Author: Queteletcenter

Before the advent of steam engines, mills were the most ingenious machines in common use. The oldest existing mill in the Low Countries dates from 1183 and was built in Wormhout. Important applications of mills were grinding grain, pumping water and sawing wood.

The Quetelet Center made a detailed survey map of the mill distribution based on the Ferraris map around 1774 (database STREAM) . This map was published in an article by Alain Goublomme (chairman of Molenforum Vlaanderen and Oost-Vlaamse Molens vzw) and Wouter Ronsijn (researcher of the Bocconi University in Milan and UGent) on the occasion of the expo Naar molens kijken (looking at mills) at the heritage site Ename. The red dots are windmills concentrated in the northwest and north. The blue dots represent water mills which were mainly to be found in areas with differences in altitude.

Ostend was an important port that developed into a bustling city and tourist centre in the course of the nineteenth century. A large part of this past is still shrouded in darkness by the disastrous destruction of important archival collections during and after the Second World War. Authors Pieter François (University of Oxford, Centre for Study of Social Cohesion) and Luc François (Professor Emeritus of History UGent) partly fill this gap with a remarkable and rare study of the Ostend land register on the eve of the Belgian revolution. They describe in detail the spatial organisation, the housing, the port buildings, the landowners, the tenants and the distribution of wealth on the basis of the real estate data collected by the cadastre in 1829-1834. The Quetelet Center processed the data at house level in overview maps.

Article:

Luc François en Pieter François. “Oostende gemeten en geteld: het kadaster van net vóór 1830”, in Als spaken van een tredmolen: gedenkwaardige en- of historische feiten, De Plate. Jubileumboek, 36(2021), 81-95.

In the course of the nineteenth century, Belgium underwent a radical transformation in terms of mobility. In barely half a century, mobility increased enormously with the advent of the railways and the expansion of the transport network. The role that the transport policy played in this transition has not yet been sufficiently studied. Historian Ingrid Schepers (University of Antwerp) investigates the connecting function of the Belgian railways by means of relational geography and combined various forms of mobility. She shows how much the transport policy was decisive for labour mobility and the complex relationship between city and countryside. For her research, she used commuter data and census data from LOKSTAT.

Article:

Ingrid Schepers. “Vertrekken, blijven of beide? De invloed van het Belgische transportbeleid op de arbeidsmobiliteit van de plattelandsbevolking tijdens de negentiende eeuw?”, in Stadsgeschiedenis, 16(2021), 1, 3-20.

Author: Isabelle Devos

The coronavirus has dominated our daily lives for several months now. It seems as if COVID-19 is the most widespread infectious disease on earth. Statements such as ‘nothing will be the same again’ or ‘there will be a pre- and a post-Corona era’ intimate the worst possible scenarios.

Counting nearly 300,000 deaths (as of 15th May 2020) the coronavirus is, however, not (yet) nearly as deadly as many other infectious diseases. Tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, the three so-called ‘big killers’, claim millions of lives every year, mostly in the southern hemisphere. Even the plague itself, yes the plague, is still responsible for thousands of infections a year. In fact, the island of Madagascar suffered a serious plague epidemic as recently as 2017. 

In Europe and North America, however, we have not only forgotten how to handle epidemics, many of us have also forgotten that up to 100 years ago infectious diseases were the most common cause of death. It is therefore high time to refresh our memory.

All kinds of figures are circulating about the death toll of the Spanish Flu. Depending on the author, some 10, 20, 50 or even 100 million people died worldwide during the epidemic in 1918-19. All these figures have two things in common, namely that they are very high and they are not usually based on a detailed study of the sources. In other words, they are rough estimates.

