@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Alexis Litvine (U. of Cambridge/CAMPOP), T. Thévenin (Univ. Bourgogne/ThéMA),
Establishing how many people inhabited a particular area and being able to define precisely its boundaries is not just an academic exercise. It is the cornerstone of historical, economic, and social scientific research. This exercise comes with several challenges, not least the significant landscape and boundary changes over the last two centuries.
This session will cover the background and preliminary results of the COMMUNES project, which aims to do this in the long run for France. Combining modern GIS techniques and large historical databases it now possible to represent and analyse the spatial dimension of demographic and socioeconomic phenomena at an unprecedented level of accuracy. Municipal-level Historical GIS (H-GIS) data now exist for several countries, but France, despite the existence of all the necessary records, is clearly lagging in this respect. The COMMUNES project aims: i) to produce the first H-GIS providing annualised boundary data for all French municipalities from the Revolution to the present day; ii) to link each spatial unit to historical population data and metrics of access to networks of transport; iii) to develop a multimodal model of transport to allow the dynamic analysis of the relationship between economic and demographic changes and accessibility from the end of the 18th century to the present day; iv) to represent and analyse on a very fine scale some key demographic and socio-economic phenomena. In this paper we will present our method for reconstructing historic administrative boundaries combining the study of historical and cartographic sources, as well as other yet unexplored documents from local administrative archives and cadastral surveys and link them to existing census data. I will also introduce recent exploratory work aimed at creating population estimates for ancien régime parishes for the early 1780s. In this talk I will i) present our method to link ancient parishes to post-revolutionary communes, ii) present the historical sources used in this work, and iii) discuss the usefulness and potential pitfalls associated to using BMD data to reconstruct population estimates.
This session will cover the background and preliminary results of the [COMMUNES project](https://anrcommunes.hypotheses.org/le-projet-communes), which aims to do this in the long run for France. Combining modern GIS techniques and large historical databases it now possible to represent and analyse the spatial dimension of demographic and socioeconomic phenomena at an unprecedented level of accuracy. Municipal-level Historical GIS (H-GIS) data now exist for several countries, but France, despite the existence of all the necessary records, is clearly lagging in this respect. The COMMUNES project aims: i) to produce the first H-GIS providing annualised boundary data for all French municipalities from the Revolution to the present day; ii) to link each spatial unit to historical population data and metrics of access to networks of transport; iii) to develop a multimodal model of transport to allow the dynamic analysis of the relationship between economic and demographic changes and accessibility from the end of the 18th century to the present day; iv) to represent and analyse on a very fine scale some key demographic and socio-economic phenomena. In this paper we will present our method for reconstructing historic administrative boundaries combining the study of historical and cartographic sources, as well as other yet unexplored documents from local administrative archives and cadastral surveys and link them to existing census data. I will also introduce recent exploratory work aimed at creating population estimates for ancien régime parishes for the early 1780s. In this talk I will i) present our method to link ancient parishes to post-revolutionary communes, ii) present the historical sources used in this work, and iii) discuss the usefulness and potential pitfalls associated to using BMD data to reconstruct population estimates.
I will finally briefly outline the intellectual agenda of the project, including:
Producing high-resolution, spatially disaggregated data for economic history and historical demography is not adding more data to an already crowded field. It opens new ways to answer fundamental questions: it makes possible for the first time real multi-scalar analyses ranging from local to transnational levels and permits the identification of specific characteristics and spatial linkages with adjacent areas, which are central to understanding the diverse demographic and economic trajectories of regions.
