This dataset contains a number of files containing hearth and population censuses for the Duchy of Brabant and Lordship of Mechelen, starting from 1374. The dataset is linked to the GIS dataset
Historical Atlas of the Low Countries (1350-1800).
The data was collected and digitised with the great help of Bastiaan van den Akker, who worked in 2018/19 as an intern at the
International Institute of Social History and, as part of the NWO-funded project '
Imagining a Territory' (led by Dr. Mario Damen), at the University of Amsterdam.
The files in the folder "summaries" refer to data files prepared for further analysis, by disaggregating counts of combined areas using known ratios of other years, by interpolating missing values using nearest-neighbour-analysis of growth rates, and by creating a consistent time series by relating each figure to a predefined spatial part of the duchy which remains fixed.
The methodology behind these files is described in A.E. Oostindiër and R.J. Stapel, 'Demographic Shifts and the Politics of Taxation in the Making of Fifteenth-Century Brabant', in: M.J.M. Damen and K. Overlaet eds.,
Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), which is currently under review.
For users not familiar with creating spatial joins in GIS, we would like refer to
this related dataset. It contains a number of specially prepared GIS layers for the Duchy of Brabant, that store some of the data available below. (2020-02-12)
