From 1800 to the present the average person on the planet has been enriched in real terms by a factor of 10, or some 900 percent. In the ever-rising share of places from Belgium to Botswana, and now in China and India, that have agreed to the Bourgeois Deal—“Let me earn profits from creative destruction in the first act, and by the third act I will make all of you rich”—the factor is 30 in conventional terms and, if allowing for improved quality of goods and services, such as in improved glass and autos, or improved medicine and higher education, a factor of 100. That is, the reward from allowing ordinary people to have a go, the rise at first in northwestern Europe and then worldwide of economic liberty and social dignity, eroding ancient hierarchy and evading modern regulation, has been anything from 2,900 to 9,900 percent. What needs to be explained in a modern social science history is not the Industrial Revolution(s) but the Great Enrichment, one or two orders of magnitude larger than any previous change in human history. The article takes seriously the lesson of comparative history that Europe was not unique until 1700 and argues that ideas—specifically Bourgeois liberal ideas—not capital or institutions, made the modern world.

In June of 1948, during the peak period of strike activity in the United States in the past fifty years, Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the most successful militant labor organization of the twentieth century, published an article giving his views on labor organization, democracy, and “our American system.” He argued that “if we pull together . . . we shall surmount the present crisis.” He felt confident about his prediction because, he said, “We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here. And in the final analysis the interests of farmers, factory hands, business and professional people, and white-collar toilers prove to be the same” (Murray, 1948; quoted in Lipsitz, 1981: 143).

A veritable boom in immigration research has taken place in the last 15 years. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual map, a way of presenting the issues and approaches that pertain to the topic, to guide us through the vast territory immigration research now encompasses. As this boundless growth in immigration research has occurred across the social sciences, this review of the literature is not intended to be exhaustive but merely illustrative of what sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have contributed. Since America is the quintessentially immigrant society, the focus is on American immigration, but the theoretical issues this review highlights can be applied equally well to other societies with histories of immigration and racial or ethnic relations, such as Great Britain or Brazil. Increasingly, immigration research is one of the topics where sociologists and historians meet (research on revolutions is another), although they meet in much the same fashion that one sometimes arrives at a party and is much surprised to find out who else is there. Our common research interests increasingly bring us together, although not without a fair amount of surprise and trepidation.

From the point of view of the preindustrial world, the development of the English cotton textile industry in the eighteenth century was truly revolutionary. The industry was established early in the century as a peasant craft (section 2; note 2), and by 1850 it had been almost completely transformed in terms of the organization and technology of production. Of the total work force of 374,000 employed in the industry in 1850, only 43,000 (approximately 11.5 percent of the total) were employed outside the factory system of organization. In terms of technology, the industry was virtually mechanized by this time: there were 20,977,000 spindles and 250,000 power looms in the industry in 1850. What is more, steam had become the dominant form of power used in the industry—71,000 horsepower supplied by steam as opposed to 11,000 supplied by water (Mitchell, 1962: 185, 187). Value added in the industry by this time exceeded by about 50 percent that in the woolen textile industry, the dominant industry in England for over four centuries. This rate of development was something that had never been experienced in any industry in the preindustrial world. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution in England, in the strict sense of the phrase, is little more than a revolution in eighteenth-century cotton textile production.

In his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov—”The Storyteller”—Walter Benjamin (1969) lamented the destruction of collective memory that was taking place with the passage from community to society. In the transformed structure of modern life, claimed Benjamin, our ability to exchange experiences has diminished, and along with it, a collective sense of meaning. While tradition collapses under the irresistible force of the development of economic production, human perception also appears to be affected and penetrated by a logic of rationalization. This logic tends to annul more than past traditions and their meaning as vehicles for communal understanding; it also undermines the capacity for experience in general. In the modern world of machines and automatons, Benjamin feared, tradition was irreparably lost. With it there also vanished the remnants of collective dreams and aspirations that in the past had formed the humus of people’s redemptive path toward a meaningful and fulfilled life.

