It is a truism that the personal is political: State power and other forms of publicly constituted power can penetrate interpersonal intimacy. Feminists and other scholars have criticized the notion that “private” and “public” spheres can be separated; they have asserted that the processes and experiences of the home and family are indissolubly linked with those of the state and the institutions of politics.

Literacy underwent revolutionary growth in northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution coincided with other dramatic changes in European society, such as the industrial, demographic, agricultural, political, and religious revolutions (Deane 1969: 20–84). While the relationships between literacy and these other revolutions are not fully understood, their association is apparent and many potential influences exist (Cipolla 1969; Cremin 1970; Graff 1981: 232–60; 1987a, 1987b; Jensen 1986: 114–28; Maynes 1985: 117–31; Mitch 1984, 1988; Sanderson 1983; West 1978). The transplantation of European society across the Atlantic brought the literacy revolution to the American periphery. While numerous studies have shown that colonial America participated in this expansion of literacy, the common longitudinal patterns of literacy growth across the various regions and populations of colonial America have received less attention.

In Part I of this study, our focus was on the bases of crime in Imperial Germany during the 1880s—the “take-off” stage of German industrial development. In Part II, we will extend the time dimension of our analysis to include the period of growth between the 1880s and 1914, and we will also broaden the scope of the issues and explanatory variables to be considered.

In many ways, German society in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I represents an excellent historical context for a study of the impact of urban-industrial development on crime. The German criminologist Aschaffenburg notes: “The last twenty years [1885-1905] of German criminality are especially suitable for such an analysis, because no transfiguring upheavals have taken place; the years having been marked by a great economic and cultural advance.” German society during this time enjoyed a period of international peace unknown since the years between 1815 and 1848. This period of relative tranquility allows the scholar a chance to analyze the problem of crime in its relations to socioeconomic conditions without having to control for the serious disturbing factors induced by war. La belle époque, as this period has been referred to by contemporary historians, also graced Germany with a respite from the bellicose domestic turmoil that it suffered in the past century. The movement for national unification had finally been completed, and the struggle for social reform had changed from the vitriolic confrontations of the watershed years of 1830 and 1848 to a peaceful and evolutionary, if no less manifest, nature.

Students of federalism in the United States and elsewhere have long been fascinated by the relationships between lower and higher levels of government. State municipal leagues are one important, yet understudied, means by which cities interact with states in the United States. I examine the history of these municipal leagues, arguing that the timing of their formation in U.S. states was in part dependent on state restrictions on special legislation and in part due to the efforts of nationwide networks of policy entrepreneurs. Drawing on scholarly literatures on collective action and associational networks, I develop and test an account of how state municipal leagues formed and how they spread.

Contemporary discussions of immigrant assimilation in the United States often take the experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a benchmark, yet significant gaps remain in our understanding of the generality and rate of immigrant progress during that era. Using four decades of Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples census microdata, we utilize both ordinary least squares microdata regression and double cohort methodology to examine socioeconomic assimilation across arrival cohort and country of origin during the Ellis Island era. Our results show, contrary to some writing, that while the first generation (the foreign born) exhibit decidedly inferior labor market outcomes, socioeconomic attainment (measured by Socio-Economic Index points) increased quickly with duration in the United States. Persons of the second generation and those of mixed parentage show much less penalty than immigrants. At the same time, we uncover differences in outcome by European region that do not disappear over the decades we examine.

Numerous studies have shown that since about 1900 the largest industrial, financial, and transportation companies have interlocked extensively through a sharing of directors and, much less often, officers (e.g., Bunting and Barbour, 1971; Bunting, 1976a, 1976b; Dooley, 1969). In fact, this interlocking has been so extensive that a virtual network exists whereby nearly any large corporation in principle is able to participate either directly or indirectly, once or twice removed, in the top-level policy deliberations of any other large concern (Mizruchi, 1982; Pennings, 1980).

