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Occupational structure of Belgium, 1796-1910

Occupational structure of Belgium, 1796-1910

Erik Buyst, KU Leuven

For some years Buyst has worked on the occupational structure of Belgium from 1846 to 1910 as part of the INCHOS project. In the ENCHPOGOS project, he is pushing the estimates back in time.

In 1795 Belgium was annexed to the French republic. To get a better understanding of their newly conquered territories the French administration set up a kind of population census which included a registration of both male and female occupations. For six out of the nine Belgian provinces sufficient archives on a local basis have survived to reconstruct a relatively detailed occupational matrix. For the other three provinces however almost no archival material has been found. This very unfortunate, as one of these provinces is Hainaut, the cradle of the Belgian industrial revolution (together with Liège).

The project would develop an alternative method, based on parish registers, to reconstruct the occupational structure of the provinces of Hainaut, Namur, and Luxembourg. A first step is to make an inventory of the parish registers (or early civil registers) that contain occupational titles for the 1793-1799 period. If a representative sample of useful parish registers can be assembled, then the next step would be to analyze them in detail.