Recent research suggests that economic inequality thwarts attempts to establish a welfare state. The corollary of this view is that today's welfare states had witnessed an equality revolution already before the rise of social policies aiming at redistribution. The paper brings this insight to bear on the creation of the welfare state in Sweden, for many the very model of a universal welfare state, and enquires into whether equality really predated the formation of universal welfare policies in the 1950s. We present evidence on inequality based on labor market outcomes and corroborate the view that there has been a sharp reduction in inequality during the 1930s and 1940s. Hence Sweden underwent a true equality revolution prior to the establishment of the welfare state. A leveling of incomes is a necessary precondition for the rise of the universal welfare state, we suggest, because of trust, which correlates negatively with inequality. High trust levels solve the problems associated with collective goods and boosts support for universal solutions of income security. The paper provides a narrative in which the formation of institutions, the removal of large income differentials, and the creation of higher trust levels interacted in the 1930s and 1940s to form the foundation for the welfare state in the 1950s. It adopts a dynamic view of trust by departing from the assumption that trust arises endogenously as a concomitant to changes in the underlying fundamentals like income inequality and redesigned institutional frameworks.

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.

Studies of social movements have often focused on the role of the state vis-à-vis social movements—in recent times using the concept of political opportunity structure to understand the options available to social movements. This article examines the internal conflicts within the ruling party in Communist Poland to show that a reciprocal process proceeded, in which both the social movement and the state found the choices of action available to them limited by the other, rather than just the social movement. The social upheaval that impacted the entire country brought about the rise of a reform movement within the ruling Polish United Workers Party, which prevented the government from acting as it preferred for a significant period of time. That reform movement, which would not have existed without Solidarity and certainly would not have brought about intraparty changes by itself, saw itself as connected to and dependent upon Solidarity. Party conservatives had to respond to and overcome the reformers before they could turn their full attention to ending the challenge Solidarity presented to the Communist system. In effect, for a time, Solidarity limited the political opportunity structure of the state, while the reverse was also true. While social movement scholars have long considered the possibilities and the limits on possibilities available to social movements because of the state or other external circumstances, this experience demonstrates that similar considerations must sometimes be contemplated with respect to the state.

Historians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources.

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.

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.

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.

Basic income experiments tend to show some decline in work hours, but less is known about how that nonwork time is spent. This article uses data from a randomized controlled trial of a guaranteed annual income to examine the activities of recipients who left the labor force for some amount of time. In particular, we analyze the reasons respondents gave for not working. We find that the intervention led to growth in care work activities and education, especially among women, moderate growth in self-employment, relatively strong growth in the portion of men and women simply reporting that they did not want to work, and the strongest growth in nonemployment connected to dissatisfaction with work/job conditions. Finally, the sole nonemployment category that declines as a result of the experiment is health-related reasons for not working.

Social scientists and historians have identified the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants from social insurance programs during the New Deal as a cause of the racially divided US welfare state. The most prominent explanation for these exclusions is that they originated in a Southern-dominated congress and were deliberately designed to exclude a majority of African-American workers from the emerging welfare state. This article examines recent historical scholarship, archival evidence, and information on unemployment compensation programs internationally to situate this policy choice in a wider context. The exclusion of these categories of workers is consistent with the experience of other unemployment insurance programs. Given the close linkages between the technical experts who drafted the US legislation and their counterparts abroad, the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants from unemployment insurance is best understood as an example of policy diffusion.

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

Individuals engaged in overseas trade in the early modern period often faced high levels of uncertainty regarding their prospects for trade. One way of managing uncertainty is to gather information from others through social interactions, that is, through social networks. Here we consider how social ties impacted trade patterns by analyzing the relationship between port traffic and early modern ship captains’ exposure to information about ports using informal relations. We consider the possible impact of strong and weak ties and the use of ties under different types of uncertainty. The analysis suggests that social networks encouraged trade at port cities with already high rates of traffic, though this effect is less pronounced than for other means through which information was distributed throughout the trade system.

Numerous network studies demonstrate that interlocking directors unite corporations in the United States into a tight-knit corporate community (e.g., Sonquist and Koenig, 1975; Mariolis, 1975; Mizruchi, 1982). In addition, nonnetwork studies of foundations, universities, and other nonprofit organizations suggest that corporate officers and directors play a large role in the governance of such institutions (e.g., Hartnett, 1969; Dye, 1976; Useem et al., 1976; Salzman and Domhoff, 1980; Useem, 1981). However, there are no studies that cast light on the structural position of nonprofit institutions in relation to the well-established corporate network.

The rapid expansion of historical demography as a discipline has meant a growing number of studies of past migration (excellent examples are Tugault, 1973; Chatelain, 1976; Piore, 1979), although migration still receives considerably less attention than does fertility or mortality. The study of industrializing cities during the nineteenth century has focused interest on those patterns of migration that caused rapid urban population growth (Anderson, 1971; Anderson, 1980; Crew, 1979; Thernstrom, 1970). Most of these recent studies of internal migration are based on localized information over relatively short periods of time. They provide us with demographic data of unprecedented precision, but the local nature of such studies accentuates their dependence on currently accepted generalizations as guides in the search for and interpretation of evidence.