Little is known about the origins of this network. Most research implicitly assumes that the network has resulted from some relatively recent decline in competition and subsequent movement toward economic concentration. This conclusion follows from the commonly accepted proposition that competition precedes monopoly in industrial development. Scherer (1979:47), an authority on modern American industrial organization, cites Marx for the essence of this notion: “‘One capitalist always kills many’ (creating) a ‘constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process.’” In less colorful but more factual terms, Burns (1936:1-42) and many others have described the “decline of competition” and the factors leading to the domination of many industries by relatively few large corporations (literature reviewed in Scherer, 1979:67-70; Blumberg, 1975:16-83).

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”

This article explains Mauritius’s exceptional state building and development during late colonialism as the product of a conjuncture of two separately determined historical processes. The first causal chain involves the creation of a bureaucratic state, which was built over two centuries of French and British colonial rule. The second main causal path concerns the development of a society with dense associational ties. This process was set into motion by land distribution that occurred in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the emergence of several villages of small landholders. The essay argues that a prolonged period of labor riots beginning in the late 1930s and the more interventionist policy of the British government after World War II combined to initiate a “critical-juncture period” that increased relations between state and societal actors. This increased embeddedness made possible state-society synergy, which promoted broad-based development by engaging and strengthening both state institutions and societal associations, thereby endowing Mauritius with the institutions necessary for broad-based development after colonial independence as well.

In the Americas, two types of racial systems developed at the confluence of migration streams from Europe and Africa. In the Caribbean, free persons of color emerged as an intermediary group between whites and large populations of Negro slaves. In British mainland colonies, whites came to treat all blacks, whether free or enslaved, mulatto or Negro, as a single social category (Hoetink 1967; Mörner 1967: 136–38).

A necessary step in any assessment of early national economic growth is a characterization of market development before independence from Great Britain. Drawing up such a characterization, however, presents problems as at least two different pictures of the eighteenth-century economy are currently available. One depicts the intense involvement of early Americans in markets and overseas trade, while another equally powerful image suggests a colonial landscape of sleepy villages inhabited by farmers devoid of a profit orientation and almost entirely dependent upon their own households and neighborhood reciprocity for goods and services.

In contrast to their interest in interdisciplinary cooperation, quantitative historians have neglected the international dimension of their work. Many of the pioneers of quantitative methods in the United States (like L. Stone, C. Tilly, or W. O. Aydelotte) specialize in European history, but the bulk of quantitative work deals with American topics; or, if it ventures abroad, investigates other countries in their own national terms (Kousser, 1980). Where there is a broader awareness, scholars tend to draw upon British and, due to the acclaim of the Annales school, also on French examples; while Germany, and even more so Russia, Latin America, or the Far East, remain in the outer darkness of quantitative consciousness (Rowney and Graham, 1969, as can be contrasted with Aydelotte, 1972). Some fields like economic history (due to its strong international organization) are internationalized; but others like the “new political history” are somewhat provincial, considering that few countries developed comparable democratic institutions in the nineteenth century, thereby providing material for similar research (Temin, 1981; Bogue, 1980). In less cosmopolitan scholarly communities than the American, the situation is worse, if anything. French quantitative historians seem to have shown some interest in their British or Hispanic neighbors, but have done little international or comparative work (Bourdelais, this issue; for an exception see Graham, 1982). Similarly, German historical social scientists appear to borrow methods freely, but do not occupy themselves much with transnational concerns (Jarausch, 1978).

There are three sources of information about undercounts in nineteenth-century U.S. censuses: demographic analyses of net undercounts by age, sex, and race at the national level; record-linkage studies of gross undercounts for local communities; and contemporary testimony of the types and bases of underenumeration. This article reviews the strengths and limitations of each of these sources, assesses the extent of their agreement, and discusses the bases of their disagreement.

