This presidential address argues that capitalism must be understood as an epochal phenomenon, that is, as a historically specific and temporally limited form of life with social and temporal dynamics that set it off from previous eras of history and that are not destined to last indefinitely. Capitalism's most distinctive feature—sustained secular economic growth in per capita terms—has brought great benefits to the human race, not only increasing economic well-being but endowing people with bigger, stronger, and more resilient bodies and radically increased life spans. It has also made possible an astounding increase in society's technical, educational, and scientific powers. The experience of sustained economic growth has led to a particular sense of time as open-ended and progressive—making possible modern historical consciousness. Meanwhile, the relentless commodification of social relations under capitalism has tended to free people from domination based on personal status, but also to subject them to more abstract forms of domination. Creative destruction, which is capitalism's key mechanism for producing sustained economic growth, has also produced an unmasterable cyclical pattern of boom and bust, creating new forms of insecurity at the same time that it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty. Capitalist development has always been spatially uneven. There is reason, however, to think that the capitalist era may be approaching its end. The shape of the postcapitalist era will depend on how well we collectively make use of the powers that the capitalist era has produced—science and technology, to be sure, but also the critical historical consciousness that lies at the heart of social science history.

This research reevaluates the effect of the Australian ballot reforms of the late nineteenth century on voter mobilization and turnout, challenging the “vote market hypothesis” regarding voter bribery by political parties. We propose that any subsequent declines in turnout were more directly affected by ballot design than by voter secrecy. In a regression analysis of voter turnout in statewide gubernatorial elections from 1870 to 1910, we find a significant decline in turnout in those states implementing “office bloc” reform ballots. However, the use of “party column” reform ballots did not lead to a decline in turnout. The results suggest that secrecy in voting does not fully explain the national turnout decline observed after passage.

Party leaders and committee chairs are rarely studied side by side. This study takes a step toward resolving that shortcoming by using an approach developed by David Mayhew to content analyze 3,163 original leadership “actions” from the Washington Post to demonstrate how leadership is exercised in the US House before and after the 1970 reforms. Existing studies demonstrate a shift in the locus of power from committee chairs to party leaders. This study details that transformation by illustrating how these leaders operate and reveals a shift in the number and type of leadership maneuvers that capture the essence of the reforms. Mainly, committee chairs were more likely to lead by legislating and party leaders are shown to lead by taking stands. The results also provide comparative evidence that party leaders had a greater connection to the president than chairs.

Historical research can contribute to greater understanding of economic growth, but only if it proceeds without theoretical blinders and assumptions imposed by past definitions of capitalism. We will make this case, by taking one particular historical example—mortgage markets in nineteenth-century France—and analyzing the financial development that accompanied the rise of capitalism there. The French example demonstrates that there is an immense amount that historians and social scientists still do not know about economic growth or capitalism. One common assumption is that little financing takes place before big banks and other modern financial institutions arrive on the scene. No one, however, has ever tested this implicit assumption by estimating how much lending or other financial dealing occurred before the arrival of the banks and modern financial institutions in developed economies. Although scholars have studied financial dealings back into the Middle Ages or before, no one knows whether the sums involved were big or small. We do so and discover that the sums involved were enormous. That so much borrowing went on outside modern financial institutions raises serious doubts about the argument that connects financial development and economic growth. Our research also makes it clear that context was critical when entrepreneurs raised money in the early stages of economic growth or when young businesses or firms in new industries sought funds.

What causes imperialism? Classic explanations of imperialism theorized causes within the imperial metropole, such as nationalist culture or the imperatives of capital accumulation. More recent theories emphasize global pressures. To assess these longstanding but rarely adjudicated theories, this paper employs original time-series data and qualitative evidence on British imperialism from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows that British imperialism was not only a domestically produced process but also a global one. British imperialism was a strategy for meeting the state's imperatives of geopolitical security (containment) and economic growth (capital) in the face of external threats. Those threats were most likely to be perceived when the global system was at its most economically competitive. These findings affirm a “structural competition” approach that builds upon existing global-oriented theories but specifies the structural conditions and causal processes driving imperialism.

The development of the Republican Party is a significant event in American political history. While scholars describe its formation as a realignment caused by the slavery issue, this article reinterprets this perspective. Focusing on gubernatorial elections in New England from 1840 to the mid-1850s, I present evidence that the rise of the Republican Party in the region was due to a lack of strategic voting coupled with third-party, antislavery voting that did not consistently affect the Whigs across states. A counterfactual argument suggests that Whig elites would have sought to change the nature of party politics and, had the distribution of third-party voting affected the Whigs similarly across states, then the Republicans may not have formed. Thus, the distribution of antislavery, third-party voting was more important than the presence of antislavery sentiment. This finding is important for understanding American party development and how strategic voting fits into the study of US elections.

When and how do tax regimes become sites of social protest and support broader movements of social policy reform? This question has drawn increasing interest from political sociologists and political scientists who have looked at the ways in which tax regimes create political cleavages that create the foundations for major shifts in state policy making or become the focal points of collective identity formation, leading to “tax protests.” In this paper we seek to contribute to this line of inquiry through an examination of the politics of Canadian tax policy from 1988 through 2008. What makes this case so compelling is that during these years the debates over tax policy raged over, first, the implementation and, later, the reduction of a federal value-added tax (VAT). However, rather than fueling a broad-based tax protest, debates over the VAT heightened interprovincial political cleavages that allowed the Conservatives to tie the question of the VAT to a broader economic program of typically “neoliberal” reforms: improving private-sector competitiveness and shrinking the size of the state. Drawing on a statistical analysis of the Canadian Election Study and an historical analysis of the conflict over taxation, we show how the federal structure of the Canadian state, and its policies of revenue equalization across the provinces, created an interprovincial adversarial politics that made sales tax reduction a key issue for Canadian voters. Our findings show how recognizing the historically contingent and institutionally specific context of struggles over tax policy helps to explain cross-national variation in the politics of taxation.

Louise Tilly is noteworthy as an historian, a mentor, and a distiller of feminist thought. Her work covers a variety of fields. In the field of labor history she produced an important study of political contention in Italy, Politics and Class in Milan, 1881–1901, and, along with Charles and Richard Tilly, a widely influential study of collective action, The Rebellious Century (Tilly 1994; Tilly et al. 1975). Her most influential work is in the arena of women's and family history, most notably Women, Work, and Family, a product of her collaboration with Joan Scott (Tilly and Scott 1978). She was also a member of the Panel on Women's Work and Technology of the National Research Council, which produced a signal study of the evolution of women's white collar work and its prospects, Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, and she possessed a keen interest in the intersection between demographic and family history as shown in her coedited collection on European fertility decline (Gillis et al. 1992; National Research Council 1986). Before illness forced her to cease work, she was moving into global history where her most important contribution was her presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA) that outlined a distinctive and original approach to world history (Tilly 1994).

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.

Working out large-scale processes through close attention to local-level analysis remained central to Louise Tilly's approach to social history. An ongoing commitment to agency and strategy undergirded her vision for a global history that made connections between large-scale processes across space, between human agency and structure, and between the past and present. Her vision remains an important influence in my coauthored comparative history of the welfare state in England, France, and the United States. This is illustrated by a discussion of unemployment policies in the three countries at one particular moment of crisis, the Great Depression, concentrating on the United States, where the Depression hit first and hit the hardest. Important differences in demography, the mobilization of ordinary citizens, the responsiveness of state structures to democratic pressure, and public attitudes about the legitimate role of government all affected the history of unemployment policy in each country.

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.

This article explores how Louise Tilly's examination of nonstate actors, collective action, and transnationalism remains relevant to scholars today. More specifically, I address how her scholarship has influenced the conceptualization of my first book project, which investigates how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates in the United States mobilized against restrictive immigration laws within a transnational framework. Tilly's work has helped me complicate the story of immigration restriction in the United States by looking at how grassroots ethnic organizations took advantage of their members’ ability to naturalize to challenge the legitimacy of draconian immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. In addition to the influence that her scholarly agenda still has on the field, this article contends that Louise Tilly's commitment to interdisciplinarity and collaboration with other scholars is a model to emulate and represents another major aspect of her legacy.

This article addresses the legacies of Louise Tilly's work on women and the family in Europe for current studies of girls’ agency in history. Using my preliminary analysis of a body of German periodicals written for girls during the late Enlightenment, I propose some methodological possibilities for combining cultural histories of reading with social historical approaches to the roles played by girls and women in European social life. Tilly's focus on the life cycle as an organizing principle and the family economy as a key site of history established the importance of such groups to social historical understandings of the past. Though my study incorporates sources outside the usual bounds of social history, it also depends on the analysis and methods of pioneering feminist social historians such as Louise Tilly.

While previous research conceptualizes genocide as an outcome of complex interactions between multiple social factors, the specific ways in which these factors interact and combine with each other, and how their individual effects may be mediated through such interaction, remain to be empirically specified. Using historical accounts given by survivors of the Cambodian genocide, and drawing from insights in the collective action literature, this study presents a configurational and comparative analysis of the collective dynamics of genocidal violence. The analysis focuses on how changing local patterns of relational and cognitive collective mechanisms created distinctly local patterns of violence, affecting both levels of victimization and the targeting of different groups over time. While the expansion and consolidation of central state power accounts for a generalized increase in violence, official framing practices mediated how groups became targeted. These findings confirm and extend the insights of other meso-level studies of genocide, and demonstrate the utility of comparative configurational methods for further inquiry.