Charles Tilly has introduced to historical and sociological discourse the concept of the repertoire of collective action. The concept is rooted in the observation that “any given population tends to have a fairly limited and well-established set of means for action on shared interests. . . .” (Tilly 1977: 39) The repertoire of collective action, like its theatrical counterpart, implies a group of actors who choose among a restricted number of performances with which they are familiar. Their options are circumscribed both by prior experience and by the material, organizational, and conceptual resources they find readily at hand (Tilly and Tilly 1981: 19). Tilly also likens the repertoire of collective action to a game that involves a set of basic rules around which a considerable degree of extemporization is not only permitted but required. The result is a “paradoxical combination of ritual and flexibility” (Tilly 1977: 22; Tilly 1986b: 33, 37) in which neither element must be allowed to displace the other, lest the performance lose either its creative edge or its ready communicability.

For an industrial worker in late-nineteenth-century America who lost a limb or an eye from a precariously assembled piece of machinery or who suffered some other work injury, compensation could be attained only through litigation. But under the common law, the courts assumed that workers who found themselves in dangerous work situations had the freedom to leave and find employment elsewhere. If they chose not to leave and were injured, the employer was not to blame legally. The doctrine of “assumed risk,” one of three “employers’ defenses,” made it difficult for a worker to win compensation. Only when an injured worker could prove that the employer had directly caused the accident and had done so alone was payment awarded (Downey 1912: 11–13).

Linked historical records typically are unrepresentative of the population from which they are drawn even if the method of linking is restricted to time-invariant matching criteria. An example drawn from Canadian census records illustrates the nature of bias that may afflict even a carefully linked sample. The use of potentially time-varying match criteria doubles the size of a linked sample at a modest cost in terms of additional bias. This trade-off is attractive for some research purposes if care is taken in the uses to which the data are put. Reweighting to mitigate the effects of bias in visible characteristics is desirable.

In this article three pathways into armed activism are identified among those who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972. The accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that for those who were already involved in the Republican movement before 1969, a trajectory of mobilization emerged because of the long-standing counterhegemonic consciousness present in their homes, which in turn strongly influenced them as committed Republican militants. For those who joined after 1969 and had previously been involved in other political activities, mobilization was a result of a particular transformative event that triggered the belief that armed struggle was the only approach capable of bringing change in the new sociopolitical situation of the time. For the majority, that is, those who joined after 1969 at a very young age without any previous involvement in organized networks of activism, it began as a more abruptly acquired sense of obligation to defend their own community and retaliate against the Northern Ireland establishment, the Loyalists, and the British army. Overall, the accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that Republican volunteers were fighting first and foremost to reclaim dignity, build honor, and instill a sense of pride in themselves and their community through armed activism. In these terms, the choice of joining the PIRA was justified not as a mere reproduction of an ideological alignment to the traditional Republican aim of achieving Irish reunification but as part of a recognition struggle. At an analytic level, this article illustrates the utility of a multimechanisms interpretative framework. And it contributes to broadening the empirical basis by presenting and analyzing a series of 25 semistructured interviews with former PIRA volunteers.

Statistics originally meant state-istics, a scientific representation of the state for governmental purposes. It did not just cover the growing need for information in the emerging nation-states, but also contributed to establishing a new idea of government. This paper analyzes the rearticulation of the household within modern state-istics. The Belgian population censuses, which were first organized by Adolphe Quetelet, provide the material for our analyses. More particularly, we focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, when the welfare state started to develop alternatives to household dependence. We discuss how the orientation shifted from the de facto to the de jure population; the state became involved in redefining the conditions for household membership. Two types of co-residential units were distinguished: family household and collective household. But inmates of collective households caused much concern; statisticians tried to reassign them administratively to households considered more appropriate. We also discuss the articulation of intrahousehold relations. Changes in the notion of “belongingness” show how the state articulated its expectations regarding the proverbial cornerstones of society.

This study explores the relationship between railroad integration and regional development on the European periphery between 1870 and 1910, based on a regional data set including 291 spatial units. Railroad integration is proxied by railroad density, while per capita GDP is used as an indicator of economic development. The period under study is of particular relevance as it has been associated with the second wave of railroad construction in Europe and also coincides with the industrialization of most of the continent. Overall, we found that railroads had a significant and positive impact on the growth of per capita GDP across Europe. The magnitude of this relationship appears to be relatively modest, but the results obtained are robust with respect to a number of different specifications. From a geographical perspective, we found that railroads had a significantly greater influence on regions located in countries on the northern periphery of Europe than in other outlying areas. They also helped the economies of these areas to begin the process of catching up with the continent’s industrialized core. In contrast, the regions on the southern periphery showed lower levels of economic growth, with this exacerbating the preexisting divergence in economic development. The expansion of the railroad network in them was unable to homogenize the diffusion of economic development and tended to further benefit the regions that were already industrialized. In most of the cases, the capital effect was magnified, and this contributed to the consolidation of newly created nation-states.