Historical accounts of the evolution of child labor are limited to the United States and to the core European economies. The experience of countries outside the prosperous European core has rarely been investigated. This paper draws on data from censii, labor force, and household surveys and qualitative information such as the testimonies of various stakeholders and news articles to provide an analysis of the evolution of child labor in Portugal. The Portuguese experience is set against the backdrop of the country's economic structure and economic growth, demographic changes, educational expansion and schooling, and labor legislation. Our assessment suggests that the long-run evolution of child labor in Portugal was determined mainly by the needs of the economic structure of the country and it was the progressive adoption of skill-biased technologies that pushed children away from work. While the passage of compulsory schooling and minimum working-age laws may have provided additional impetus, they were not the main drivers as changes in these laws tended to follow declines in child labor.

This article refines our understanding of abolitionism as “the first modern social movement” through a microhistory of abolitionism in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British town. Examining requisitions, which collected signatures calling on a mayor to convene public meetings to launch parliamentary petitions or other associational activities, the article shows how antislavery mobilization in Plymouth grew amongst a multiplying variety of religious, political, cultural, and economic institutions. Through a prosopography of those initiating antislavery petitions, an analysis of the other requisitions they supported, and qualitative evidence from leading abolitionists’ personal papers, the article details the ways local leaders raised petitions for a national campaign. Civic and religious dynamism at this local level facilitated new forms of contentious mobilization on national and imperial issues. The article therefore directs causal attention to those socioeconomic changes that underpinned the associational cultures of abolitionism.

Quantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

In the wake of Hawaii's annexation by the United States, congressmen engaged in a series of intense debates about the suffrage laws that would govern the new territory. This article documents how these 1900 congressional debates contributed to a growing schism between the territorial definition of the state and the sociopolitical definition of the nation. The state officially expanded beyond the North American continent while the definition of the nation remained racially restrictive. A simultaneous espousal of inclusive, universalistic principles and exclusive, racist preferences characterized efforts among European American policy makers and political observers to exercise political domination over indigenous Hawaiians while, at the same time, maintaining white control of political power.

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.

In post-World War II agricultural research, a new perspective on “peasant society” developed. This approach is still vigorous today and implies that peasant society—defined by subsistence production, the safety-first principle, and a stable village system with moral obligations—leads to conservative behavior toward change. It also assumes that only external forces can tear down the system and force peasants into markets. However, many researchers throughout Europe have challenged these opinions of peasant mentality and peasant behavior. This study investigates five parishes in southern Sweden (Scania) to analyze the behavior of peasants during the agricultural transformation (c. 1750–1850). Important organizational and institutional changes, such as enclosures, the emergence of a formal credit market, and the growing land market, are analyzed. Results reveal that some peasants actively participated in the agricultural transformation in a number of ways and that peasant farmers in Scania did not demonstrate a conservative attitude toward change.

Research on political violence occurs in waves, generally corresponding to the successive swells of violence that in many ways define modern society. Critically, this violence is characterized as much by diversity as by uniformity. As each new spate in research on political violence has shown us, rarely can we generalize about either the aims or the repertoires of action of the purveyors of violence. Some similar mechanisms are in play, however, as violence develops from political conflicts between states and their opponents.

This suggestion comes from social movement studies, whose influence is increasing in the analysis of political violence. These studies developed especially from a critique of ‘terrorism studies,’ which emerged within security studies as a branch of international relations and have traditionally been more oriented toward developing antiterrorist policies than toward a social scientific understanding of political violence.

The title of this presidential address reflects the happy conjunction of my particular interest in social networks and the network structure of the Social Science History Association. My talk will be brief, because I want to reserve most of this “presidential picnic” for the panel that the program chair, Donna Gabaccia, organized. Last year's president, Eric Monkkonen (1994: 166), in his history of the institution of the SSHA, called our meetings “a venue for scholars from different disciplines to learn to talk to one another.” That we have this annual opportunity for conversations is due to the work of our networks that organize the sessions that attract us to the meetings; to program chairs—this year, Donna—who create a program from these sessions; and to our executive director, Erik Austin, whose ability and diligence keeps the organization going from year to year.

Recent research has ignited a debate in social science history over whether and how to draw conclusions for whole populations from sources that describe only select subsets of these populations. The idiosyncratic availability and survival of historical sources create a threat of sample-selection bias—an error that arises when there are systematic differences between the observed sample and the population of interest. This danger is common in studying trends in health as measured by average stature—scholars can often observe these trends only for soldiers and other similar groups; but whether these patterns are representative of those of the broader population is unclear. This article illustrates what simple patterns in a potentially selected sample can be used to recognize the presence of sample-selection bias in a source, and to understand how such bias might affect conclusions drawn from this source. Applying this intuition to the use of military data to describe stature in the antebellum United States, I present several simple empirical exercises based on these patterns. Finally, I use the results of these exercises to describe how sample-selection bias might affect the use of these data in testing for differences in average stature between the Northeast and the Midwest.

This article considers the problem of popular, collectively organized political action in the context of the abolition movement of the slave trade (1788–1807). Various primary sources, a petition, a trade directory, church records, and a self-built historic GIS are used to locate petitioners for abolition in the social fabric of Manchester. Through matching and computational experiments the article highlights which social structural forces led individuals to support the abolition movement by signing a petition. Specifically, gathering places that were historically involved in the movement, as well as those that housed traveling merchants from communities with successful abolitionist petitions from preceding campaigns shaped abolitionist petitioning—and the impact of these institutions remained important over and above family ties, active religious congregations, and the occupational groups. The article gives a new understanding of the role that early industrialization played in the abolition movement, building it from the bottom up, forging cohesion within and across communities through local institutions, rather than creating new boundaries and divides through processes of class formation.

