19th century population explosion!

Well, a lot happens in four years, but enough about me...

David Ellis of Natick MA recently posted to the LitvakSIG listserv a question that related to population growth in the shtetlach in the 19th century.  His question related to Butrimonys.  It led me to wonder whether we can find out anything interesting about shtetl populations using the datasets we have available.

I looked at Salakas for which we have a range of data sets - census, revision lists and family lists.

(An article by Boris Feldbyum explains the background of much of this information   http://www.bfcollection.net/fast/articles/ruscensus.pdf )

The 1784 Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) census has 80 lines for Salakas, the 1845 revision list has 650 lines or so, the 1874 family list has 3080 entries and the 1887 family list about 8,500.

Plotted on a chart:

This looks exponential: and plotting on a log chart we see the trend very clearly.

This is a steadyish trend of close to 4.5% every year.  In other words the population doubled about every 16 years.   If this had continued Salakas would now be a metropolis of more than 1 1/2 million people.

There was a mix of immigration and organic growth.  Comparing the 1845 and 1887 lists, 1845 has 72 unique family names, 1887 about 200. Using this as a proxy for net immigration (which may or may not be reasonable) it looks as though about 2.5% annual growth was through net immigration with another 2% or so “organic” growth. 

There is a myth of the unchanging shtetl.  Salakas was in ferment with a doubling in size in less than a generation.  With this pace of growth the number of young people massively outweighed the old.

While the population expanded, opportunities became more and more limited as the Russian state failed to industrialise and limited Jewish access to higher education and the professions. The pressures on resources was clearly a key factor in the explosive emigration that started in the 1880s.