Past research suggests that although political violence in mature democracies is rare, it does occasionally occur along ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic lines. Jamaica is an exceptional case in that it is a relatively mature democracy that experiences political violence between demographically similar groups. This article examines the origins of political violence in Jamaica—that is, the conditions that led to its development, intensification, and institutionalization during the late colonial period. Through original archival research, this article supports past findings identifying personality politics, the politicization of race/class divisions, and clientelism as contributing factors to the development of political violence. The research also, however, makes a major new contribution by providing evidence that colonial nonintervention during the early stages of political violence was a crucial factor leading to its escalation and then institutionalization. This finding gives the British colonial state a different and more central role than the extant literature suggests and has broader implications for all democracies.

It is commonly asserted that Chinese diets before the market and production reforms of the 1980s contained little or no meat. Yet this nearly universal assumption remains untested: Unlike other forms of material consumption, the question of meat in Chinese diets has received almost no systematic attention from historians. Focusing on the early twentieth century, this article examines who in China ate meat, and how meat consumption was shaped by regional and household patterns. It combines insights from three sorts of data. First, Japanese price surveys from the 1920s show a high degree of variation in the preference for one type of meat over others, and the price availability of meat versus wages or other food products. Second, production data, including slaughterhouse tallies and industry estimates of animal by-products show the seasonality of animal slaughter and the vast scale and dispersed geography of China’s livestock production. Finally, nutrition and diet studies from the 1920 to the late 1940s examine actual household consumption, emphasizing how social forces and cyclical fortunes shaped individual choices. The composite picture from these three perspectives confirms that China’s meat consumption was hardly inconsequential. But more than simply triangulating a result, the exercise of comparing perspectives of price, production, and nutrition also highlights the collection of survey data as a series of historical moments.

We offer new evidence on the dynamics of wealth holding in the United States over the Civil War decade based on a hand-linked random sample of wealth holders drawn from the 1860 census. Despite the wealth shock caused by emancipation, we find that patterns of wealth mobility were broadly similar for northern and southern residents in 1860. Looking at the determinants of individual wealth holding in 1870, we find that the elasticity with respect to 1860 wealth was quite low in both regions – consistent with high levels of wealth mobility.

Family systems shape social institutions, yet they are rarely considered in histories of economic development. In this article, we show that a suite of social conventions—such as age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence against women—are overrepresented in polygamous societies as compared to monogamous societies. This dichotomy can be explained on the grounds that polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females. We argue that this suite, which we call gamos and which we quantify by two different methods, has demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) conducted more than 100 atmospheric atomic detonations at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) between 1951 and 1962 depositing radioactivity throughout the United States but particularly the rural communities just “downwind.” The monitoring of radioactivity and efforts to warn downwind residents, however, failed to ensure their safety. I engage in archival analysis of AEC documents to examine decision making in reference to radioactive fallout. In recounting the socionatural history of atmospheric testing at the NTS, the present study argues operational conduct was lethargic due to the adoption of specious organizational heuristics. They included the assumption that fallout is subject to predictable atmospheric dispersion; fallout has noncumulative, undifferentiated effects on people; and downwind residents were prone to unreasoning panic. Thus AEC officials were continually chasing problems after they arose and in the absence of containment of fallout focused on containment of public perception and dialogue. The study concludes by highlighting the lessons relevant to contemporary sociotechnical activities.

Virtually all previous empirical studies analyzing the characteristics of European immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth century examine a single country. These studies provide a vast array of information on some or all of the following: the immigrants’ ages, their occupations, whether they traveled singly or within a group, the size of the traveling groups, the number of their children, and the gender breakdown, along with other characteristics. As a result of this empirical work, our knowledge concerning who immigrated to the United States during the nineteenth century is much clearer than it was 30 years ago. Since this body of work is specific to individual countries and based on a variety of data sources, however, it is difficult to compare the characteristics of the immigrants from the various source countries.

The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (David and Temin, 1974; David et al., 1976; Schaefer and Schmitz, 1979; Wright, 1979).

Historical social mobility research has played an important part in the coming-of-age of “the new social history” as an active arena for empirical social research. The contribution of this social mobility research tradition can be traced in part to its success in providing three critical elements that lie at the heart of most coherent social science research traditions. These critical elements include the following: 1) the identification of important substantive questions that are susceptible to empirical analysis; 2) the identification of data sources that can provide empirical information relevant to these questions, and 3) the provision of a set of methodological operations and research practices that link substantive questions to the results of empirical analysis. The importance of Thernstrom’s (1964, 1973) landmark works on historical mobility in providing these fundamental elements is reflected in the widespread adoption of his research design by subsequent empirical studies of occupational mobility in historical settings.

