Evolution of Demographic Studies of the Don Host in the Late Imperial Period

Abstract

Demographic processes on the territory of the Don Host Oblast (until 1870 — Land) have been studied since the beginning of the 19th century. Therefore, in modern national historiography this topic is considered well researched, and scholars usually do not address it purposely, providing results obtained by pre-revolutionary authors. However, a deeper exploration of the situation reveals that pre-revolutionary authors pointed out serious inaccuracy of the Don statistics. In this paper, for the first time in historiography, it is shown that as far as in the 1860s a prominent statistician N. I. Krasnov highlighted the anomality of the Don statistics and suggested it should be verified via comparison with the experience of world statistical science. But the majority of authors of the second half of the 19th century asserted that the experience of world statistics was inapplicable to The Don Host believing that the regional statistics had to reflect and describe the data but not to analyse it. The paper also shows that due to such an approach the study of the Don demography of the second half of the 19th century has been brought by to a dead end. National historians rely on initially inaccurate data, moreover, its verification by traditional historical methods is impossible. However, the French mathematician N. Bonneuil with the help of the Russian demographer E. V. Fursa developed a mathematical-statistical model to reconstruct demographic processes in the period in question. The article concludes that from a historical point of view this method is also sufficiently reliable, and its application by historians will allow the latter to significantly clarify the features of demography of the pre-revolutionary period.