For social historians and historical sociologists working in the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic studies and women's studies, the challenges posed by poststructuralism are neither purely intellectual matters nor disciplinary quibbles. Rather, a concern with “rescuing political economy” from being washed away by the tide of poststructuralism is impelled by larger political commitments that transcend the academy.

Unlike mainstream disciplines, these fields historically have been connected to social movements dedicated to empowering people marginalized by reason of race, class, and/or gender. Poststructuralism has become a thorny issue in these fields: Many social science- and political economy-oriented scholars have come to feel, whether justifiably or not, that these fields are being “taken over” by literary, film, and cultural studies scholars.

The history of the family lacks a history. Sociologists and historians rarely cite interpretative literature written before the last third of the twentieth century. Curiously, at least for the discipline of history, recent scholars have seemingly regarded older perceptions as relics of a prescientific past.

This foray into intellectual history will demonstrate that ignoring the history of this field also distorts it. My case study considers what is widely regarded as the largest revision in thinking about the history of the family—the complete overthrow of what William J. Goode, the sociologist most credited with its rejection, has derisively called (1970: 6) “the classical family of Western nostalgia.” Kertzer and Hogan (1988: 84) have aptly summarized the chief elements of the interpretation overturned by the revisionists: “Until recently, the popular image of Western family history pictured people as living in large extended family units that had multiple functions. With the advent of industrialization, it was thought, this system was transformed into one characterized by small, nuclear family units having more specialized functions.”

Bodenhorn et al. (2017) have sparked considerable controversy by arguing that the fall in adult stature observed in military samples in the United States and Britain during industrialization was a figment of selection on unobservables in the samples. While subsequent papers have questioned the extent of the bias (Komlos and A’Hearn 2019; Zimran 2019), there is renewed concern about selection bias in historical anthropometric datasets. Therefore, this article extends Bodenhorn et al.’s discussion of selection bias on unobservables to sources of children’s growth, specifically focusing on biases that could distort the age pattern of growth. Understanding how the growth pattern of children has changed is important because these changes underpinned the secular increase in adult stature and are related to child stunting observed in developing countries today. However, there are significant sources of unobserved selection in historical datasets containing children’s and adolescents’ height and weight. This article highlights, among others, three common sources of bias: (1) positive selection of children into secondary school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) distorted height by age profiles created by age thresholds for enlistment in the military; and (3) changing institutional ecology that determines to which institutions children are sent. Accounting for these biases adjusts the literature in two ways: evidence of a strong pubertal growth spurt in the nineteenth century is weaker than formerly acknowledged and some long-run analyses of changes in children’s growth are too biased to be informative, especially for Japan.

Development economics was born as a distinct disciplinary field in the aftermath of World War II, when the development of so-called Third World countries, due to the dynamics of decolonization and the Cold War, became an international priority. At the institutional level, the birth of development economics was paralleled by the reorientation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (so-called the World Bank) from the support of European reconstruction to funding development policies worldwide. Not surprisingly, the paths of the Bank and of pioneers of development economics often crossed, and it is fair to say that the Bank and the new discipline—from the perspective of the history and sociology of social sciences—are part of the same story. Indeed, one would think that the Bank was the natural place for the breeding of development economics. This seems coherent with the image we have of the Bank today: the reign of economists. Yet, for most of the years when development theory was shaped, the Bank, although very active in development policies worldwide, was remarkably silent in the field of development economics. This paper will connect the study of economic ideas and economists in international organizations with the history of economic policies. Based on previously untapped archival sources, it will discuss how the history of development economics and of development organizations—and especially the largest among them, that is, the World Bank—proceeded separated for a long stretch of time, and how they later converged.

