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On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
Historians have not been at their finest in attempting to measure standard of living, and late imperial rural Russia is no exception. Given the absence of reliable measures for personal or household income or even of real wage trends—the most common proxy for the standard of living—scholars have been forced to employ a variety of other surrogates, often with unfortunate results. For Russia, recourse has been made to peasant tax arrears, mass consumption of “luxury” or nonfood items, and rye-wages. Shifts in the size of land allotments, numbers of livestock and patterns of land tenure often have been the focus of study; others have emphasized trends in net national product, grain retained in the village or grain yields generally. Diet has been assessed both quantitatively, in terms of caloric intake or protein derived from meat products, and qualitatively, underscoring harvest variability. Still other studies have looked at population trends, at times addressing the malthusian dilemma and suggesting that Russia was overpopulated. And frustration has recently led one historian to suggest we give up.
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References
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82. Novosel'skii, “Statisticheskii material,” 47; idem, Smertnost’ i prodolzhitel'nost' zhizni, 182-84; and idem, “Obzor,” 70; Caselli, “Health and Cause-Specific Mortality, “ 79.
83. H. O. Lancaster, Expectations of Life: A Study in the démography, Statistics, and History of World Mortality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990), 304-12 and 374-409.
84. G. I. Rostovtsev, “Dozhivaemost’ muzhskago naseleniia do 20-21 g. i telesnoe razvitie prizyvnago naseleniia v Dmitrovskom uezde Moskovskoi gubernii,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny (August 1902): 1187; Sandberg, Lars G. and Steckel, Richard H., “Overpopulation and Malnutrition Rediscovered: Hard Times in 19th-century Sweden, “ Explorations in Economic History 25, no. 1 (1988): 3–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Komlos, John, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 23–54 Google Scholar; and Floud, Roderick C., Wachter, Kenneth W. and Gregory, A. S., Height, Health, and History: Nutritional Status in Britain, 1750-1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
85. McKeown, The Modern Rise, 138-39; Roberts Woods and P. R. Andrew Hinde, “Mortality in Victorian England: Models and Patterns, “/owraa/ of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 39; Jacques Vallin, “Mortality in Europe from 1720 to 1914: Long-Term Trends and Changes in Patterns by Age and Sex,” in The Decline of Mortality in Europe, 38-67; and Livi-Bacci, Population and nutrition, 70-71.
86. Sokolov and Grebenshchikov (25, 37-38 and 45-55) and D. E. Gorokhov (“Obshchestvennoe znachenie izucheniia detskoi smertnosti i bor'by s neiu,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, [October 1908]: 1633-36 and [November 1908]: 1734-43) provide a detailed survey of the literature on this subject. See also M. Ptukha, “Smertnosf 11 narodnostei Evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XIX veka,” Pratsi démografichnogo instytutu (Kiev, 1928), 6: 25-26, and 31; Novosel'skii, “Statisticheskii material,” 29-30; idem, “Obzor, “ 66-67; idem, Smertnost’ i prodolzhitel'nost’ zhizni, 181-82; Coale, Anderson and Härm, Human Fertility, 75; and Kunitz, Stephen J., “Speculations on the European Mortality Decline,” The Economic History Review, second series, 36, no. 3 (August 1983): 352 and 357CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
87. Massimo Livi-Bacci, “The Nutrition-Mortality Link,” 96; and Schofield and Reher, “The Decline of Mortality in Europe,” 16. Thus the attempt by Gatrell to use infant mortality rates as a proxy for income are, for the Russian case, suspect (Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 30-7). In addition, Kahan's statement that the “mechanism of the increase in the size of population during this period [1860-1913] was the decline in the mortality rate (especially infant mortality)” is wanting (Kahan, Russian Economic History, 2-3).
88. McKeown, “Food,” 28; idem, The Modern Rise, 152-54; idem, “Fertility, Mortality, and Causes of Death: An Examination of Issues Related to the Modern Rise of Population, “ Population Studies 31, no. 3 (November 1978): 541; W. R. Lee, “Introduction: Population Growth, Economic Development and Social Change in Europe, 1750- 1970,” in idem, ed., European démography and Economic Growth (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 15; and Perrenoud, Alfred, “Mortality Decline in Its Secular Setting” in Pre- Industrial Population Change: The Mortality Decline and Short-Term Population Movements, eds. Bengtsson, T., Fridlizius, G. and Ohlsson, R. (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1984), 43 Google Scholar.
89. Flinn, Michael W., The European démographic System, 1500-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 101 Google Scholar. See also Scrimshaw, “Nutrition Studies,” 334.
90. Evsey Domar, “Were Russian Serfs Overcharged for their Land by the 186.1 Emancipation? The History of One Historical Table,” in Research in Economic History: Agrarian Organization in the Century of Industrialization: Europe, Russia, and North America, supplement 5 (1989), part B, 434; Lositskii, A. E., Vykupnaia operatsiia (St. Petersburg, 1906), 38–39 Google Scholar.
91. Domar, “Were Russian Serfs Overcharged,” 436.
92. Gerschenkron, “Agrarian Policies,” 740-41.
93. Degtiarev, A. la., Kashchenko, S. G. and Raskin, D. I., Novgorodskaia derevnia v reforme 1861 goda: Opyt izucheniia s ispol'zovaniem EVM (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1989), 143–46Google Scholar; Kashchenko, S. G., Reforma 19 fevralia 1861 goda v Sankt-Peterburgskoi gubernii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1990), 130–39Google Scholar; and Steven L. Hoch, “Introduction,” The Novgorod Countryside in the Reform of 1861: A Computer-Aided Experimental Study in Soviet Studies in History 30, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 5. Peasants who reached voluntary agreements with their lords might have contracted to make supplemental payments. But only one third of all redemption agreements were voluntary (outside the western provinces where redemption was made mandatory in 1863), and in most of these instances no supplemental payments were involved (Hoch, “The Banking Crisis,” 815).
94. Linda Bowman, “Russia's First Income Taxes: The Effects of Modernized Taxes on Commerce and Industry, 1885-1914,” Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 257.
95. PSZ II, vol. 36, no. 36, 662, articles 185 and 186; no. 36, 663, articles 191 and 192 (19 February 1861); and vol. 54, no. 59, 250 (23 January 1879); Kovan'ko, Reforma, 201-29 and 481; Simms, “Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” 384-85.
96. Grigg, Population Growth, 47; Susan Cotts Watkins and Etienne van de Walle, “Nutrition, Mortality, and Population Size: Malthus’ Court of Last Resort,” in Hunger and History, 10-11 and 28.
97. Nifontov, Zernovoe proizvodstvo, 225.
98. Boserup, Ester, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Chicago: Aldine, 1965 Google Scholar; idem, Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-term Trends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
99. T. R. Malthus, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, vol. 2, An Essay on the Principle of Population, E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, eds. (London: W. Pickering, 1986), 104, 108 and 188; and Chaianov, , “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” in The Theory of Peasant Economy, 1–28 Google Scholar.
100. Julian L. Simon, “The Effects of Population on Nutrition and Economic Well- Being,” in Hunger and History, 229.
101. Chaianov, “On the Theory,” 28; Bideleux, “Agricultural Advance,” 200-1; and Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, “Differentiation in Russian Peasant Society: Causes and Trends, 1880-1905,” in Land Commune, 165–91 Google Scholar.
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