In an article published in De Standaard on 20 April 2020 (De ‘moeder aller pandemieën’ die onder de mat geveegd werd, which translates as The ‘mother of all pandemics’ that was swept under the carpet), Marc Reynebeau states that the epidemic of 1918-19 cost the lives of almost 300,000 Belgians. He bases this on the figure of 282,165 deaths mentioned in a master’s thesis (Antwerp University, 2017), where this figure is attributed to André Lambert, who studied the demography of the First World War. This figure is surprising, on the one hand because it is so precise and on the other because it is extremely high, even incredibly high. Research shows that nowhere does Lambert put forward a figure of 282,165 deaths for the Spanish Flu. Lambert only provides a table with the official annual mortality figures (regardless of the cause of death) between 1910 and 1920. This shows that 282,165 is simply the rounded sum of the total number of deaths in Belgium over two years (the sum for the years 1917-18, and moreover not for 1918-19). The figure of 282,165 deaths in the thesis is therefore based on the reasoning that every death in those years, from the youngest baby to the oldest Belgian, was due to the Spanish Flu. Which would mean that no one was killed then by any other disease or military force, or died outside the three brief waves of the epidemic. Of course, this is impossible.

Belgium is hardly ever mentioned in international studies on the Spanish Flu because the historical sources are incomplete and not transparent enough. In the Belgian context, however, the figure of 282,165 deaths from this thesis is already quoted on the Wikipedia page on the Spanish Flu, was used in a website that promotes flu vaccines, and recently it formed the basis of an article in the quality newspaper De Standaard. Such a figure, especially one of this magnitude, will therefore take on a life of its own. Numbers are attractive and easily copied, especially when they are available online. They radiate reliability but do not necessarily reflect reality. In particular, when it comes to epidemics from the past, it seems that the numbers can never be big enough. But the death toll does not have to be so high to have a major social impact, as we now know.

So far, not a single historian has ventured to calculate the number of victims of the Spanish Flu in Belgium. This is due to the fact that the cause of death statistics for the war years have not been preserved and it is therefore difficult to distinguish between deaths caused by war, flu or other diseases. Moreover, the mortality statistics for these years are incomplete: we do not have data for the worst affected municipalities on the war front, those in the Westhoek. Because the data at the national level are incomplete, in recent years there have been several studies on the Spanish Flu conducted at the local level (master’s theses UCLouvain, 2018 and Ghent University, 2005 and 2009). These show that the excess mortality could vary greatly from place to place, but that the mortality in 1918-19 was much higher than before the war almost everywhere. This is also indicated by quantitative analyses based on municipal data from the series of archives Le Mouvement de la Population et de l’Etat Civil (State Archives of Belgium). In comparison with the pre-war mortality figures (about 110,000 deaths annually), the figures in 1918-19 were on average a third higher.

Many European countries have more complete sources to measure the impact of the Spanish Flu. In recent decades, various studies based on historical sources and statistical methodologies have been able to determine more accurate mortality figures. For the Netherlands, these estimates range between 20,000 and 60,000 victims, for France between 230,000 and 360,000, and for England between 150,000 and 280,000. Depending on the scale of the epidemic, the Spanish Flu accounted for 10 to 25 per cent of the total annual mortality in the different countries. Taking into account a correction for under-registration, this means that in Belgium the epidemic claimed about 30,000 victims in the best case scenario and almost 80,000 in the worst case. Contemporaries estimated the mortality figure from the Spanish Flu in our country to be 20,000.

Over the past few months, reports on the corona epidemic have also alerted us to both the benefit and the dangers of numbers. There is a lot of discussion about the method of counting and calculating COVID-19 mortality. In Belgium, the scientific institute Sciensano has a comprehensive counting method: in addition to the COVID deaths in hospitals, it also reports people who died of the disease at home or in a residential care centre, along with any other suspected COVID deaths. Such detailed data help in better mapping the course of the disease, making better predictions and ultimately also avoiding deaths. Unfortunately, this does not make international comparisons any easier. Due to the comprehensive reporting method, the Belgian figures are much higher in relative terms than in other countries. In any event, the basis of our figures is clear. Something that cannot be said of the hallucinatory figure of almost 300,000 Belgian victims of the Spanish Flu.