Formalization of comparative case methodology has given the appearance of growing consensus and cross-disciplinary acceptance around a set of best practices. Yet how researchers use a method may differ widely from what methodologists believe, which is the crux of institutionalization of a method. This study examines whether comparative methodology has, in fact, institutionalized within the social sciences using evidence from the entire corpus of comparative studies of revolution published from 1970 to 2009. Content analysis of methods of case selection within the revolution subfield reveals a wide diversity of strategies with only modest methodological awareness by practitioners, a lack of consensus among which case selection strategies to use, and little convergence over time. Thus, the comparative method has not yet institutionalized in its practice. Methodological practice has implications for the coverage of cases of revolution and what is substantively known about the phenomenon.

How do insurgents engaged in high-risk collective action maintain solidarity when faced with increasing costs and dangers? Based on a combination of process tracing through qualitative evidence and an event-history analysis of a unique data set assembled from naval archives concerning a mass mutiny in the Royal Navy in 1797, this article explains why insurgent solidarity varied among the ships participating in the mutiny. Maintaining solidarity was the key problem that the organizers of the mutiny faced in confronting government repression and inducements for ships’ companies to defect. Solidarity, proxied here as the duration of a ship's company's adherence to the mutiny, relied on techniques used by the mutiny leadership that increased dependence and imposed control over rank-and-file seamen. In particular, mutiny leaders monitored and sanctioned compliance and exploited informational asymmetries to persuade seamen to stand by the insurgency, even as prospects for its success faded.

This article presents and analyzes the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress—from 1789 to 2010—to test whether divided party control of government affects the number of important acts Congress passes. We find that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the nineteenth century and four additional such acts in the twentieth century. However, party control of government cannot explain the broad historical trends in the rate at which Congress passes significant legislation. Nixon in 1969 was far more successful with a Democratic Congress than was McKinley in 1897 with a Republican one.

In 1876, there was a huge commemoration of the centennial of American independence. The year was marked in many ways, by many groups, in many parts of the country. The central event, though, was a grand International Exhibition in Philadelphia, four years in the making. Planners first met in 1872 in Independence Hall and spoke at length about the sacredness of the venue: “It is altogether fit and wise that we should take our first step and utter our first words in this hall. There sat John Hancock, presiding over that immortal body. There came Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston presenting the sacred declaration. There lies the broken and silent bell, which at the word proclaimed liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof” (USCC 1873: 24-25). The theme was taken up by many others in many different ways. Images of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Washington, and Franklin were scattered throughout centennial ceremonies, buildings, poems, histories, and other documents. The revolution was used as a touchstone in talk about the exhibition and as a rich source of national symbolism.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of classificatory struggles and sociological literature on professions’ construction of jurisdiction, this article examines the origins of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), the dominant classification system for the US nonprofit sector. Using data drawn from archival research and secondary research, I show that the establishment of the NTEE was part of a larger symbolic struggle over the proper classification of charitable foundations. Philanthropic elites and new nonprofit scholars responded to government threats to foundations by integrating them into the newly created “nonprofit sector,” whose societal value—both philanthropic and economic—would be demonstrated through research on this sector. The NTEE was formed by nonprofit researchers to generate valid data that demonstrated the nonprofit sector’s multiple contributions to society’s well-being. Using a theoretical approach, this article extends Bourdieu’s emphasis on classificatory struggles beyond the study of the construction of the characteristics of social classes to explore contestations over the proper taxonomy of organizations and sectors in society.

Like many other social science historians, since the late 1980s I have reflected on how postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Derrida are useful for historians. In 1995 I taught a graduate course on the history of social history, and I looked back on the origins of the field through the eyes of my students who were intrigued with postmodernism. I realized that time has crept up on me. I barely noticed that this field that we developed over the years is no longer young but has come of age and is now part of the accepted canon, one of many subdisciplines. Indeed, my students thought of social science history in much the same way that social science historians viewed traditional political history, a field whose assumptions and perspectives should be critically analyzed, challenged, and revised. These students helped me to see postmodernist criticisms in a new light, not as a sharp break from social science history but rather as emerging at least in part from long-term developments within the field itself. The contributors to the debate on these pages see postmodernism in this way. In various ways, they contend that these challenges, poststructuralist and otherwise, can help us to see within social science history contradictions and tensions that result in both strengths and weaknesses. We can learn from postmodernism without accepting it uncritically; we can reevaluate materialist social history in light of new challenges without rejecting social science history's benefits.

