in Northwestern Europe. Historical overviews of this region often deal with this topic only very marginally; there is also as yet no publication that deals exclusively with this topic in Southeast Europe over the last two centuries - there are only publications on the population history or the historical demography of a single country or of Europe as a whole. The existing studies on regional differences in the historical demography of a country or between occupational groups concern the only database of representative rural and urban populations in Southeast Europe: Albania, based on the 1918 census. This project will enable similar studies in other countries in the region and comparative studies between these countries. For this purpose, samples of all other countries in Southeast Europe will be created, including urban populations on a large scale.

The following research questions are to be answered:

• What regional differences in fertility and nuptiality existed in historical Southeastern Europe?
• What regional differences were there in historical household structures and in cohabitation within a household in Southeast Europe?
• What regional differences were there in terms of family patriarchal structures?
• What differences do the individual occupational groups show in terms of marriage patterns, household formation and fertility?
• Which influencing factors were mainly responsible for these differences?

In a first step, the archives in the countries of south-eastern Europe will be searched for existing manuscripts of censuses up to the First World War. From these, a selection will then be made that is as representative as possible in order to be able to examine urban and rural families and different regions within the individual countries. The selected individuals and families are then recorded in a database and coded according to important characteristics (gender, marital status, family relationship, occupation, religion).

The microdata will be coded on the basis of existing coding systems (IPUMS, NAPP, Mosaic, HISCO), thus ensuring that the new data will subsequently be comparable with existing data. The analyses will be based on the child-woman ratio, the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage (SMAM), the proportion of people who remain unmarried, the age gap between spouses, the patriarchy index and measures of cohabitation (dyadic relationships - who lives with whom?).

This project will create the largest European database of historical census data outside the already established centers of historical-demographic research. Studies based on this large-scale expanded database will shed light on previously obscure areas of Southeast Europe in terms of historical demography, household structures and family patriarchy. The new data will be made available to the international research community free of charge (open access), thereby creating additional opportunities for research, including research questions that are not related to historical demography. Collaboration in research should be encouraged and the gap between analyses at the state level and village studies should be bridged by analyses at the regional level.

Siegfried Gruber (2022) Digital Census Microdata as Sources for the Historical Demography of the Ottoman Empire. In: Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall 2022, pp. 111-116. DOI:https://doi.org/10.2979/tur.2022.a902191

Siegfried Gruber and Daniel-Armin Đumić (2024) Women owning Property in mid-19th Century Serbia. In: Balkanistic Forum, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 31-41, DOI: https://doi.org/10.37708/bf.swu.v33i2.3