Digital Analysis of the 1897 Imperial Census: Educational Patterns in the Governorates of Elisavetpol and Baku
The Russian Imperial Census of 1897 remains one of the most comprehensive demographic resources for the study of the South Caucasus in the late nineteenth century. The census data of the Elisavetpol and Baku governorates, despite their considerable scholarly potential, have seldom been the subject of systematic digital analysis, and the educational dimensions of this source have received particularly limited attention. The present paper is a prosopographic and quantitative study of literacy and educational data recorded in the 1897 census in the two governorates under consideration. The study is based on the original published volumes stored in the Presidential Library of Russia.
The census recorded a variety of educationally relevant variables, including literacy in different languages, the language of instruction and attendance at confessional and secular schools. The paper reconstructs collective educational profiles of the population by ethnic, religious, gender and administrative categories by digitizing and structuring this data. The resulting data set permits a comparative analysis of literacy rates between the urban and rural population, as well as between the two governorates as different administrative and socio-economic units.
The paper raises several important questions: What was the educational level of the different communities of the Baku and Elisavetpol governorates? What can we learn about social stratification, access to imperial institutions and the role of confessional networks in education from patterns of literacy and schooling? And how does the 1897 census, when approached through the digital prosopographical methods, become a tool for reconstructing collective social identities, not just a collection of individual statistics?
Methodologically, the paper draws on the framework of digital prosopography, conceptualising census entries not as individual data points but as structured biographical traces which, when aggregated, trace out the contours of social groups. Through the use of relational data modelling and visualisation techniques, the analysis maps educational geographies across the two governorates, revealing patterns that have been largely overlooked by traditional narrative historiographies. The paper also reflects on the methodological challenges inherent in working with imperial census data: questions of categorisation, the politics of enumeration, linguistic complexity and the limitations of self-reported data. In so doing, it engages with broader discussions in the field of digital prosopography on source criticism and the epistemological stakes of quantitative approaches to historical populations.
The study situates the 1897 census in the broader history of education in the South Caucasus and provides a model for the application of digitized imperial statistical sources for prosopographical research of regions that are still underrepresented in digital humanities scholarship.
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Aykhan Mehdizade is a researcher at the Institute of History and Ethnology of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS). His research interests are centred on the social and educational history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Azerbaijan, with a focus on imperial census sources and digital methods in historical demography.
E-mail: ayxan.mehdizade@gmail.com
