In the historical study of contentious politics, political economy theories see the transformation of the dominant form of contention from reactive violence to proactive demonstration in early modern Europe as a result of large-scale political-economic processes like state formation and market expansion. Culturalist theories emphasize instead the significance of large-scale cultural reconstitutions in forging such transformation. Judging between these two theories is no easy task, as macropolitical-economic and cultural changes were concurrent in most cases. Mid-Qing China (c. 1683-1839), which experienced state centralization and commercialization in conjunction with a relatively stable neo-Confucianist hegemony, constitutes a telling case that helps resolve the debate. By analyzing a catalog of political protest events derived from archival sources, I find that Chinese protest changed from predominantly reactive violence in the seventeenth century to proactive demonstration in the mid-eighteenth century and back to reactive violence in the nineteenth century. The general direction of change can be explained by the cyclical trajectories of state formation and market development alone. At the same time, the specific claims and repertoires of protest were always delimited by the cultural idioms available in the overarching neo-Confucianist orthodoxy of the time. This study suggests an integrated perspective synthesizing both culturalist and political economy accounts to offer a fuller explanation of macrohistorical changes in contentious politics.

The slave trade, death, and misery were inseparable long before abolitionist writers took up the slave trade as a subject in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the historiography there has been widespread recognition that Africans entering the trade died not only during the middle passage but during the process of enslavement and travel in the interior, on the African littoral awaiting shipment, and after arrival in the Americas. Europeans directly involved in the traffic were at risk in the last three of these four phases of transition between life in Africa and life in the Americas, and tended to die at rates comparable to their human cargoes. In the shipboard phase, and probably also in other stages of the journey, mortality in the slave trade normally exceeded that in other long-distance population movements. In the nineteenth century this differential widened as rates on other long-distance routes fell (Cohn, 1984; Eltis, 1984; Grubb, 1987; Klein, 1978; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1989, forthcoming). To date, most explanations have focused on morbidity and mortality on board ship; data on the preembarkation phases are no more available to us today than to the abolitionists 150 years ago. For shipboard mortality, overcrowding on the ship, psychic shock, and violence have not fared well as explanations in the work of the last two decades, although the interplay between the first two and resistance to disease suggests further consideration. The present study focuses on shipboard mortality, but it is based on a large and complex dataset. It begins with a discussion and preliminary analysis of the nineteenth-century data. This is followed by a review of the various hypotheses on mortality in the slave trade.

Did the United States circa 1850 provide more primary education to its youth than other European countries, especially Britain? And was its more decentralized and democratic polity an important reason why? Analyzing census data, parliamentary reports, and election results, I find the perceived American advantage in regard to enrollments is due to an underestimation of the population at risk, a confusion of enrollments with attendance, and a lack of attention to differences in the length of school terms. In neither northern or southern counties in the United States did the extension of the franchise correlate with more tax dollars for elementary schools; rather it materialized in counties with more Whig and moral reform partisans whom institutional and social historians have identified as being motivated by external benefits/ social control objectives. More similarities in educational status may exist between the two nations than is often acknowledged and a North Atlantic perspective might be fruitful. Agricultural employments and racial/ ethnic differences surfaced as deterrents to 3R competency in both places, though the spread of a high-fertility population into low-density areas presented the United States with a special challenge. These results suggest that the effects of late-nineteenth-century compulsory attendance and other education legislation merit a reevaluation.

In this article, we analyze the male-female earnings differential in the single most important sector of female employment, clerical and office work, for the period running from the 1880s to the 1970s. Clerical occupations currently provide jobs for one-third of all females engaged in market employment. Our analysis reveals that intraoccupational earnings differences between the sexes rather than differences in occupational structure have been the major factors underlying the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector. This finding represents a major break with the conclusion reached in many earlier studies where researchers have argued that sex differences in occupational structure account for most of the sex differential in earnings (Cohen, 1971; Fuchs, 1971; Kreps, 1971; Sawhill, 1971). The empirical evidence presented here also suggests that the sex differential in earnings levels in the major clerical occupations has shown no substantial narrowing in recent decades. This result is surprising given the changing social climate of the post-World War II period. In recent decades we have seen a sharp upsurge in activity by feminist groups, pathbreaking civil rights legislation, increasing female labor force participation, increasing female career orientation, changes in sex roles, and other significant social changes. The results in this article suggest that up to now these social changes have not had a significant impact on the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector.

