This article undertakes an examination of the origins and evolution of a discourse of alterity against the Vascones –the alleged forefathers of the Basques – and other Western Pyrenean peoples from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The methodology employed involves the study of literary references made to these peoples, which are then compared to recent scholarly and archeological evidence. Through this analysis, it becomes possible to evaluate the accuracy of these mentions and interpret them within their specific historical context. The results of this research indicate that mentions of the Vascones during this timeframe were mainly polemic in nature and lacked substantial grounding in empirical reality. Instead, it seems that the underlying objective of these narratives of alterity was twofold: to enhance the social and political standing of their authors and to support their claims to political control over the Western Pyrenees. The abandonment of these interpretative repertoires during the tenth century, coinciding with the emergence of the kingdom of Pamplona and the county-duchy of Wasconia, further emphasizes the connection between the display of these tropes and imbalances in political power between the region and its neighbors. The conclusions of this article directly challenge the underpinnings of discourses that depict the ancient Vascones as entirely alien to the political and religious paradigms derived from the Roman and Christian traditions. In so doing, it thus confront narratives about these “ancient Basques” that are prevalent in contemporary Basque cultural production.

While a value-added tax (VAT), which supports a welfare state, was officially introduced in Japan in 1989, earlier attempts to implement this tax system failed. This study looks in-depth at why Japan was slower than other countries to implement a VAT. The tax authorities’ debates during the 1960s and 1970s are reviewed to understand why other attempts to introduce a VAT failed. Implementing the VAT would require a shift from the ideology centering on a direct tax to acceptance of indirect taxes and justification for a general consumption tax’s superiority over specific consumption taxes. Four influential factors are identified. First, in 1960, the ideology centering on a direct tax made a VAT inherently inferior. Second, in the 1968, “Break Fiscal Rigidification Campaign” created a revenue-neutral path for indirect tax increases but favored specific consumption taxes. Third, the Fundamental Issues Subcommittee conceptualized “high benefit/high cost” in the early 1970s and established the VAT’s superiority over specific consumption taxes based on a study of overseas travel to European Commission countries. However, the VAT was abandoned due to external shocks. Fourth, the attempts to link the VAT with fiscal reconstruction in the late 1970s faced strong opposition from consumers, small businesses, and the ruling party. Failure to introduce the VAT in the 1970s eliminated the possibility of using it to raise taxes in the early 1980s. The findings reveal that Japan’s failure to introduce the VAT closed a door to a “high benefit/high cost” type of Western-style welfare state.

Modern colonialism from the eighteenth century onward encompassed most of the world’s surface. Today, the world is different. In theory at least, nation-states rather than empires and colonies are the global norm. The sorts of colonial conquests that mark earlier centuries appear to have ended. But does this mean colonialism in the past is not relevant for the present? Scholarly and popular discussions allude to the idea that past colonialism impacts the present, using a variety of terms like “legacies,” “imprints,” “vestiges,” “ruins,” or “afterlives.” Yet existing scholarship has yet to fully clarify and catalog the specific processes and mechanisms that connect colonial history with its putative legacies. This essay, based upon the 2022 Presidential Address to the Social Science History Association, identifies and discusses four such processes and mechanisms or “modes of reverberation”: (1) continued colonialism through simple reproduction, (2) the persistence of power through formal and informal institutionalization, (3) path dependent historical trajectories (or “colonial institutionalism”), and (4) colonialism’s archive of meaning.

Wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the “first era of globalization” (in the second half of the nineteenth century) was frequently interrupted by policy and “exogenous” events such as wars. This paper adds Canada to this story by looking at trade and price data, as well as contemporary debates. This allows us to triangulate the role of policy and wars, since Canada as a small open economy was part of the British Empire. We find that, despite its privileged access to British markets, Canada faced similar barriers to the US, suggesting that membership of the British Empire provided only a modest benefit to trade. We also describe the limitations she faced accessing the US market, in particular after American independence.

What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological homologies between the two disciplines. Structurally, ethnography and historical sociology are similarly positioned in sociology more broadly, as enterprises with sometimes-tense relationships with dominant assumptions of the social sciences. Methodologically, both ethnographers and historical sociologists face the challenges of bounding the research process, navigating access to data, analyzing and retaining data while “in the field,” and overcoming cultural distance between themselves and the worlds they are studying. Taken together, these findings extend work in the sociology of science and knowledge and suggest some key conditions for intellectual efflorescence.