Sources

Bibliography

• Ansart, Séverine, Camille Pelat, Pierre‐Yves Boelle, Fabrice Carrat, Antoine Flahault, and Alain‐Jacques Valleron. “Mortality burden of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Europe”, Influenza and Other respiratory Viruses 3, no. 3 (2009): 99-106

• Baudhuin, Fernand. Histoire économique de la Belgique, 1914-1939. Brussels: E. Bruylant, 1946, vol. 2.
• Brulart, Benjamin. “La grippe espagnole en Belgique occupée (1918-1919) : analyse épidémiologique et étude de l’imaginaire et de la perception de l’épidémie à travers les carnets de guerre”. PhD. Diss., UCLouvain, 2018.
• De Smet, Saartje. “De Spaanse griep in België”. PhD. Diss., Ghent University, 2005.
• Hendrickx, Laurine. “Onderschat en onbeantwoord. De publieke perceptie van de Spaanse griep in de Belgische context (1918-1930)”. PhD. Diss., Antwerp University, 2017.
• Johnson, Nial Philip Alan Sean, and Mueller Juergen. “Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic”. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 1 (2002): 105–115.
• Lambert, André, “La population de la Belgique dans la guerre 1914-1918”. Lecture for the memorial of WOI organized by de Vlaamse Vereniging voor Demografie and Société Démographique Francophone de Belgique, February 2014. http://adrass.net/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/rap1418_final.pdf
• Murray, Christopher J., Alan D. Lopez, Brian Chin, Dennis Feehan, and Kenneth H. Hill. “Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918–20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis”, Lancet 368, no. 9554 (2006): 2211-2218
• Patterson, D.K., and Pyle G.F. “The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic”. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65, no. 1 (1991):4–21.
• Reynebeau, Marc, “De ‘moeder aller pandemieën’ die onder de mat geveegd werd”. De Standaard, 20 April 2020. https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20200419_04927397
• Van Laere, Stefanie, “’Over-leven na de Groote Oorlog’. De demografische gevolgen van de Eerste Wereldoorlog in België in kaart gebracht”. PhD. Diss., Ghent University, 2009.

Food supply faced various challenges in the past centuries. Population growth, urbanization and industrialization put food supplies under pressure. To cope with the problems, scaling-up, innovation and technological improvements were necessary. The last issue of the CORN publication series is dedicated to the regulation of food production and distribution in the early modern and contemporary periods. Editors of this volume are Wouter Ronsijn (Ghent University and Bocconi University of Milan), Niccolò Mignemi and Laurent Hermes (Ecole des Hautes Etudes and Sciences Sociales in Paris). The publication contains contributions from various researchers about Mexico and six European countries. Pieter De Graef (University of Antwerp) wrote an article about urban agriculture in Belgium during the nineteenth century. He shows how commercial farms were driven out of the cities and made way for small-scale agriculture by local residents. His findings are based on agricultural statistics and cadastral series from the LOKSTAT and POPPKAD databases.

Abstract:

This book presents ten case-studies by eminent scholars dealing with food supply, storage and markets from c. 1600 to c. 2000. Together they present a long-term history of the tools to regulate the rhythms and seasonal patterns of the food production and distribution process. How were the vast flows of staple food needed for metropolitan areas organised? What practical difficulties had to be overcome to preserve this food safely? Did people respond to price patterns in search for profit? Were governments successful in imposing regulation? In dealing with these issues, the contributing authors adopt different approaches and investigate cases from England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Mexico. The focus on the stocks and flows of grains and other foodstuffs raises new questions combining economic, social, political, and environmental issues in the study of agricultural markets and food policies.

Ronsijn, Wouter, Niccoló Mignemi and Laurent Herment. Stocks, season and sales: food supply, storage and markets in Europe and the New World 1600-2000. CORN Publication Series 17, 2019 Brepols, 1-224.