The Swedish Tabellverket
1749 · Parish Population Tables · Work 684 of 1,871
A heavy parish register of 1749 lying closed on a plain pine table in the sacristy of a country church in Sweden in winter, the register a thick folio volume bound in dark brown leather with two brass clasps, its front cover plain smooth worn leather from edge to edge, its spine plain with raised bands, beside it a large folded folio sheet of cream rag paper lying at a flat angle, soft in focus, showing only a grid of fine ruled columns, a goose quill, a turned wooden sand shaker and a small packet tied with string and closed with red sealing wax, the parson seen from behind in a long black woollen coat, whitewashed stone wall, cold daylight from a small window on the left and one tallow candle.
- What it was used for
- The Tabellverket was the Swedish population statistics that began in 1749 and has run unbroken since. The forms were filled in by the clergy: in every parish the minister entered the figures from the parish registers onto a standard form. The parish forms were summarised for rectorial districts, rural deaneries and the diocese, and sent on from there to the Chancery in Stockholm. Pehr Wargentin, an astronomer and secretary of the Academy of Sciences, directed the analysis; the body set up for it, the Tabellkommissionen, is described by today's Statistics Sweden as the world's oldest statistical agency. The first published figure appeared in 1764: 2,383,113 inhabitants of Sweden and Finland in 1760.
- What was new
- What was new was its permanence: not a single count but a form filled in again at regular intervals. Statistics Sweden calls the result the world's oldest regular national population statistics. The barb lies in the 1749 result itself: the figure came out far lower than expected, and the government declared it a state secret — for more than a decade, until the publication of 1764. And the precision at issue was not available in the first decades: the Human Mortality Database, which maintains the series today, holds that it was more or less impossible to keep track of the early system's errors, starts its Swedish series only in 1751, and regards the statistics as more reliable only from 1802.
What the sources leave open: None of the sources consulted gives a population figure for 1749 itself. On when Wargentin took over the Tabellkommissionen the accounts diverge: Statistics Sweden dates the commission's founding to 1756, while The Local gives 1754 as the year Wargentin was asked to lead it.