In the early 1900s, Washington, D.C. contained many alleys in the interior of blocks inhabited by impoverished Black residents. Elite reformers engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate alleys, on the grounds of their purported unsanitary environment and high disease prevalence. In this paper, I combine quantitative, qualitative, and spatial sources to explore new perspectives on segregation, public health, and the racialized efforts of housing reformers during this period. I find that reformers overstated the horrors of conditions in alleys and their effects on residents’ health: poorer health among alley residents was in large part due to Black residents’ marginalization wherever they might live. Alleys’ status as racialized space, coupled with progressive paternalistic racism, facilitated the discursive construction of alleys as pathological “breeding grounds of disease.” Further, my findings shed new light on micro-configurations of segregation within racially mixed neighborhoods, as well as the social experience and meaning of such configurations. Far from indicating harmonious coexistence, the proximity of such alleys to white homes and institutions spurred elite Washingtonians’ self-interested fear of disease spreading beyond the alleys. Thus, this pattern of segregation helps explain the zeal of the campaign to eradicate alleys: as a means of achieving separation from undesired Black neighbors whom white reformers associated with contagion.

Housing figures prominently during economic crises, a notable example being the Great Depression. Because housing is immobile, its market is very localized. In each city, the main agents are closely interconnected. Lenders depend on mortgaged homeowners and landlords to maintain payments; landlords rely on tenants; municipalities need all property owners to pay taxes. The Depression experiences of tenants, homeowners, and federal housing programs are well-appreciated; those of landlords and private lenders much less so. Considering the role of all agents, this case study of Hamilton, Ontario, focuses on owners and private lenders and asks who lost property, to whom, and how. Drawing on land registry and property tax records, city directories, and newspaper accounts, it documents the pattern and trajectory of defaults experienced by homeowners, landlords, and private lenders. Contemporaries and historians have used foreclosures as a measure of distress, but many borrowers defaulted voluntarily. The experience of Hamilton’s homeowners was similar to those in U.S. cities. Local landlords experienced higher rates of defaults than homeowners; private lenders foreclosed less often than lending institutions. Along with municipalities, both learned to be flexible in demanding payments. The high incidence of private mortgages, the stability of lending institutions, and the marginal role of the federal government were distinctively Canadian, but in general Hamilton’s experience is more broadly indicative.

Hobson v. Hansen (1967) is best known as the first federal court case to rule against discriminatory use of standardized tests in the context of educational tracking. It was also significant as one of the first desegregation cases after Brown v Board of Education (1954) to use psychological evidence in its ruling. This essay briefly examines the debates over ability testing before Hobson, the contexts of post-desegregation D.C. educational politics that shaped the case, the social scientific evidence presented in the case, and its application to the court’s ruling. It argues that while scholars have correctly acknowledged the court’s mistaken assumptions about testing, the evidence presented of testing bias nevertheless cogently illustrated a broader constellation of discriminatory District practices. A review of the testimony suggests that while the psychological evidence was central to the court’s ruling, the opinion rested less on the resolution of social scientific debates over testing bias than it did on the need to determine the justification of ability testing in the context of District tracking practices. Although sweeping in scope, the decision did little to resolve long running disputes over ability testing. Instead, it only helped inaugurate a more heated and contentious legal environment for educational testing in the coming decades.

In the Global North, mass warfare created a huge demand for social protection, pushing governments to provide income for invalids, war victims, and the survivors of fallen soldiers. Most European colonial powers, including France and Great Britain, recruited soldiers and other security forces not only from their metropoles but also from their colonies during both World Wars. However, the question of how mass warfare influenced social reforms in former colonies has not been systematically addressed, particularly with respect to how these influences varied across colonial powers. To begin to address this gap, this paper explores the warfare–welfare nexus in the context of British and French colonies of West Africa around World War I (WWI). The paper finds that, while Britain and France had similar overarching imperial and military objectives in West Africa of securing their colonies, enforcing order within them, and promoting commerce to increase profit, they went about achieving them very differently, with direct and indirect implications for social reforms after WWI. While only a first step, research on the distinct nature of the warfare–welfare nexus in colonial contexts is critical in order to historicize and close research gaps by widening and deepening our understanding of social policy trajectories in countries of the Global South.

