Suchergebnisse

Even when historians disagree profoundly over causation, periodization, and perhaps the ultimate purpose of historical inquiry, they may still be able to find common ground in the discussion of primary sources and of the appropriate methods of extracting from them accurate information about a vitally important but heretofore neglected dimension of past social life. Such an impression emerges when Heldur Palli's account of the historical demographic research at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR is placed in the context of Western inquiries into the history of European populations. The methodological adjustments required in the application of well-known demographic techniques to unusual data sources should be better understood when the Estonian researchers conclude their work of family reconstitution from multi-lingual evidence about a peasantry with highly unstable naming practices. Also, Coale and Anderson (1979) described how the demographic characteristics of the Baltic area (including Estonia) in the late nineteenth century distinguished it from Russia proper, thus raising the question of when, in the distant past, these characteristics first appeared and how they can be described quantitatively before the first modern Baltic census of 1881. The sources being used by Palli and his colleagues no doubt will contain at least the beginnings of a concrete answer to these questions. Furthermore, the research by Peter Laslett and others on a regionalized model of premodern European household structure has suggested that the Baltic area stands somewhere between the West—with its high proportion of simple family households—and Russia—with its impressively high incidence of multiple family structures, a proposition which the cadastral revisions and fiscal censuses of Estonia should help to refine. There are also the questions of population turnover and social mobility, to which the frequent enumerations of the Estonian population ought to bring considerable quantitative evidence illustrating Eastern European patterns. Finally, Estonian peasants, like many other peasantries in the centuries discussed by Palli, were serfs; but, unlike all but a very few peasantries elsewhere, the Estonian population continued to be precisely enumerated by state authorities even after the abolition of serfdom in 1816-1819. The availability of detailed household-level data before and after legal emancipation will be of interest to Western scholars who have had to deal with the social structural consequences of emancipatory measures among servile agricultural populations in their own societies.