This article explores two simultaneous epidemics that, despite similar pathologies, prompted significantly varying responses from public health actors in 1901 Cape Town: the bubonic plague and smallpox. The Cape Colony responded to the plague with racialized quarantining, forcibly removing all black Africans from certain poor neighborhoods and transferring them to a camp on the outskirts of the city. It was the most significant segregationist act in Cape Town's history to date and foreshadowed the actions of governments in postunification and apartheid South Africa. Conversely, smallpox, though highly contagious and deadly, did not prompt similar aggression. Drawing from archival material, I argue that this differential treatment was the result of a global medical concern for the spread of plague to Europe that imposed external demands upon any region affected by plague that were nonexistent for smallpox. These demands aligned with local ideologies that equated state control with racial discipline to produce the first urban township in South Africa. This article addresses the global processes at work within seemingly localized epidemics and contributes to existing scholarship by exploring the role of medical experts and scientific knowledge in the framing of early pandemic threats.

The interdisciplinary field of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) took root and flourished at the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This essay first recounts the growth of HGIS at SSHA and beyond. It then considers challenges that GIS continues to pose for historians and other scholars, such as the unfamiliarity of its conceptual framework and the time and expense often involved in building HGIS databases. The bare-bones visual culture of Social Science History may inhibit submissions by HGIS scholars, whose work typically includes color maps. Yet the enduring methodological and interdisciplinary interests of SSHA members provide a strong basis for continuing involvement by historians who use GIS. The essay closes with new directions in HGIS scholarship, including study of empirical uncertainty, historical gazetteers, textual analysis linked to GIS mapping, and comparison of topology and topography.

Research on the Balkan joint family, often incorrectly generalized as zadruga, shows three striking characteristics. First, although there is an abundance of scholarly literature on this issue, most of it is not linked to general questions about family and household structure in western Europe or even eastern Europe. This is unfortunate because findings are not seen in a broader context and are interpreted in isolation.

In this article we plead for a less state-centered definition of migration that allows us to understand better the relationship between cross-cultural migrations and social change and social development in the long run. Therefore, we developed a method that enables us to systematically compare CCMRs (cross-cultural migrations per capita) through time and space. This CCMR method puts issues of state policies and citizenship in a much broader social context. We conclude that the presentist approach to migration in the social sciences is highly myopic, as it privileges migrations crossing state borders over internal moves, and favors migrants who have the intention to settle for good. In itself this is a legitimate choice, especially if the core explanandum is the way migrants’ long-term settlement process in another (modern) state evolves. In the more empirical parts of this article however we have concentrated on the effects of Eurasian societies since 1500 that have received migrants. Sending societies and individual migrants and nonmigrants in sending and receiving societies have been largely left out. Finally, and paradoxically, integration and assimilation in the long run leads to diminishing opportunities of social development by cross-cultural experiences, because one could argue that due to globalizing migrations cultures converge further and thus cultural boundaries (as is already the case in migration to cities within culturally homogenous nation-states in the twentieth century) become less salient or disappear entirely. Logically speaking, this is also an implication of the model, presently to be developed further.

Conscription records are considered to be the best sources for studying heights over cohorts. This article discusses the various steps and selection mechanisms involved in the conscription system of the Netherlands, which was more or less similar to the systems found in other European countries. Starting with a birth cohort of 4,436 boys, we run a series of regressions on the likelihood to be registered at all and to have one’s height recorded. We discuss the effects of cohort attrition through mortality and migration, and explore familial, social, and religious reasons for evading registration and (medical) examination. We find various kinds of selections, but their effects on the distribution and averages of heights are limited. Thus, heights culled from conscripts records are indeed an excellent indicator of a cohort’s biological standard of living. However, researchers focusing on social variation in height need to be aware of the unequal opportunities to evade registration and measurement.