scholarly journals Infant Mortality Among German Settlers in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Gietel-Basten ◽  
Georgia Verropoulou ◽  
Rachel Ganly

Currently, very little is known about regional patterns of infant mortality rates [IMR] – or mortality more generally – in the Russian Empire during, and before, the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, what studies have been performed generally rely on the reproduction of aggregate statistics, rather than being based on individual-level data. The objective of this study is to (a) identify the extent to which registration is complete in a part of the historical Russian region of Bessarabia for the period 1833-1885 and, then, (b) identify trends of IMR in a part of the historical Russian region of Bessarabia for the period 1833-1885. The study utilises church records of births (N=21,984) and deaths (N=7,194) from the German colony of Glückstal, a village near modern-day Grigoriopol in Transnistria (Moldova). Three methods of calculating IMR are performed. While there appears to be a significant degree of under-reporting of births which is inconsistent over time as well as gaps in the data more generally, it is possible to account for much of this through adjustment post linkage. After accounting for this, a linked net IMR can be generated. The range over the period is around 100- 190, with some periods of crisis mortality. These figures are lower than has been reported for the region. The comparison of different methods of calculating IMRs suggest that birth registration may be incomplete, however. This means that nominative linkage is required to derive accurate rates and other statistics. The findings challenge the widely held view of very high IMRs across the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. By utilising appropriate methods, this analysis suggests that such colony church records may represent a valuable source for further analysis of this neglected period in Russian demographic history.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.


1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan B. Carter

National, state, and individual-level data are used to explore the implications of the crowding of educated women into the teaching profession in nineteenth-century America. It is found that the more young women attended school, the lower were teacher wages and the price of educational services. Through this mechanism young women paid for their own education and, by lowering the price of educational services, helped America develop the best-educated population in the world by the century's end.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-176
Author(s):  
Lotta Vikström ◽  
Emil Marklund ◽  
Glenn Sandström

Due to insufficient historical population data, there is limited knowledge about the demographic outcomes of colonisation. This study provides demographic evidence of the difficulties faced by the Sami – an indigenous population in Sweden – during nineteenth-century colonisation, as indicated by (1) high risks of migration and (2) low survival rates compared to non-Sami. The digitised parish registers of the Demographic Data Base (Umeå University) provide longitudinal, individual-level data on migration, mortality, and ethnic origin. Event history analysis reveals that the Sami were vulnerable, with a higher mortality rate than non-Sami, and that they were more prone to migrate from areas overcrowded due to an increased competition for land. However, regardless of ethnic origin, it was primarily the settlers who migrated, and who ran the lowest mortality risks. This result suggests a ‘healthy settler effect’, and diverse consequences of colonisation that did not always follow ethnic lines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-388
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith

AbstractIn the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.


2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Fournier

Historians have pointed out that as a terrestrial rather than an overseas empire, the Russian empire has had to grapple with a blurry boundary between imperial center and periphery. Ektind goes a step further to show that the Russian empire was the stage for intensive colonization of the imperial core itself and the attendant processes of self-orientalization and self-alienation. The review identifies and explores three dimensions of the process of internal colonization. In the first, colonization by consent, Russian historical writers’ interpretations of the origins of the state in terms of consent to (foreign) domination are contextualized by drawing on colonizers’ fantasy of consent across contexts and historical periods, and by pointing to resistance as an important aspect of the relation between Russian imperial elites and the colonized. The second dimension is the idea of colonizing “one’s own,” whereby elites not only coerced people of the imperial core into various practices, but also viewed them through an orientalizing lens, and this, from the beginnings of serfdom through the nineteenth-century populists’ efforts at rapprochement (the perceived divide between rulers and ruled is, it is argued, still salient in Russian politics). The last dimension, strangers to ourselves, deals with the “splitting of the self” from a postcolonial studies perspective but it is pointed out that the use of psychoanalytic frameworks and literary theory may reproduce orientalist interpretations of the Russian imperial self. Instead, it is argued that self-orientalizing discourses in the Russian context may serve to divert attention away from one’s actual power.


Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1046-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Verner

Russians have long been preoccupied with surnames, particularly a distinction between so-called "good" and "bad" surnames, in ways that may be hard to understand by a nation of immigrants whose ancestral names were often mutilated by immigration authorities or anglicized by their bearers with a stroke of the pen. In the Russian Empire, such changes required the personal permission of the ruler and were exceedingly rare until the end of the nineteenth century.


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