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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During the 1960s in Sweden, socioeconomic differentials decreased sharply and both the labor force participation of married women and aggregate divorce rates increased more rapidly than during any other period of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the socioeconomic composition of the couple influenced the probability of divorce during this period of rapid restructuring. The study uses a large data set covering the entire married population of Sweden in 1960 and applies a binary model whereby the couples are analyzed as units rather than separate individuals to model divorce during the period from 1960 to1965. The main results show that the equalization process between genders and social classes during this period contributed to the decrease in marital stability. Dual-provider families exhibit substantially higher probabilities of divorce as compared to traditional single-provider families. We also find that the socioeconomic gradient of divorce had become negative by the early 1960s and that couples with low socioeconomic status contributed more to the increase in divorce than did couples in the higher strata. A difference between the results reached in this study and those from divorce research covering later decades is that children do not reduce the probability of divorce when the wife's labor force participation is controlled for. The results indicate that the determinants of divorce have varied across different phases of the divorce transition during the twentieth century and that a historical perspective is necessary if we are to understand the long-term process that has produced current marital behavior.

This study examines regulatory efforts directed toward black midwives in South Carolina in the early twentieth century as evidenced within the state's Board of Health documents. Using qualitative content analysis and Abbott (1988) and Starr's (1982) discussion of the medico-legal relationship between doctors and the legal profession, I critically examine South Carolina's Sanitary Codes in order to discern the temporal nature of midwifery law in the early twentieth century. I argue that the language within these legislative stipulations governing granny midwives become more restrictive over time in the early twentieth century thanks to antimidwifery advocacy by US physicians and health officials. Further, I demonstrate how the South Carolina State Board of Health ensured that grannies operated appropriately using other black women as midwifery supervisors. This study illustrates how despite the lack of universal laws governing midwifery in the United States in the early twentieth century, South Carolina actively engaged in “rounding up” the midwife using state-appointed midwifery supervisors, increasingly restrictive practice stipulations, and mandatory midwifery training seminars. This research was supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Enhancement Grant and Fellowship.

Since the emergence of the Weberian notion of “kadijustiz” scholars have debated the ability of Islamic courts to resolve disputes fairly and predictably. For a quantitative analysis of how these courts resolved disputes, we use data from the court records (sicils) of the Ottoman town of Kastamonu and examine whether the judges’ decision followed systematic patterns and whether the patterns were logical. The results show that the trial outcome was influenced by the gender, elite status, religion, and religious markers of litigants. Using the tools and concepts of modern scholarship on dispute resolution, we argue that in resolving disputes Kastamonu courts displayed logical patterns that are consistent with those identified by quantitative analysis of court outcomes in modern societies.

This article aims to clarify the scope of questions about religion in population censuses, and attempts to explain why such questions were included or left out of censuses taken in different nations and periods. The quantitative aspect is a fundamental question for students of religion interested in knowing where it is possible to rely on statistics about the size of confessional groups and their basic characteristics. A common use of the census in connection with religion has been to create aggregates about the size of different congregations by nation, and to cross-tabulate this with other variables such as gender, occupations, ethnicity, or regions. Enumerations with questions about religion were performed in many countries from the mid-nineteenth century, but questions about religious affiliation never entered the US censuses, and were left out of most censuses in many other countries as is indicated in the map in figure 1. We shall try to clarify how pressure was put on statistical bureaus, parliaments, and governments to promote or hinder the inclusion of questions about religion.

Numerous scholars consider the economic origins of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US married women's property acts. Researchers investigate how economic downturns and women's inroads into business spurred lawmakers to reform property laws to give married women the right to own separate property. Such economic explanations, however, are only a partial story. Our investigation reveals the important role of women's collective activism in winning these legal changes. Women mobilized for property rights often as they pressed for voting rights and, in one case, as they campaigned for an equal rights amendment. We examine circumstances leading to passage of married women's property acts in seven states to show that as women mobilized for property rights alongside voting rights or a broader equal rights law, a radical demand effect unfolded. Lawmakers often considered demands for woman suffrage or an equal rights amendment as more far-reaching and thus more radical and threatening. Such feminist demands, then, provided a foil for property-rights activism, and the contrast led lawmakers to view property demands as more moderate. In addition, as they pressed for these combined reforms, women often engaged in hybrid framing that allowed them to moderate their demand for property reforms by linking their property goals to beliefs already widely accepted. The confluence of these circumstances led political leaders to deem property changes as more moderate and acceptable in an effort to steer feminists away from their radical goals. In the end, the radical demand effect created a political opportunity for passage of the married women's property acts.

This paper analyzes admissions to the Colorado Insane Asylum from 1879 to 1900. We estimate and compare admission rates across sex, age, marital, occupation, and immigration status using original admission records in combination with US census data from 1870 to1900. We show the extent to which persons in various status groups, who varied in power and social advantage, differed in their risk of being institutionalized in the context of nineteenth-century Colorado. Our analysis showed that admission or commitment to the Asylum did not entail permanent incarceration, as more than half of those admitted were discharged within six months. Men were admitted at higher rates than women, even after adjusting for age. Marital status also affected the risk of admission; single and divorced persons were admitted at about 1.5 times the rate of their married counterparts. Widows of either sex were even more likely to be admitted to the Asylum, and the risk increased with age. Persons in lower income/lower prestige occupations were more likely to be institutionalized. This included occupations in the domestic and personal service category in the US census, and this was evident for both males and females. Foreign-born men and women were admitted at, respectively, twice and three times the rate of their native counterparts, with particularly elevated rates observed among the Irish. In general, admission to the Colorado Insane Asylum appears to differ only in a slightly greater admission of males when compared to similar contemporaneous institutions in the East, despite the obvious differences in the Colorado population size and urban concentration.