Key features of reproductive behavior in China vary systematically through space and time. In this article we present an analysis of fertility change in regional space, using a 1% household sample from China’s 1990 population census. Elsewhere,we use the same data to analyze reproductive strategizing, but here we pursue the big picture with a straightforward analysis that takes reported births as an uncomplicated indicator of fertility.The article has three objectives: first, to introduce a novel, multilevel spatial model of regional structure constructed using a geographic information system (GIS); second, to demonstrate the potential for longitudinal data derived from onetime censuses to contribute to historical demography in conjunction with regional analysis; and third, to document the manner in which China’s fertility transition has unfolded in regional space.

Migration, social mobility, and social change are questions that have aroused animated international research debate during recent years. Throughout this discussion, migration often is found to be the triggering mechanism for upward social mobility and social change in the life cycle of individuals. The connection between long-distance migration and social progress in an expanding labor market is thus an important one. In American investigations, a significant amount of social mobility, both upward and downward, has been registered between roughly defined strata in the society. With a corresponding social structure in three Swedish cities investigated in the so-called “Three City Study,” almost the same results are evident.

On repeated occasions in the nineteenth century, Asian cholera irrupted from its traditional center in the great river basins of India and spread in pandemic waves throughout parts of Europe, North Africa, and North America. In Spain alone 600,000 deaths resulted from cholera during four great invasions (Cárdenas, 1971: 224). The United States experienced terrifying outbreaks beginning in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Rosenberg, 1962) which also touched parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Initially South America escaped the onslaught. Some Brazilians speculated that the intense heat of the equator, or the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, somehow offered an effective buffer to the southward spread of cholera (Rego, 1872: 84). But this “sweet illusion” was shattered in 1855. Indeed the first city in Brazil struck by Asian cholera was Belém, capital of the vast northern province of Pará located astride the equator at the mouth of the Amazon river.

Looking back at the more than 20 years that have gone by since the 1982 special issue of Social Science History, it is interesting to observe how important the study of anthropometric data has been in contributing to economic history and related disciplines.While there had been numerous earlier comments by contemporary observers as well as by scholars about heights and their implications as seen in JamesTanner's marvelous study, A History of the Study of Human Growth (1981), the systematic work that was reflected in the 1982 volume was then only about six or seven years old in the United States. It represented the early output of a study directed by Robert Fogel, primarily through the Development of the American Economy (DAE) project of the National Bureau of Economic Research.There had been a few previous publications including my own piece in Local Population Studies (Engerman 1976). My first use of the height-by-age data was in response to a dinnerparty conversation in 1974 with two ofmy colleagues in the Rochester history department:Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch.

By our late-twentieth-century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well-established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of microsocialist economies that, internally at least, did not use prices to allocate resources, allowed for little private property for participants, and provided a constant return to labor independent of effort. Some of these economies may even be termed “successful,” if success is taken to mean survival over several generations (Roehl 1972). If these communities survived despite their lacking the conditions generally thought necessary for success, a question worth asking is how this occurred, for we can then shed some light on what really is necessary for economic survival. The role of time is critical here, for even if the microsocialist economies examined in this article eventually became the merest shadow of their former selves, the fact that they did flourish for so long makes them a valuable counterexample and, hence, a phenomenon in need of explanation.

In his 1978 Presidential Address to this Association, Allan Bogue urged us to direct our attention to problems associated with the use and development of computer-readable source material (Bogue, 1979). My remarks are in a similar vein. They are limited, however, to only one of the categories of source material that Bogue discussed: information that is originally recorded and stored in computer-readable form. In this area problems have become substantially larger and more pressing than they seemed in 1978, although possible means to their amelioration are now also becoming more apparent. The problems concern, in the first place, the rapidly growing volume of potential source material that is recorded and stored in computer-readable form; and, in the second place, the danger that much of this material will not be preserved or that it will be preserved only in forms that sacrifice its central and crucial advantage of manipulability.

