The European Network for the Comparative History of Population Geography and Occupational Structure 1500-1900 (ENCHOS)

We launched the European Network for the Comparative History of Population Geography and Occupational Structure 1500-1900 in early 2017. The underlying aim of ENCHOS is to improve our understanding of Europe's long-run economic history, and the origins of modern economic growth. Its goals are to (i) create a long-lasting network of scholars committed to working together within an agreed methodological framework (ii) precipitate multiple follow-on projects generating robust harmonized datasets on occupational structure and population geography at the local, regional and national levels 1500-1900, for as many European regions as possible and create a quantitative data-infrastructure, scalable to any spatial scale from local communities, to regions, polities and beyond.

Economic historians are drowning in detailed local studies and buffeted by contradictory and methodologically problematic international comparisons based on incommensurable national studies. While we have estimates of national aggregates such as GDP per capita and real wages for many countries, we lack a detailed, quantitative and integrated account of European economic development 1500-1900 based on harmonized and robust data available at a sub-national level. ENCHOS would try to change that by jump-starting projects aimed at creating an integrated set of inter-related datasets that would allow us to trace, in a directly comparable manner, the evolution of Europe's local, regional and national economies over four centuries. The intention is to create a quantitative scalable framework for European economic history to which more particularistic studies could fitted. Long-term economic development is closely connected with two major interrelated structural changes which the historic record allows us to document in considerable detail over many centuries. First, as economic development proceeds, population tends to concentrate in towns and industrial or proto-industrial regions. Second, individuals tend to become more specialized while localities, regions and nations experience shifts in occupational structure away from an early predominance of agricultural employment

The network is co-ordinated by Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Dr Alexis Litvine, both at the University of Cambridge.

The inaugural meeting of the ENCHOS network took place at Robinson College, Cambridge, in 2017.  Podcasts of most of the presentations are available. ENCHOS II and ENCHOS III were held at Bocconi Museum Milan and Koc University in Istanbul. ENCHOS IV will take place in Barcelona in September 2021.

Members of the network

• Austria (Michael Pammer, Johannes Kepler University, Linz), Occupation in Austria, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries
• Belgium (Erik Buyst, KU Leuven), Occupational structure of Belgium 1796-1910
• England and Wales (Leigh Shaw-Taylor and others at the University of Cambridge), The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911.
• England and Wales (Jane Whittle and others, University of Exeter), Women’s work in rural England 1500-1700: a new methodological approach
• France (Alexis Litvine, University of Cambridge; Isabelle Seguy INED, Paris), Reconstructing a municipal-level GIS for France
• Germany (Paul Warde, University of Cambridge)
• Germany (Katrin Moeller, Georg Fertig, Halle University), Ontology of historical German occupational titles
• Ireland (Jason Begley, University of Coventry; Frank Geary; Tom Stark)
• Italy (Guido Alfani, Bocconi Univeristy, Milan)
• Ottoman Territories/Turkish Republic (Erdem Kabadayi and others, Koc University, Istanbul), Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000
• Poland (Piotr Koryś, Maciej Bukowski, Maciej Tyminski , University of Warsaw)
• Scotland (Michael Anderson, Edinburgh; Corinne Roughley, Scotland), Mapping Scottish demographic datasets
• Spain (Carmen Sarasua, Autonomous University of Spain and others), Participation rates of women and men and occupational structure in 18th and 19th centuries Spain
• Spain (Frán Beltran, Norwegian University of Science and Tecnology; Alfonso Díez Minguela, University of Valencia; Julio Martinez Galarraga, Univeristy of Valencia)
• Spain (Guillermo Esteban Oliver), The geographical distribution of the economic activity in Spain: 1860-1950

• Spain (Luisa Muñoz Abeledo), Women's Labour Force Participation and Occupational Structure in Spain, 1877-1975    

• Sweden (Kerstin Enflo, Lund; Anna Massalia, Lund, Matts Olsen Lund; Fredrick Sangren, Umea University), The Occupational Structure of Sweden, 1570-1920

We would welcome new members for the network, especially (but not only) those working or wishing to work on regions of Europe we do not presently cover.

Picture Credit: Maître du Boccace de Genève [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons