Organized markets for European immigrant servants in North America began in Jamestown around 1620 and ended in the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans around 1820. For two centuries these markets survived, even flourished, in spite of numerous wartime interruptions, political revolutions, depressions in the transatlantic shipping market, cyclical recessions in the American economy, and competition from both slave and native-born free labor. During the eighteenth century roughly half of the European emigrants to British North America entered servitude to pay for their transatlantic passage (Galenson 1981; Grubb 1992b).

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

Historians who have studied school attendance in the nineteenth century have noted the differences in enrollment rates between children of immigrants and children of parents born in the United States. These differences in attendance rates apparently persist even after controlling for the social and economic backgrounds of the children. Despite the fact that this result is familiar in the literature, historians have not agreed upon a single cause for these differences (Kaestle and Vinovskis 1980; Soltow and Stevens 1981; Perlmann 1988). Scholars have debated many possible reasons: perhaps different cultural or religious circumstances led immigrants and native-born Americans to act differently toward their children’s education; perhaps immigrants took their children out of school earlier because they could not afford the luxury of educating their children; or perhaps immigrants made a conscious choice between the education of their children and better housing, or other consumption for themselves and their families.

Charles Tilly (1984) has advocated the study of “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons” as the surest path to knowledge in the present conjuncture. This essay follows his lead with a comparative study of the transformation of the sugar industry in Martinique and Cuba during the nineteenth century. Slavery in the Americas is commonly viewed as an archaic form of social and economic organization that is incompatible with modern forms of economy and polity emerging in the nineteenth century. Such a perspective presumes the singularity of slavery and represents its abolition throughout the hemisphere as a linear transition to capitalist modernity.

Although individual and personal, names take on their significance in social interaction. Since the context of social interaction changes with immigration, names can be expected to change as well. In this paper, we use information from the Public Use Sample of the 1910 U.S. census to compare the patterns of personal (given) names of first- and second-generation Italian and Jewish immigrants and native-born whites of native parentage, and to examine the association of naming patterns of immigrants with several measures indicating interaction with those outside the ethnic group. Because the information from the census is at a single point in time, we also draw on interviews with elderly Italian and Jewish women in order to provide more direct evidence of change and of the contexts in which this change occurred.

Lodging was once common. In 1900 about one-quarter of U.S. households contained a lodger or lodging family. Almost as many more took one in at some point in the life of the household. Since then, rising incomes have enabled more people to maintain their own household. Today, lodging is quite rare and is confined largely to the poor.

A good deal has been written about lodging, mostly by social historians concerned with its implications for daily life. We have been told that lodiging was part of the immigrant experience, that it helped even out household income over the life cycle, that it augmented the clout of women within the household, and that in larger cities it supported a subculture among single men and women (Modell and Hareven 1973).

The study of social movements from “below” has been a major element in political sociology, and perhaps the dominant tendency in social history, in recent decades. While bringing welcome attention to neglected historical actors and episodes, much of this literature carries a congratulatory air without managing to identify the results of such movements or to specify the mechanisms by which actors effect change from below. The four essays discussed here (three appear in this issue and one, by Mark Traugott, will appear in the next issue) all contribute to understanding the consequences of popular social action by placing it in the context of recurrent elite efforts to assert power. They demonstrate that examining the structure of social relations is a precondition for understanding the possibilities for, and effects of, agency by both elites and popular groups.

In recent years, due in part to the increasing diffusion of constructivist conceptions of the social and historical world, statistics has attracted the attention of historians more as an object than as a means of investigation and analysis. While quantification and statistical methods have lost the popularity they gained among social historians in the 1960s and 1970s, new and important histories of statistics and of the theory of probability have appeared that shed new light on the subject (Porter 1986; Stigler 1986; Kriiger et al. 1987; Hacking 1990). These works have traced—at times in highly original and sophisticated ways—genealogy and developments of the statistical methods and probabilistic conceptions that are at the basis of today’s quantitative practices.

In the Americas, two types of racial systems developed at the confluence of migration streams from Europe and Africa. In the Caribbean, free persons of color emerged as an intermediary group between whites and large populations of Negro slaves. In British mainland colonies, whites came to treat all blacks, whether free or enslaved, mulatto or Negro, as a single social category (Hoetink 1967; Mörner 1967: 136–38).

The fall in the labor force participation rate of older men in the United States has been dramatic. In 1860 approximately 76% of men 65 and older were in the labor force. Today less than 20% work. Much of the decline has been explained in terms of a shift from agricultural occupations to manufacturing or industrial occupations, where participation historically has been lower at older ages. Participation rates, however, appear to have been constant in both farm and urban households through 1930, thus challenging the thesis that industrialization and urbanization were causes of the fall in the participation rate of older men.

The early decades of the nineteenth century are widely recognized as formative years for the English working class. During the first two decades a wide variety of trade groups struggled at both the regional and national levels to protect artisanal rights and unmuzzle the legally muted voice of labor (Prothero 1979; Randall 1991; Rule 1986; E. P. Thompson 1966). Success was at best uneven. Revocation of the Statute of Apprentices in 1813–14 was an alarming defeat for artisans who sought to protect their trade privileges from growing capitalist incursions. The successful repeal of the Combination Laws that had barred trade unions in 1824 encouraged a clamoring among many of London’s trades to resuscitate wage rates, precipitating strikes in many industries. Also emerging from the lean years was a new understanding of the relations between capital and labor. “The interests of the masters and men,” London’s Trades’ Newspaper pronounced, “are as much opposed to each other as light is to darkness” (Hollis 1973: 45).

Between the Civil War and World War I the American economy was reshaped by the forces of industrialization. In 1870 the United States was still a predominantly rural and agricultural society concentrated in the area east of the Mississippi River. By the early twentieth century it had become a largely urban and industrial society of continental proportions. The growth of railroads, cities, mines, and factories, along with shifts in the sectoral and geographic patterns of economic activity, required the mobilization of vast quantities of capital and labor (Perloff et al. 1965: chap. 14). The formation of efficient factor markets capable of responding to these demands was an important ingredient in the rapid economic growth of the postbellum United States. The evolution of financial market institutions in response to the demands of late-nineteenth-century industrialization has been studied in some detail (Davis 1965; Sylla 1969; James 1978; Snowden 1987, 1988), but relatively little is known about the history of labor market institutions after the Civil War.

The essays by Hans Marks and Don Kalb represent important contributions to a growing literature on class formation. Much of the current attention to class formation flows from the contemporary concern with larger processes of identity formation (Hanagan 1989; McNall 1988; Tilly 1992). Scholars such as Ira Katznelson and Adam Przeworski have emphasized the contingent character of class identity while, at the same time, reminding us of the need to understand why millions of people in the late nineteenth century chose to band together and fight under banners labeled proletarian (Katznelson 1986; Przeworski 1977).

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.

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst. In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

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.”

In 1965 Morris David Morris, by questioning the view that British rule had led to the impoverishment of the Indian people, reopened the debate about the course of Indian economic welfare in the nineteenth century. Aspects of the question continue to concern scholars.

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

Recapturing people's experiences as part of understanding specific social and cultural processes leads us to the art of differentiating. We need to ask by whom, when, and why certain developments are defined. All historical sources bring knowledge, often in absolute and definite terms. But sometimes sources depart from the dominant societal discourse. How is one to evaluate the explanatory value of the different sources of interpretation placed hierarchically? This article takes on the evaluation of different discourses surrounding the process defined by historical demography as “rising illegitimate fertility.” Although it will imply a reevaluation of proletarianization processes as well, the central focus will be on illegitimacy.