In the decades before World War I, the United Kingdom was the pivot of a significant migratory phenomenon. While great swaths of the population were going abroad, multiple movements from the European continent (mainly from Germany, Italy, and Poland) were arriving on the British shores. To reappraise the impact of migration into the United Kingdom, this article focuses on Edinburgh in 1911, with the aim of moving beyond the initial movement of people and toward an analysis of the longer-term demographic trends. The main sources are the 1911 Census Enumerators’ Books, which are also the basis of the official census report and contain a plethora of information that were previously unavailable. Using a methodology that has been developed specifically for this study, the migrants’ households and their familiar links have been completely reconstructed. Moreover, the various communities have been examined in relation with all the other migrant groups, as well as with the local Scottish population. The resulting quantitative analysis paints a surprising picture of their impact, with significant differences between the various migrant groups, and highlights how the role played by the migrants in the development of the United Kingdom has been underestimated.

This collection of papers, from very different vantage points, makes the argument that the Ottoman Empire bequeathed significant legacies to the notion and practices of modern political governance in the Middle East. The three essays address the impact Ottoman policies had on territories that had once been part of the empire, focusing most closely on the development of state institutions, nationalism, and the position of the caliphate. By exploring these key issues, the authors hope to call attention to the importance of the Ottoman experience in laying the groundwork for future political life in the region.

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.

The modern state arose in Western Europe and was transplanted to European settler colonies. The question about why Western Europe developed high-capacity states bound by the rule of law remains a core concern of modern social science. Prior scholarship dealing with this issue has generally favored different variants of a war-and-state-making perspective. However, generalized geopolitical pressure does little to explain why the modern state arose in Europe and not in other historical multistate systems. This article argues that the European outcome was conditional on the prior existence of “medieval communalism,” that is, on strong norms and institutions of communal representation, based on units such as parishes and towns. It was due to these initial conditions that geopolitical pressure facilitated not only a strengthening of state capacity but also the development of checks on state power in the form of the rule of law. This argument is first theorized and then illustrated empirically using a number of examples from both within and beyond Europe. Against this backdrop, the implications for present-day state building are briefly discussed.

Egypt and Iraq display contrasting policies in the relationship between state and religion. Egypt's nationalist officer corps has subordinated political Islam, stigmatized the Muslim Brotherhood, and bended clerics to its will. While Arab Iraq presents two models, both hold a similar stance on religion: one an elected, parliamentary government dominated by political Islam and Shiite clerics; the other a theocratic Sunni caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Egypt and Iraq are heirs to two differing Ottoman solutions to the problem of religion-state relations, the legacy of which is often overlooked. The most prevalent model subordinates clergy and religion to the state in the tradition of Mehmet I. This model is characteristic of the empire in its glory years and would have been recognized by Suleyman the Magnificent. In the other model, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Hamidian caliphate, the head of state claimed temporal and religious authority to combat colonial penetration. Neither Ottoman nor colonial norms of governance, nor nationalist states succeeding them, developed methods to deal with multiethnic states or avoid a tyranny of the majority. Unlike the modernizing Ottoman caliphate, however, the caliphates of Mulla Omar and Ibrahim al-Samarra'i display a literalist reading of sharia and a ruthless disregard of humane prohibitions in mainstream Islamic law against killing innocents. Of the two models, the likely victor is the state-centric subordination of religion because latter-day caliphates have flourished only briefly as radical and sectarian movements in rugged territories where power vacuums existed.

The notion that government funding undermines the independence of nonprofit organizations is a prevalent theme in scholarship on state–nonprofit relations, social welfare policy, and the condition of American civil society. This article scrutinizes historical assumptions about community organizations that inform debates over the influence of government funding in the nonprofit sector. Drawing on long-standing organizational theory and a historical analysis of the Community Chest movement, this article highlights the tension between collaboration and independence inherent in the nonprofit organizational form as well as the implications of this tension in light of historical changes in the resource environment of voluntary human service agencies. This conceptual and temporal focus leads not only to an analytical reorientation but also to a historical revision: The influx of government funding in the American nonprofit sector in the 1960s promoted nonprofit independence by undermining the authority of local community institutions. In addition to complicating popular beliefs about charity in American civic culture, this article facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of community dynamics.

This article focuses on traditional private credit markets in eighteenth-century France through the examination of notarized loan deeds and to a lesser extent civil court records. It examines in particular how credit markets functioned and how they developed in the eighteenth century. It argues that traditional credit markets featured norms of solidarity, cooperation, and fairness, and allowed considerable flexibility and input from both creditors and debtors. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, this market experienced several major changes. Not only did the volume of exchange and the number of notarized credit contracts dramatically increase, engendering a standardization of contracts and a greater resort to external institutions, but a new group of investors modified the traditional norms and practices of exchange. This article concludes that the private credit market shifted from an institution in which input, negotiation, and flexibility prevailed to a more rigid institution in which rules and rigor applied.

