The first Statistical Yearbook – an important cornerstone in the house of data we have been building for 150 years

The beginning of the publicist activity of the State Statistical Office in Croatia

The year is 1876. It has been a year since the establishment of the National Statistical Office in Croatia. Milovan Zoričić, the first director, publishes the first Statistical Yearbook for 1874. In such a short period of time, and given the technological limitations of that time and the fact that everything was done manually, collecting data and publishing them within a year was an exceptional undertaking. It is also the first publication^[1] of the National Statistical Office in Croatia that contains data on the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia and on the Military Frontier for 1874, printed in Croatian and German, as was the case with most of the printed editions of that time.

Although most of the data was collected from, as we would say today, administrative sources, we must not diminish Zoričić's enthusiasm because "he first created a working basis, according to which, from 1875, regular data collection was carried out in administrative areas, courts, institutes and societies in the country"^[2]. In the introduction to the Yearbook, he referred to the history of data collection in the territory of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia and the Military Frontier and expressed his satisfaction with the establishment of a statistical office that independently monitored the changes that took place in the population, economy, education, communications and other aspects of society in the mentioned territorial areas.

In the second part of the introduction, where a brief overview of the content of the Yearbook is given, the methodology of data collection is explained in great detail. Thus, in the section on area, population and residence, we can read about the need to arrange the data so they are comparable to the data collected in the past: “With the intention to prepare some data for the Frontier as well for the years 1870, 1871 and 1872, the statistical office compiled data by provinces so they can be compared to those for years 1873 and 1874 (...)”. 

Of course, the boundaries of political and territorial units such as cities, counties, provinces and districts have changed over time, and in order for modern data to be comparable to those of previous years, they have been monitored according to the same political and territorial boundaries as in the past.

The Yearbook was divided into 21 units and included a variety of data, from data on surface area, population size and natural change in population, to data on loans, mortgages and banks, to data on schools, steamships and telegram communication. It is interesting to see that the data that were important to man and society in the 19th century are the same ones that are important to us today and that the areas do not differ much, except perhaps in the name.

Very interesting and extremely useful data have always been those concerning the population, both then and today. In the Statistical Yearbook for 1874 we can find out that, for example, June 1874 saw the birth of 2 514 girls and 2 613 boys, but also that there were 833 marriages in the same month. Interestingly, there were 8 732 pupils who attended the primary classes in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia in 1875, with the girls (3 600) being almost half as many as boys (5 132). Today, 150 years later, the situation is different. Namely, according to data for the 2022/2023 school year, girls and boys in almost equal numbers attend primary school (148 250 girls and 156 692 boys).

All in all, we can conclude that many interesting and valuable data have been made eternal, without which statistics as we know them would not exist. That is why the first Statistical Yearbook of the National Statistical Office is a very important cornerstone in the house of data that we have been building for 150 years.

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