When and how do tax regimes become sites of social protest and support broader movements of social policy reform? This question has drawn increasing interest from political sociologists and political scientists who have looked at the ways in which tax regimes create political cleavages that create the foundations for major shifts in state policy making or become the focal points of collective identity formation, leading to “tax protests.” In this paper we seek to contribute to this line of inquiry through an examination of the politics of Canadian tax policy from 1988 through 2008. What makes this case so compelling is that during these years the debates over tax policy raged over, first, the implementation and, later, the reduction of a federal value-added tax (VAT). However, rather than fueling a broad-based tax protest, debates over the VAT heightened interprovincial political cleavages that allowed the Conservatives to tie the question of the VAT to a broader economic program of typically “neoliberal” reforms: improving private-sector competitiveness and shrinking the size of the state. Drawing on a statistical analysis of the Canadian Election Study and an historical analysis of the conflict over taxation, we show how the federal structure of the Canadian state, and its policies of revenue equalization across the provinces, created an interprovincial adversarial politics that made sales tax reduction a key issue for Canadian voters. Our findings show how recognizing the historically contingent and institutionally specific context of struggles over tax policy helps to explain cross-national variation in the politics of taxation.

Women played a vital role in British industrialization. However, studies of women’s work are often hindered by data limitation. The British censuses provide an unparalleled opportunity to study women’s work and its impact systematically. However, the reliability of the census recording of female employment is still under debate. This articles aims to contribute to this ongoing debate by examining a particular census recording concerning married women who were supposedly working with their husbands, that is “occupation’s wife.” By analyzing a new source of big data, namely 100 percent sample of Census Enumerators’ Books and published census reports, this article shows that the recording of “occupation’s wife” was not informative about the level of married women’s labor in the form of working together with their husbands in the same trade. Given the important fact that married women recorded as “occupation’s wife” constituted the largest group of married women with any occupational titles in the censuses, the results presented in this article suggest a reassessment of some of the empirical foundations in the studies of married women’s work.

Inquisitors engaged in mass censorship across the Iberian and Italian peninsulas; however, the effect it had on scholarship is debated. To test the effect of inquisitorial control a database of more than 2,000 top-tier mathematicians, scientists, authors, artists, and composers was created for 16 European countries from 1000 to 1749. Italy and Iberia had large declines of high-level scholars shortly after the establishment of the inquisitions. In contrast, other countries—both Protestant and Catholic—had increases in top-level scholars. Even though other countries had book burnings, religious persecution, and intolerance, the presence of an institution that became intolerant and oppressive significantly impacted the location of scientists and other top achievers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nationalism's role in the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire is re-examined. Traditionalists blamed the breakdown on the extreme nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) while today's orthodoxy attributes it to the external contingency of the Balkan Wars and World War I instead. This article looks at the onerous state-building and mild nation-building demands put forth by the CUP toward the Albanians. The Albanian resistance created unstable coalitions that broadened to include north and south, and tempered religion in favor of ethnicity, but fell short of demanding independence. The First Balkan War forced a vulnerable Albania to reluctantly declare independence for which it had made contingent plans. The Ottoman center refused to change course and its pursuit of an imperial nation-state prompted other populations to think and act more ethnically than ever before and draw up their own contingent plans. The concept of ethnicity without groups (Brubaker) and the causal connection between state-building and nationalism (Hechter) are critically assessed in the Ottoman context.

Recent major works on long-term racial inequality in the labor market revolve around competing hypotheses concerning the importance of human capital factors (Smith and Welch 1989) and government policy (Donohue and Heckman 1991) in promoting black advance. There is, however, another line of thinking which emphasizes the importance of experimentation and “demand-side learning”: employers’ gaining access to accurate information about the abilities of black workers and adjusting their beliefs in accordance with this information.

Sociologists, demographers, and historians of the last few decades have pieced together a dramatically new understanding of the meaning of past migrations. The old story held that industry pulled recently dispossessed rural people to the city, where—along with deskilled artisans—they became part of a growing urban industrial proletariat. For migrants from rural areas, the process was thought to be catastrophic, requiring a total and often impossible adjustment to an urban world that was different in just about every imaginable way. Recent scholars have distanced themselves from this framework.