About | Czoernig CEHDH

I want to thank my the many colleagues and fellow researchers who have contributed their datasets to this data hub, namely: Michael Pammer.

Let us properly cite the contributors' work when we make use of their datasets.

This website is made possible thanks to the financial support of the UCL Center for New Economic Transitions, operating at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European studies.

I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Neuron – National Foundation for Science, without whose grant (NF 15-2014) during the years 2016 - 2018 this data hub could not have been created.

The bulk of the datasets are in Excel format (although I am open to other formats, too); the shapefiles are obviously zip files.
To make the navigation of each dataset easier, I strove to reproduce in Excel the table headers from the original publications.
In datasets where the unit of observations is district/Bezirkhauptmannschaft, the variable "Bezirk - Constant borders" is a created variable indicating the time span during which the district borders were constant and therefore the data for the geographica unit are directly comparable. For example:
- "Linz Landbezirk |1876-1903|" indicates the suburban district outside Linz as it existed within the borders specified in 1876 and until they were changed again in 1903. Therefore all the Bezirk-level data for that district dating into this interval pertain to the same territorial unit are comparable across time.
- "Liezen |1873" denotes a district (Liezen in Styria) in the borders which were last amended in 1873 and then remained unchanged until the end of the monarchy in 1918
- "Wolfsberg" (without any brackets) means that the district borders of this particular Bezirk remained constant throughout the whole period in which the Bezirk administration was in place (1850 - 1918)
- "Lussin 1904|" denotes a district (Lošinj in modern-day Croatia) in its borders from the creation of the Bezirk administration until the borders were amended in 1904.
Some datasets make use of abbreviations for crownlands (similar to the FIPS codes for US States). These are, in alphabetical order: BO - Bohemia, BU - Bukovina, DA - Dalmatia, GA - Galicia, GG - Goricia and Gradisca, IS - Istria, KI - Carniola, KS - Austrian Littoral, KT, - Carinthia, MA - Moravia, NO - Lower Austria, OO - Upper Austria, SB - Salzburg, SI - Silesia, ST - Styria, TR - Triest and environs, TL - Tyrol, TV - Tyrol & Vorarlberg, VA - Vorarlberg

The data hub is named after the statistician and founder of modern Austrian data collection, Carl Freiherr von Czoernig-Czernhausen.

He was born in 1804 in the village of Tschernhaus/Černousy, in the northernmost corner of Bohemia. In 1829, he completed his university studies in Prague and in Vienna with a dissertation about Reichenberg /Liberec, a budding industrial town not far from his birthplace. Right away, he entered public service, being first posted to Trieste and then Milan in the 1830s.

In 1841, Czoernig returned to Vienna and was put in charge of the k.k. Direction der administrativen Statistik, a fledgling statistics bureau at the Trade Ministry. In this capacity, he upgraded the Direction's main output, the Tafeln zur Statistik der Oesterreichischen Monarchie, from a predominantly internal accounting document into a respectable, publicly available annual statistical yearbook. He also laid the groundwork for the comprehensive collection of industrial and financial statistics and in 1855 published a unique ethnographic map of the empire (accompanied by a three-volume commentary). Under his leadership, the office gradually developed, in 1863, into the k.k. Statistische Central-Comission. It was considered one of the most advanced and sophisticated statistics admini-strations in Europe at the time.

In 1865, Czoernig retired and moved south to the pleasant Friulian town of Gorizia/Görz where he also died in 1889 - but not until he, predicta-bly, wrote a statistical treatise about it.

Czoernig (pronounced t∫ørnig ) is an online database and data exchange hub containing historical demographic, economic and other data on Central and Eastern Europe.

In terms of its geographic extent, the bulk of the datasets that you can find here covers the provinces and crownlands once ruled by the Habsburgs (hence the schwarzgelb colour scheme) but I happily accept contributions from other corners of the general CEE region. In terms of its temporal extent, most of the data pertain to the period before 1914 but this is not a hard and fast rule. I also impose no limit on how far back into the past the data may go.

The seed of the data collection consists of various datasets that I have transcribed and cleaned from available Austrian and Hungarian sources during the course of my own research. But for this page to serve as a true data hub, it relies on willing contributions from other researchers of the economic and social history of the area. For every such contribution, I and the rest of the research community are very grateful.