Historical and comparative social scientists are increasingly interested in explaining the spread of innovations—which social scientists commonly refer to as diffusion and, broadly conceived, can include the spread of new ideas, behaviors, technologies, and institutions. However, in spite of the profusion of studies, researchers do not always specify a diffusion model or its underlying causal mechanisms. Whereas many studies document spatial diffusion, not all specify a vector, model flows of influence and information, or show how people and places are connected (tied) to one another. In reviewing some of the most important work on the spread of religion, violent conflict, and social movements over the last few decades, it is clear to us that social network analysis has revolutionized the historical study of diffusion. Even so, many studies have yet to embrace concepts, methods, and measures from social network analysis. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the combination of historical perspectives on change and innovation, new methods of historical data collection and analysis, and growing sophistication in the application of network concepts and models is shedding light on a host of historical questions and contributing to our general understanding of diffusion.

In recent years, the gap between the traditional study of history and the concerns of modern social science has been bridged by a number of interdisciplinary minded scholars who have sought to undertake a more rigorous and theoretically relevant examination of the basic structural components of societies as they have changed over time. I Within this emergent field of socio-historical inquiry, it is possible to locate a growing body of quantitatively oriented research designed to relate various forms of social dissent and political unrest to the conditions and dislocations engendered by the processes of urban-industrial development. In particular, patterns in various types of social and political pathologies (e.g., crime, social disorganization, popular disturbances, etc.) have come to represent important foci for quantitative historical research, especially in the industrializing contexts of 19th-century Europe, where ample documentation of a statistical nature concerning many of these phenomena has existed for well over a century and a half.

Before its deployment as a practice by insurgent social movements for mobilizing public opinion in the long nineteenth century, petitioning was a ubiquitous, relatively uniform practice with no connection to popular insurgency. It was nearly the inverse, though just as prominent, phenomenon: an instrument of state as opposed to an instrument of protest, occurring wherever rulership relied on administrative techniques for generating and deploying its authority. Humble subjects sought benevolent deployments of power in pursuit of goals that were within and not about the rules of the game. This mode of petitioning is aptly described as petition-and-response, a term of art from classical scholarship that is applicable to diverse patrimonial states across Eurasia with diverse ideological systems. The transition to modern petitioning as a repertoire for contentious politics was an extended, uneven process. It was facilitated initially by the unquestioned legitimacy of petitionary etiquette with regard to form and rhetoric, as opposed to explicit invocation of novel ideas about natural rights. Liminal petitioning had contradictory elements of deference to and defiance of power relations that diminished perceptions of novelty in novel activities that mobilized and invoked popular opinion on contentious political issues.

We welcome the animated debate raised by Analytic Narratives concerning social scientific methods and the scope of rational choice. Advocates of mathematical and rational models have long claimed they have much to tell us about situations where behavior can be quantified or where the situation under study recurs many times. However, it was thought impermissible for rational choice theories (and rational choice) to venture into the analysis of big events. Political scientists like Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994) implicitly conceded the issue by concentrating on the problem of case selection when the number of cases is small but greater than one.We believe unique events are too important to leave aside, and we use rational choice, particularly game theory, as a means to study unique events.

The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.

Using a newly developed geographic information system transportation database, we study the impact of gaining access to rail transportation on changes in population density and the rate of urbanization between 1850 and 1860 in the American Midwest. Differences-in-differences and instrumental variable analysis of a balanced panel of 278 counties reveals only a small positive effect of rail access on population density but a large positive impact on urbanization as measured by the fraction of people living in incorporated areas of 2,500 or more. Our estimates imply that one-half or more of the growth in urbanization in the Midwest in the late antebellum period may be attributable to the spread of the rail network.

The dissolution of empires has been one of the distinguishing and most consequential characteristics of the twentieth century. The popular struggles for national sovereignty that have helped to destroy these empires have sometimes (although certainly not always) been fused with attempts to change radically the socioeconomic institutions inherited from the imperialists. The result of this fusion has been nationalist revolution—or revolutionary nationalism—another phenomenon largely unique to the present century. Most recently, in the Eastern European satellites of the former Soviet Union, imperial domination not only generated a nationalist opposition but also unwittingly radicalized it—albeit in a very peculiar way that I explain below. Thus, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, as Pavel Campeanu (1991: 806–7) has pointed out, had “a dual nature: social, since their goal was to destroy the socioeconomic structures of Stalinism, and national, since they aspired to re-establish the sovereignty of the countries in question.”

How do theory-oriented history and quantitative history relate to each other? According to Morgan Kousser, theory and methodology—meaning statistical and mathematical methodology for quantitative work—“are like the Emperor and his new clothes; without the one, you have an empty suit; without the other, a nude old man” (Kousser, 1977). I disagree. There is, on the one hand, quantitative historical work without much theory. On the other hand, there exists good theoretical history of a basically nonquantitative character. Whereas quantitative history can only gain by becoming more theoretical, theory orientation does not always lead to quantification.

Using data from the 2011 Multi-State Survey on Race and Politics (Parker 2011), I ask if African American1 opinion toward undocumented immigration mirrors African American opinion toward immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I find evidence that contemporary African American opinion does reflect the manner in which a previous generation of African Americans reacted to immigrant newcomers. More specifically, I find that factors associated with past reactions to new immigration, most notably political and economic competition, egalitarianism, the belief that new immigrants are distancing themselves from African Americans, and the belief that restrictive immigration policies were fueled by racism, continue to predict contemporary African American opinion on undocumented immigration. Taken together, I take my findings as evidence that the past may be prologue in accounting for black opinion toward the newest wave of immigration.