[Week 12] March 24+26 - The importance of taking census

Presentations: Mihaly and Leon

Discussion leaders: Dario and Thint

In the final week of the course we will investigate one of the most important tools of the modern state: the census. The instructor is still developing resources for this section, but our aim will be to draw upon the language skills of the actual student cohort in order to make a series of comparisons in the classroom about how social class, native language, religion, and profession of citizens and subjects were collated (often imperfectly) by the state. Whether it be the census of the Russian Empire in 1897, or that of the British Empire in 1901, or the Habsburg Austrian census of 1910 and its Hungarian counterpart, or the 1890 American census (famous for employing tabulating machines to process the data), or the German census of 1895, or the French census of 1881, or the 1891 Norwegian male census, or the 1861 Italian census, or the 1888 Swiss census, or the 1881-1882 Ottoman census, we want to study the relation between new forms of technical facility and knowledge of populations. 

Assigned reading: Christine von Oertzen, "Machineries of data power: Manual versus mechanical census compilation in nineteenth-century Europe," Osiris 32 (2017): 129-150.