The article links the digital records of individual proprietors in the manuscript censuses 1851–81 for the whole of England and Wales using the BBCE database to identify career changes of employers and own account proprietors. It investigates continuing proprietorship, entry to business from previous activity, and switching out of business. The article identifies the effects on switching of demography, gender, household relationships, sector markets, and opportunity/necessity measured by location and access to railways. Previous analysis of nineteenth-century proprietor careers has been based mainly on local case studies and large firms. This article allows examination across the spectrum of small and large businesses for a representative sample large enough to generalize to the behavior of the whole population. The analysis shows a larger proportion of flows between employer, own account, and worker status than often expected, indicating a relatively open and flexible Victorian economy, and higher than in the modern United Kingdom. Farm and nonfarm activities show contrasted patterns, with farm proprietors more stable with less switching, as to be expected. Switching appears to have slowed slightly over time, with incumbency increasing for both farm and nonfarm employers, and for both men and women, but own account proprietorship was often relatively ephemeral. The article assesses the factors influencing switching using logistic regression. This confirms age, sex, marital status, family position, location, and sector as significant for explaining switching/nonswitching. The results demonstrate that although open and flexible, proprietorship was highly varied between sectors, with changes of railway accessibility mainly significant for farmers.

Debates about patterns of time use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain go back to the seminal work of E. P. Thompson in the 1960s. But the lack of systematic evidence means that many of these questions remain unresolved. In an attempt to advance those debates, this essay uses three catalogs of political events to reconstruct the working week in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Three patterns emerge. First, observance of Saint Monday appears to have been widespread in the early nineteenth century before declining slowly in the mid-1800s, a process that happened faster in factory towns than elsewhere. This finding supports the orthodox narrative about Saint Monday against its recent challengers (in particular Hans-Joachim Voth). Second, I find that political organizers in the early nineteenth century were reluctant to profane the Sabbath by arranging public meetings on Sundays, but that this came to an end during the heyday of Chartism. Third, these catalogs also provide some, more speculative, evidence that the working day and the working week became more ordered as the nineteenth century wore on.

It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the local community or imported from beyond. We also find that the urban regime of strike policing matters by moderating the impact of strikebreakers. The most powerful predictor of strike outcomes is employer use of replacement workers, signaling the key to undermining working-class strike solidarity directly pits the working class against itself. Intraclass solidarity is necessary for the success in interclass struggle but needs to extend beyond the struck firm implicating the importance of solidarity of the surrounding community and wider social factory. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the historic formation of the US labor movement and its present predicament.

This study provides a novel analysis of occupational stratification in Sierra Leone from a historical perspective. By employing census data for early-nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone, the present study offers a valuable snapshot of a colony characterized by a heterogenous population of indigenous and migratory origin. The study shows that an association between colonial group categorization and socioeconomic status existed despite the colony being of very recent foundation implying a hierarchical structure of the society. Although Europeans and “mulattoes” occupied most high-status positions, as common in the colonies, indigenous immigrants were also represented in high socioeconomic strata thanks to the opportunities stemming from long- and short-distance trading. However, later arrivals, especially liberated slaves, belonged within the lowest socioeconomic strata of the society and worked as farmers or unskilled labor, suggesting that the time component may also have influence socioeconomic opportunities.

We analyze the evolution of homicide rates in Chile, as a proxy of interpersonal violence, from the 1880s to the 2010s. Homicides rates are the best measure of a country’s personal security, and a key variable of well-being. We found that the homicides rates were high during the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. From the 1930s homicide rates started to decline initially gradually, but then sharply during the 1950s–1960s. During the 1960s–1990s, the country’s homicide rates were low by international standards. However, they have increased during the last two decades. Our regression suggests that increased social spending in the past is associated with reduced homicides in the present, that past and concurrent economic growth also correlates with a reduction in the rate of homicides, and that increased police presence is correlated with a reduction in the rate of homicides. The 1930s–1960s are a key period in the evolution of interpersonal violence. It coincides with the emergence of a welfare state (and increasing social expenditure), declining poverty rates, improvements in health and education, and an increase in suffrage.

This article develops a political articulation-based explanation of divergence in democratic inclusion between two champions of liberal democracy in Latin America: Chile and Uruguay. Political articulation scholars depart from the traditional reflection models of political parties as mere expression of preexisting social cleavages, highlighting the relative autonomy of parties’ practices and their strategic role in structuring state-society relations. My work extends this current trend in comparative-historical sociology to the Latin American Left turn after the demise of the market-fundamentalist Washington Consensus, empirically identifying a set of strategies that boost Left parties’ capacity to articulate on a specifically class basis. These strategies, I argue, are endowed with causal efficacy, driving democratic variation beyond the restrictions and opportunities of the institutional environment. Combining process tracing account of historical sequences with my own analyses of labor statistics, protest events, and party linkages and manifestos, I show that differences in Left parties’ ability to build linkages with labor and advance its institutional representation as a class actor are at the root of the divergence in political inclusion between these two countries. This finding has substantial implications for contemporary democratic theory: after neoliberalism, strongly organized mass parties of the Left may not be a necessary condition for a given democracy’s stability and consolidation, but they may be a sufficient condition for a particular democracy’s realization of the normative ideal of political equality.

Historical and comparative social scientists are increasingly interested in explaining the spread of innovations—which social scientists commonly refer to as diffusion and, broadly conceived, can include the spread of new ideas, behaviors, technologies, and institutions. However, in spite of the profusion of studies, researchers do not always specify a diffusion model or its underlying causal mechanisms. Whereas many studies document spatial diffusion, not all specify a vector, model flows of influence and information, or show how people and places are connected (tied) to one another. In reviewing some of the most important work on the spread of religion, violent conflict, and social movements over the last few decades, it is clear to us that social network analysis has revolutionized the historical study of diffusion. Even so, many studies have yet to embrace concepts, methods, and measures from social network analysis. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the combination of historical perspectives on change and innovation, new methods of historical data collection and analysis, and growing sophistication in the application of network concepts and models is shedding light on a host of historical questions and contributing to our general understanding of diffusion.