The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a Laboratory for Analysing Connections between Confessions, the Demographic Regime, and Human Capital

Abstract

Religion played a key role in the normative systems of early modern societies. This article is an introduction to a more extensive project, in which we will conduct a historical analysis of the role of religion in economic, demographic, and civilizational growth. We believe that the sources that have survived from the early modern period provide ample data to allow for quantitative studies on this subject. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth appears to be an excellent laboratory because of its unique religious diversity, which allowed for the relatively peaceful coexistence of many religions on its territory. In this paper we analyse censuses from the second half of the eighteenth century which registered the mixed denomination/religious populations of villages (the Zabartowo parish), a small town (Kępno) and a big city (Warsaw). We try to show that these censuses can be used not only in typical demographic studies on family structures, but can also be successfully used in research on human capital in religiously diversifi ed societies.