Historians and economists have increasingly identified capitalist patterns of behavior among antebellum slave owners, yet no consensus has emerged about the explanation for this finding. I argue that US slave owners were driven to behave like capitalists in part because of their dependence on credit. The ability of creditors to seize the land and slaves of insolvent debtors generated selection pressures that led to both aggregate patterns of capitalist development and the adaptation of individual slave owners to the logic of capitalist competition. I refer to this process as “credit market discipline.” In a case study of South Carolina in the 1840s, I show that the threat and reality of foreclosure was capable of stimulating recognizably capitalist behaviors among even the most aristocratic and “prebourgeois” slave owners.

The devolution of tuition authority, or abdication of tuition-setting control from elected representatives to unelected university governing boards, is an instance of marketization in higher education. Except for New York and Florida, all states have moved closer to a market-priced ideal by “deregulating” tuition. In this article, I describe my analysis of these two negative cases and argue that preexisting higher education policies have lasting effects on the institutional logics to which policy makers and other stakeholders have access, leading to divergent outcomes. What policy makers deem appropriate policy in their local context is shaped by a history of education policy making that likely preceded their position in office. However, the structure of institutions and the founding ideas of those institutions—as preserved in planning documents and remembered by select institutional actors—perpetuate a commitment to a certain institutional logic. Specifically, Florida and New York policy makers were constrained in their decision making about tuition devolution at multiple points in time by a family of institutions logic that reinforced the importance of their state university systems’ lack of formal tiers and their commitment to price similarity. The state policies governing these state systems became politically consequential because policy makers invoked the system cohesiveness mandated by such policies as a principal reason for rejecting devolution proposals. This powerful narrative appears to have precluded the ideational change toward a market university despite a move in this direction in other states.

What is the origin of the Middle Eastern state? Although social scientists have traditionally emphasized the role of the European colonial experience, especially the British and French mandates following World War I, the late Ottoman era from the Edict of Gülhane in 1839 that inaugurated the Tanzimat reforms until World War I represents a period at least as critical to understanding origins of the state in the region. Certain Ottoman provinces known as Eyalet-i Mümtaze or exceptional/special provinces developed under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire that acquired many statelike attributes without becoming independent polities. Moreover, the nature of the Ottoman Imperial center changed to become more similar to that of a territorially delimited state as opposed to the classic multifaceted polity that had been the earlier norm. These developments resulted in a blurring of lines that had traditionally defined state and empire during the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. To illustrate this change, economic, administrative, and political examples are presented from Egypt and Turkey. This comparative analysis will identify ways the evolution of the two states was similar as well as critical differences such as the extent of foreign intervention and the role played by representative assemblies. The formation of imperial states within the empire as well as the transformation of the empire to become more statelike resulted in strong state institutions in places such as Egypt and Turkey that long preceded the main European colonial intervention in the region after World War I.

Nationalism's role in the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire is re-examined. Traditionalists blamed the breakdown on the extreme nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) while today's orthodoxy attributes it to the external contingency of the Balkan Wars and World War I instead. This article looks at the onerous state-building and mild nation-building demands put forth by the CUP toward the Albanians. The Albanian resistance created unstable coalitions that broadened to include north and south, and tempered religion in favor of ethnicity, but fell short of demanding independence. The First Balkan War forced a vulnerable Albania to reluctantly declare independence for which it had made contingent plans. The Ottoman center refused to change course and its pursuit of an imperial nation-state prompted other populations to think and act more ethnically than ever before and draw up their own contingent plans. The concept of ethnicity without groups (Brubaker) and the causal connection between state-building and nationalism (Hechter) are critically assessed in the Ottoman context.

We analyze the effects of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts (EAs) on divorce rates in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. We find that the property acts increased divorce rates, which is consistent with the predicted outcome, in household extensive bargaining models, of an increase in the married woman’s relative bargaining power. We also find some evidence that the EAs had a positive effect on divorce rates, though it is not statistically significant after accounting for the possibility that divorce rates changed prior to the enactment of an EA. To support our causal argument, we control for regional trends in the divorce rate and account for the timing of the laws’ effects. We also assess alternative explanations for the rise in divorce rates during the late nineteenth century, including age structure, divorce law, urbanization, economic development, and foreign immigration, and we find that only age structure and urbanization positively affected divorce rates along with the property acts. Finally, we provide support for our argument from court cases in which the acts were used to defend a woman’s property rights against claims from her ex-husband.