Borders, Ethnicity, and Demographic Patterns in the Russian Baltic Provinces in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In his pioneering and now classic 1953 study, Nationalism and Social Communication, Karl Deutsch laid out a social science agenda for the study of national consciousness in contemporary and historic populations. Central to this agenda was communication, and central to communication was language:

‘If we knew how to compare and measure the ability of groups and cultures to transmit information, we might gain a better understanding of their behavior and capacities.’ (Deutsch 1966, 93).

At that time historians were not paying attention to social scientists as neither historical demography nor social science history had yet been born, and Deutsch’s call remained unanswered. It took the study of the secular decline of fertility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to raise the question again for the European past. When Watkins concluded that:

‘those people who spoke a common language appeared to behave in similar ways with respect to reproduction, but they behaved quite differently from those with whom they could not communicate’ (Watkins 1991, 7),

she offered one answer to Deutsch’s inquiry about social communication and social behaviour (see also: Lesthaeghe 1977; Knodel & van de Walle 1997, Watkins 1986; Anderson 1986).

This chapter was published as an article in Continuity and Change 14 (1999), 2. The editors express their acknowledgement to the publisher of the Journal, Cambridge University Press, for enabling republication. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, October, 16–19, 1997, Washington, DC, and at the European Social Science History Conference, Amsterdam, March 5–8, 1998. The research has been funded in part by a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (810–23), the Academic Senate of the University of California, Riverside, and the Department of History, Iowa State University.