This article explores the labor market status of older males in the early twentieth century, focusing on how the extent of pressure toward retirement differed across occupations and how it changed over time. A comparison of the probability of retirement across occupations shows that men who had better occupations in terms of economic status and work conditions were less likely to retire than were those with poorer jobs. The difficulty faced by older workers in the labor market, as measured by the relative incidence of long-term unemployment, was relatively severe among craftsmen, operatives, and salesmen. In contrast, aged farmers, professionals, managers, and proprietors appear to have fared well in the labor market. The pattern of shifts in the occupational structure that occurred between 1880 and 1940 suggests that industrialization had brought a growth of the sectors in which the pressure toward departure from employment at old ages was relatively strong.

Mid-nineteenth-century German immigrants who settled in the United States and other faraway destinations faced the formidable hurdle of crossing an ocean and coming up with the resources to pay for it. Using new data from German emigrant newspapers we provide more concrete information on the fares to various international ports, and how they varied seasonally and by method of transport (sail or steam). We do not observe fares declining in the late 1840s and 1850s. Unskilled German workers could not easily afford such a voyage, providing perspective on why German immigration to the United States was positively self-selected.

What is public, what is private, and what is the relationship between them? Can the public interest be clearly identified and protected? What role should government play in the lives of ordinary citizens? These are questions currently engaging policy makers and the general public as well as scholars in a range of disciplines. The provision and financing of urban public goods is one arena in which such questions have arisen. Historically, governments, private entities, and mixed forms such as public-private partnerships have undertaken these activities in the United States and other countries (Beito et al. 1989; Dyble 2010; Goodrich 1960; Hodge et al. 2010; Jacobson and Tarr 1995). In the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States, tax revolts and concerns about “big government” led to increased scrutiny of the appropriate role of government. Contracting out of government activities and privatization both assumed increased importance (Dyble 2012; Light 1999).

The argument of this article starts with three key theoretical postulates: First, regional-scale explanation differs in important respects from either aggregate macroeconomic studies of development at the national level or microeconomic and business historical studies of individual firms. Second, neoclassical economic theory is unsuitable as a basis for the analysis of regional economic dynamics, and a different framework, called adjustment theory, should be used in its place. Third, utilization of adjustment theory in the historical geographical domain leads directly to the deployment of both the concepts and methods of geographical information science as the foundation for empirical inquiry.

Historically, the departure of children from the parental home was an important economic and social phenomenon. Because it was equivalent to establishing a new residence, the decision to leave is relevant to our understanding of the history of migration. Leaving home was also a milestone in the life cycle that typically signaled a transition from semidependence to greater economic and social responsibility on the part of the individual, a change that affected labor force participation, family income, expenditures on housing, schooling or training, socialization, and interaction among siblings. In turn, couples considered these implications in formulating fertility goals and strategies.

The premise here is that there existed a specific moment in the history of France —and, one might speculate, of other European societies—when a popular insurrection in the capital was capable of bringing down the national government, virtually overnight and irrespective of public sentiment in the provinces. In the face of such sudden outbursts, not even those regimes that appeared most firmly entrenched proved to be secure. The most striking instances, and the ones that will be the exclusive focus of attention here, occurred in Paris during the early years of the French Revolution of 1789 as in 1830 and 1848, when the urban crowd was able, if only for a time, to impose new institutions and policies upon the nation. In general, the rural population proved acquiescent, but the will of the capital initially held sway even when the numerical majority living in the countryside seemed resistant to the change.

One person, one vote. With this principle, the Court permanently changed representation in the United States. Equal population requirements changed the face of legislative redistricting in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court applied it to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), and to state legislatures in Reynolds v. Sims, 84 S. Ct. 1362 (1964). Equality in district population was valued not only as instrumental to other goals but also for itself, as Justice Black explained in Wesberry: “As nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s. . . . To say that a vote is worth more in one district than another would . . . run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.”

As Justice Brennan made clear, the Court based its decision in large part on a particular understanding of the historical meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and of article 1, section 2, of the Constitution. And as widely accepted as this principle has come to be, it has been subject to severe historical criticism, criticism that has never been resolved. For example, Berger (1977) claims that malapportionment was historically present and accepted before and during the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence that the equal protection clause could not have implied the equal population principle (from chapter 5): “Certainly there was no disclosure that such intrusion [on apportionment] was contemplated; there is in fact striking evidence that malapportionment was an accepted practice.”

The study of mass public opinion has been an important area of social science research, and it has been of particular concern for political scientists, because the relationship between public opinion and government policy is central to theories about democracy and political power (e.g., see Dahl, 1956; Downs, 1957; Devine, 1970; Weissberg, 1976). Our main argument in this essay is that political scientists and others should be open to a variety of approaches in studying trends in public opinion and the relationship between public preferences and government policies, and that they should begin to pay attention to the findings and methods of recent historiography and, especially, the “new social history.”

By the 1920s, social reformers believed that the requirements of modern industry created an increasing disadvantage for older people “in competition with those who have the greater quickness and adaptability of youth” (Nassau, 1915: 15). Old-age poverty resulting from unemployment was considered to be an urban problem because in rural communities “there is always work . . . and rent is negligible” (Nassau, 1915: 15).