One of Louise Tilly's most widely cited articles was “Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns” (1976), coauthored with Joan Scott and Miriam Cohen. The subject of the article was a major increase in female illegitimacy at the time of the Industrial Revolution, which Tilly regarded as an instance of female vulnerability caused by isolation and urban migration. Surveys of recent writings by American and British historians about this subject suggest the impact of contemporary attitudes toward female sexual autonomy. This literature offers a far more positive portrait of the causes and consequences of female illegitimacy than Tilly provided.

The belief that West and Central Africans and their descendants in the New World enjoy an innate immunity or resistance to yellow fever persists in the writings of many historians. They offer three arguments that such a racial immunity actually exists: first, that a consensus on the matter prevailed among historical observers of the disease; second, that patterns of lethality during yellow fever epidemics demonstrate it to be true; and third, because a heritable resistance to malaria is known to have spread within these populations, a similar resistance to yellow fever must have developed as well. But in fact there was never a consensus among medical observers that black immunity to yellow fever actually existed, the evidence from epidemics indicates that in fact it did not, and the analogy to the very real and well-documented evolutionary consequences of endemic malaria is not apt. As there is no evidence supporting the belief of black immunity to yellow fever, it is time for historians to discard it.

This article extends Max Weber's theory of the transformation of charisma by exploring the relationships between cults of charismatic miracle workers and the Catholic Church in early modern Europe. We show that, at least in this case, cults of miracle workers were able to preserve their charismatic character even after the death of their leader by securing recognition from the church of their leader as a saint. While the Church in general was concerned over the proliferation of magic, its attitude toward miracle workers in this period was not hostile. Instead, we show that the Church established a canonization procedure that was biased in favor of those miracle workers whose acolytes formed densely connected networks capable of harnessing local support. Rather than being inimical to each other, charismatic authorities and existing institutional structures formed symbiotic relationships. In addition to routinization and depersonalization, we suggest that charismatic authorities can also undergo a process of preservation, which depends on their ability to secure from existing institutions the resources needed to stabilize the relationships between themselves and their staffs.

Between 1973 and 1977, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott wrote two articles and a book on the history of women that became a standard in the history of women, work, and the development of industrial capitalism. The authors occasionally met to work together, and they spoke on the phone, but mostly, the collaboration was based on their exchange of hundreds of letters. Based largely on the letters that Tilly wrote to her, Scott's reminiscence looks at the way that Louise combined her scholarly work with raising a family, and how she advanced the production of knowledge about women's history through her efforts to put more women and women's history on the program of major history conferences. Finally, the author details how their efforts to critique prevailing assumptions that the history of women's work was an expression of advancing individualist values, made possible by the expansion of the industrial city, resulted in the publication of Women, Work, and Family.

On the basis of qualitative and quantitative data, I show that nonviolent protests against politically motivated repression in Mexico were more significant, both in terms of their histories and their political impact over time, than the literature suggests. I document that Mexico had human rights movements prior to the late 1980s that have been overlooked because activists since 1968 framed their struggles in terms of amnesty for political prisoners as well as the reappearance of, and accounting for, the disappeared. I further show that their 25-plus years of struggle were effective in the passage of two amnesties for political prisoners (1971 and 1978) as well as the emergence of an ombudsman called the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH circa 1989/1990), along with the negotiated settlement of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. This evidence suggests that even against strong odds, and even in the context of ongoing repression, nonviolent social movements of relatively powerless people can independently influence nondemocratic governments not only to pass favorable policy, but also to restructure the polity.

These comments take us back to a very different era, when women historians were rare in state universities and women's history was in its infancy. Sorting out the threads of Louise's legacy is difficult; this is a multifaceted legacy of character and scholarship, of intellectual and personal support of those around her. In the context of emerging family history—one that began with consideration of neither women nor the poor—Tilly fought for histories including both. This was not a struggle only about inclusion, but also about writing a history that had theoretical stamina. In addition, as much as Tilly's early work focused on women in the family setting, her legacy also lives in the study of women who leave home as well—those who exit the family economy to live on their own. Migration theory and history have become much more nuanced and sophisticated in the last two decades, almost managing to keep up with Louise's insights in two crucial ways. The first is her understanding that people use strategies learned in their families of origin to come to grips with the challenges of new situations. The second set of fundamental insights elucidates the importance of gender and family roles, insights that have undergirded the past decade's work on the gendered nature of migration processes. Despite the shifts in historical debate, Louise Tilly's intellectual innovations, insights, and insistence upon theoretically meaningful work remain a model for scholars of succeeding generations, and various moments of intellectual coming-of-age.