This article compares the financing of urban infrastructure in nineteenth-century Chicago and twentieth-century Phoenix, highlighting distributional conflicts over the cost of public goods. Using the rich secondary literature on Chicago, particularly Robin Einhorn's book, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872, I explore whether adoption of development impact fees in Phoenix in 1987 represented a transition similar to that in Chicago between 1847 and 1851, when a system of special assessments paid by property owners benefiting from an improvement arose, in contrast to citywide financing of public works for citywide benefit. I examine the history of adoption and implementation of development impact fees, which were intended to “make growth pay for itself” by assessing new development to finance infrastructure it would require, and consider whether the fees resembled Chicago's special assessment system in constituting a privatization of government and in reflecting a view that government should not be used to redistribute. I conclude that models that address the provision of urban infrastructure, such as the Tiebout model, would benefit from greater attention to efforts to shift the cost of public goods over space, time, and social groups or classes in growing communities.

This collection of articles combines a set of works that study the contribution of transport infrastructure to the process of state building in different countries in Western and Central Europe. The focus and the themes treated vary, but have two common denominators: firstly, they are based on either completely original, or previously little-used, primary sources; and secondly, each work reveals new ways of interpreting how transport networks have shaped the territories into which they were introduced. Each article is an example of the wealth of potential approaches available and also helps us to interpret the processes involved in state building, which are a necessary precedent to European Integration (EI). To put the seven works that make up this special issue into context, I shall start this introduction by examining three aspects that complement them. I shall firstly clarify what we mean by EI. Secondly, I shall examine whether EI processes existed prior to the creation of the institutions that were set up after World War II to promote integration. Then, thirdly, and finally, based on the previous analyses, I shall look at the emergence of a railway network in Europe and the role that the European states played in this process. The fourth section will present the articles.

Parachurch organizations are Christian, heavily evangelical Protestant, 501(c)(3) public charities focused on providing religious goods and services outside of any congregational or denominational sponsorship. The parachurch sector in the United States has been growing rapidly in recent decades, yet this growth has been highly uneven across communities. Many communities have very few parachurch organizations, while a few exhibit incredibly higher concentrations of them than would be expected based only upon their religious composition. Using IRS records, we isolate communities with the greatest concentrations of parachurch organizations, and then, drawing upon ideas developed in studies of industrial districts, we address this puzzle by exploring four of those communities, which we refer to as spiritual districts: Tulsa, Oklahoma; Nashville, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Washington, D.C. We utilize interviews with organizational leaders and archival records to attempt to account for the makeup of and dynamics of each of the four unique clusters of parachurch organizations, concluding with a discussion of how understanding spiritual districts can contribute to greater understanding of the phenomenon of industrial districts.

The initial period of construction of the Spanish railway network is often criticized for its radial structure, centered on Madrid. In this article, the authors describe the role of the state during the initial stage of railway network construction and confirm that although the political will to construct a centralist network certainly influenced its morphology, other social and economic criteria were also influential. With regard to the political motives behind the radial network, the authors argue that part of this interest could have come in response to perceived needs to strengthen the presence of the Spanish state throughout its national territory and to promote a process of state-building. Finally, it must be stressed that the central hypothesis of our article is that the radial structure of the network was a natural consequence of the strategic geographical position of the country’s capital and of the distribution of economic activity within Spanish territory. The article proposes two methodological approaches for evaluating the extent to which the radial design of the network was justified, bearing in mind the locations of Spain’s most productive regions. The results of these two exercises suggest that the radial configuration with which the Spanish rail network was originally designed probably arose naturally as a result of the distribution of economic activity within the country and of the relative advantage that this bestowed on certain regions due to their geographic position.

Shortly after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the Franco dictatorship forcibly converted nearly half a million hectares of village commons in the region of Galicia into centrally managed forests. Consistent with their long history of using litigation to resist state intervention in the use of their commons, rural Galicians inundated regional courts with lawsuits that opposed mandated reforestation. Prevailing accounts of these events are based on comprehensive definitions of state domination and peasant resistance that minimize local variations in the implementation of reforestation projects and ignore the differing stakes of village residents in the projects. This article casts the politics of reforestation and villagers' defense of the commons in a different light and suggests that ongoing changes in farm production, growing economic disparities among village neighbors, and the evolving nature of the state's reforestation plan promoted complex, fluid, and divided local responses to reforestation that belie the solidarity of interests expressed in written petitions against reforestation.

