The Conscription of the 1777/78 in the Trieste Territorio

Abstract

The article deals with the conscription system – the demographic-statistical monitoring conformed to the military information interest introduced in Austria in 1770. The author examines the technical and methodological characteristics of the conscriptions, as well as the practical difficulties and the operation defects the system had to face in the Trieste rural area – the Territorio. These were due to the methodological complexity of the system and the fact that the city of Trieste was excluded from the military recruitment, and its population was recorded in the censuses according to different criteria. Owing to the co-existence of two types of enumeration criteria in the same administrative area the view over the population and the maintenance of the population registers were precarious.