This article focuses on the most relevant far right parties since the restoration of democracy in Spain, namely, Fuerza Nueva and VOX. These two parties show divergent electoral trajectories. While the former had some ephemeral prominence during the democratic process of transition, the latter emerged in 2018 and, for the time being, seems to have become established in several political arenas. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, this research explores the role of the organizational institutionalization process in the divergent electoral sustainability of both parties. The results show that it is possible to identify a temporal link, as well as certain mechanisms, between the way in which the parties develop organizationally and their electoral sustainability. In other words, a solid organizational institutionalization process has a positive effect on electoral sustainability. Overall, these findings suggest the need to further strengthen the so-called “internalist perspective” in the agenda of the far right, which entails a more systematic view of the characteristics of the parties themselves to explain their performance.

This is a history of the creation of the book Fatal Years: Child Mortality in late-Nineteenth-Century America (1991) by the authors. The data were a sample of households from the 1900 United States Census manuscripts. The primary method used was indirect estimation of child mortality (approximately ages 0–4) using information on the age and marriage duration of women. Among the findings were overall lower overall mortality than in the 1900/1902 Glover life tables for the Death Registration Area, and very large variations in mortality by race and size of place of residence.

This paper shows the effect that the medical expertise of medical practitioners had on the life chances of their children. We focus on infant and early childhood mortality. We reconstructed the life histories of the offspring of a group of around 2800 medical practitioners who were practicing in a high-mortality region in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1922, the period during which infant and child mortality in the Netherlands underwent the largest changes. The survival of their offspring is compared with that of a random sample of children from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands. Multilevel hazard analysis, using Cox proportional hazards models with shared frailty, is applied to study the effect of belonging to the medical profession on survival, in relation to the level of infant mortality in the regions where children were born. Within the group of medical practitioners, attention is paid to differences in children’s survival according to the level of medical knowledge of the fathers. Our statistical analyses show that the offspring of medical practitioners as a whole did have better survival prospects than children born to families without a father with a medical background. When medical practitioners had effective medical knowledge, measured by the period of graduation and the highest level of medical training reached, the positive effects on the survival of their children were even stronger.

In this paper, we study differential infant and child mortality according to the origin of the mothers, natives of Madrid or immigrants, between 1916 and 1926. From 1880 to 1939, Madrid experienced spectacular demographic growth, with a massive influx of immigrants, mainly from the Castilian Plateau. Using the city’s records of births and deaths, which we linked for the study period, we demonstrate an important spatial heterogeneity in infant and child mortality across the city. Although the development of the town was planned in the 1860s, the infrastructure and the real estate market were overwhelmed by the continuous arrival of new inhabitants. Moreover, major investments in public health increased the gap between the wealthy districts and peripheral areas. These improvements deepened inequality. During years marked by the waves of the influenza pandemic, we isolate the impact of poverty, which threatened the survival of newborns through poor nutrition, deficient hygienic infrastructures and deplorable housing conditions. Such features explain the impressive association between summer and the risk of dying from enteritis, diarrhea and other diseases of the same type among weaned children. However, the mortality differentials between the offspring of native and migrant mothers were surprisingly small, which we explained in terms of behavioral adaptation to the large city and its mass society.

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines’ observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across different types of place, and that some of the mortality differences by social class might actually reflect the contextual effects of healthy and unhealthy places. Although this line of argument has received a considerable amount of attention in health geography literature, it has rarely been examined for a specific historic period, and then only within particular urban areas. In this paper, we apply multi-level models to a complete count individual-level dataset of the 1911 census of England and Wales, comparing influences on infant and child mortality at the level of the individual couple and for two spatial levels. We find that although most variation in infant and child mortality operates at the individual level, there is also important variation at the two spatial levels and part of the mortality differences between social classes is better explained by the areas in which people lived rather than by their social class. A consideration of independent variables at all three levels suggests that different spatial scales capture different sorts of influences on early age mortality.

Early in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the ‘80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state’s historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society.

With only a few exceptions, the historical study of individual-level correlates of child mortality in the United States has been limited to the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when children ever born and children surviving data collected by the 1900 and 1910 censuses allow indirect estimation of child mortality. The recent release of linked census data, such as the IPUMS MLP datasets, allows a different type of indirect estimation over a longer period. By following couples across subsequent decennial censuses, it is possible to infer child mortality by measuring whether couples’ own children in the first census were still present in the second census. We focus our analysis on children aged 1–3 in the first of two linked censuses, who were less likely to be undercounted by the census than infants, and unlikely to be living apart from their parents in the second census. We estimate child mortality over the intervening decade and use OLS regression to correlate that mortality to the residence location and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents’ households. We limit our analysis to three panel datasets for married couples linked between the 1850–60, 1860–70, and 1870–80 censuses, when real estate and personal estate wealth data were collected. Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between wealth and child mortality across all regions of the United States and over the entire period examined.