Eastern Belgium provides a range of examples of early industrialization. In the nineteenth century, well-established proto-industrial textile and iron production was replaced by mechanization in rapidly growing cities. In this article we examine the consequences of this transition on heights of young men in seven communities with contrasting histories. Men in this area were unusually short in the early nineteenth century, but the trend was strongly upward. There is also some evidence that urban areas experienced setbacks when they were growing most rapidly. Comparison of heights among occupations shows dramatic differences between rich and poor. The gap between the poorest and the wealthiest was at least eight centimeters, and heights seem to reflect even small differences in childhood experience. However, gains in height were larger among the poor, reducing differences within the working class by mid-century.

This introductory essay, firstly, offers a comparative, historical perspective on the transformation of petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics across North America and Western Europe during the “long” nineteenth century (1780–1914). While petitions were well established as an instrument of state in many early modern states, from the late eighteenth century a new type of mass, public, collective petitioning, based on established or invoked rights, emerged on an unprecedented scale in many countries. Mass petitioning underpinned the nascent repertoires of collective action pioneered by social movements. At the same time, the reception of petitions was institutionalized by political authorities, particularly legislatures elected under limited suffrage, as a potential source of legitimation. Secondly, the introduction suggests why people petitioned, and continued to petition, when their campaigns were often unsuccessful in achieving immediate results. The answer lies in the manifold advantages of petitioning in enabling political organization, mobilization, identity formation, citizenship, political change, and the forming of networks with elite political actors. By shaping an emerging field examining petitioning and petitions, raising awareness of petitions as sources and the methodologies to exploit them, and addressing broad questions of interest to historians and social scientists, this special issue hopes to stimulate further research and contribute to a rich dialogue in the years to come.

This article explains how pasteurization—with few outspoken political supporters during this period—first became a primary milk purification strategy in Chicago and why eight years passed between pasteurization’s initial introduction into law and the city’s adoption of full mandatory pasteurization. It expands the current focus on the political agreement to pasteurize to include the organizational processes involved in incorporating pasteurization into both policy and practice. It shows that the decision to pasteurize did not occur at a clearly defined point but instead evolved over time as a consequence of the interplay of political interest groups, state-municipal legal relations, and the merging of different organizational practices. Such an approach considerably complicates and expands existing accounts of how political interests and agreements shaped pasteurization and milk purification policies and practice.

It is doubtful that any other period of comparable length in British history witnessed as many profound changes in politics as did the first quarter of the twentieth century. To mention only some of the more important examples, voter turnout rose from about 21% to 76% of the adult population; the party system was transformed when Labour displaced the Liberals as the major party of the left; legislative power was profoundly altered by the Parliament Act of 1911 which deprived the Lords of the right to veto permanently bills passed by the Commons; the social base of parlimentary recruitment expanded to include more members from lower middle- and working-class backgrounds; the disruptive influence of Irish self-government was removed from political life; and public concern shifted from issues related to Empire and wider access to parliamentary politics to domestic matters of a distributional nature. Under the cumulative impact of these changes, particularly in the party system, British politics in essence ceased to be traditional, and became modern.

What causes imperialism? Classic explanations of imperialism theorized causes within the imperial metropole, such as nationalist culture or the imperatives of capital accumulation. More recent theories emphasize global pressures. To assess these longstanding but rarely adjudicated theories, this paper employs original time-series data and qualitative evidence on British imperialism from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows that British imperialism was not only a domestically produced process but also a global one. British imperialism was a strategy for meeting the state's imperatives of geopolitical security (containment) and economic growth (capital) in the face of external threats. Those threats were most likely to be perceived when the global system was at its most economically competitive. These findings affirm a “structural competition” approach that builds upon existing global-oriented theories but specifies the structural conditions and causal processes driving imperialism.