From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Inquisitors engaged in mass censorship across the Iberian and Italian peninsulas; however, the effect it had on scholarship is debated. To test the effect of inquisitorial control a database of more than 2,000 top-tier mathematicians, scientists, authors, artists, and composers was created for 16 European countries from 1000 to 1749. Italy and Iberia had large declines of high-level scholars shortly after the establishment of the inquisitions. In contrast, other countries—both Protestant and Catholic—had increases in top-level scholars. Even though other countries had book burnings, religious persecution, and intolerance, the presence of an institution that became intolerant and oppressive significantly impacted the location of scientists and other top achievers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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.

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.

Central to American identity have been public memories of events like the struggle for independence and the achievements of key figures from the past. The individual most often subject to hagiographic accounts is Abraham Lincoln, with emphasis both on his epic achievements in saving the Union and ending slavery and on his personal characteristics, such as honesty and the motivation to transcend his “backwoods” childhood and attain positions of local, state, and national leadership. However, a recent study based on extensive survey data found that Lincoln’s connection to emancipation provided the primary content of beliefs about him for most Americans today, with other beliefs mentioned much less often. Our present research supports that emphasis when presidential actions are the focus, but a randomized survey-based experiment shows that with a type of questioning that reflects the distinction between “essence” and “action”—inner character versus public achievements—beliefs about the former become at least as prominent as beliefs about the latter. Preliminary evidence to this effect is replicated decisively in a separate experiment, and the study is then extended to consider changes over time in indicators of essence versus action. Our research highlights the importance of how inquiries are framed, and they show that variations in framing, including those that are unintended, can enlarge our understanding of collective memory of Lincoln and of collective memory generally.

Anyone who hopes to trace quantitative historical changes in populations faces the problem of incomplete and biased records. This is at least as much a problem for statistics of crime as for other kinds of statistics, and it plagues historical homicide research. As with other historical trends, those of homicide are derived from actual counts from some set of sources, including coroners’ records, indictments, arrests, and newspaper accounts. But what proportion of the original incidents were recorded and—if so—still exist? Adding sources usually increases the count, but how closely does it approach the true count? This cannot be known directly. One is caught between the facts that counting is the major means open to us to understand crime “as part of the sweep of history” (Monkkonen 1980: 53) and that there are gaping “holes in the historical record” that leave a large “dark figure” of crime (Lane 1992: 30).

The fact that white-collar workers share relatively similar experiences of economic hardship and proletarianization across nations but develop clearly different types of trade unionism renders the theoretical relevance of formalist and economist approaches to the class location and class character of whitecollar workers questionable. According to this perspective, notwithstanding ideological and logical variants, social class reflects an occupational conglomerate, and class constituents' consciousness, disposition, and action are determined by their position in the social structure. Analysis of social class becomes a simple task of filling empty strata with workers and debate centers on the demarcation lines within the occupational structure, generating theories of class structure without attention to class agents (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, historico-cultural, ethnographic approaches to social class, pioneered by E. P. Thompson's monumental work in 1963, turn formalist, economist theories on their head by bringing class agents back in. The process by which workers become class members is considered complex, contingent, and relational: lifestyles, dispositions, modes of collective action, and political orientations blend at a historical juncture in such a way that a class character substantially distinct and sustained enough forms and becomes an important dimension of social structure.

Recent major works on long-term racial inequality in the labor market revolve around competing hypotheses concerning the importance of human capital factors (Smith and Welch 1989) and government policy (Donohue and Heckman 1991) in promoting black advance. There is, however, another line of thinking which emphasizes the importance of experimentation and “demand-side learning”: employers’ gaining access to accurate information about the abilities of black workers and adjusting their beliefs in accordance with this information.

Sociologists, demographers, and historians of the last few decades have pieced together a dramatically new understanding of the meaning of past migrations. The old story held that industry pulled recently dispossessed rural people to the city, where—along with deskilled artisans—they became part of a growing urban industrial proletariat. For migrants from rural areas, the process was thought to be catastrophic, requiring a total and often impossible adjustment to an urban world that was different in just about every imaginable way. Recent scholars have distanced themselves from this framework.

A novel brand of laissez-faire that lay outside the political mainstream in the early postwar years was broadly hailed at the dawn of the twenty-first century as the common sense of a global age. Yet how to understand neoliberalism as a specifically political thing, especially in the unlikely terrains of Western European and leftist politics, is unclear. This article mobilizes field theory to conceptualize and investigate neoliberal politics in Western democracies, treating the left-right axis as a variable but fundamental organizing dichotomy over which mainstream political parties exert a unique definitional influence. To trace how this dichotomy has shifted over time, I develop a novel index of political neoliberalism using data on the electoral programs of mainstream parties across 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1945 and 2004. I find that between the 1970s and 2004 a revised political center emerged, featuring a new concept of state responsibility and the means by which it should govern: a historical shift that took root across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and that was as much in evidence in Continental, Nordic, and southern countries as in Anglo-liberal countries. The overall trend can be fairly characterized as the rise of a specifically neoliberal politics. I suggest that a full explanation requires both a political sociology and a sociology of knowledge, attending to the organizational and cultural bases of Western party systems.

Recent comparative studies in Western industrialization have discovered a variety of economic “governance structures” between competitive markets and corporate hierarchies. Such “associative” forms of enterprise pose both a descriptive and an evaluative problem to students of capitalist development. Can business cooperate, or does a single competitor who hopes to do better by cheating undermine all associative agreements? Suppose cooperation is possible: can it be accomplished to improve products and production processes, rather than merely to redistribute wealth from consumers to business?

This article examines a new set of historical microdata for insights on the wealth of the Irish in late-nineteenth-century Ontario. Regression analysis is used to determine whether or not the wealth of the Irish-born differed significantly from that of the Canadian-born and other birthplace groups.

The traditional view has been that the Irish in nineteenth-century North America were impoverished and economically disadvantaged. In the American literature, certainly, Irish immigrants have been viewed as penniless, technologically backward, and inclined to reject rural for urban life because of their experience of famine (Akenson 1988: 48). Recent American empirical work has supported this view. For example, Stephen Herscovici (1993: 329) finds that in nineteenth-century Boston the native-born held significantly more wealth than immigrants and that the wealth of the Irish did not substantially increase over time. Ferrie (1994: 10) finds that the Irish-born were 69% less wealthy than the British-born in 1850 and that this gap rose to 72% in 1860, if age and duration in the United States are controlled for.

In June 1975 and January 1978, seminary students in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, staged public protests against the regime of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. In both instances security forces forcibly suppressed the protests. Yet the first incident generated almost no public outcry, while the second incident echoed throughout Iran and quickly became a rallying point for revolutionary mobilization. What was different about Iran in mid-1975 and early 1978 that might account for these different reactions? This article examines three widely credited explanations: economic downturn, widening political opportunity, and organizational mobilization of the opposition. The examination of economic and political explanations uncovered little evidence of significant differences between the two time periods; organizational explanations, by contrast, accounted for significant shifts in 1977 among the moderate and Islamist opposition, with the Islamist opposition in particular exhibiting a sense of optimism and efficacy in the weeks before January 1978. This changed self-perception appears to be the most likely explanation for the wave of protest that followed the suppression of the Qum protest of January 1978.

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South at the beginning of the twentieth century had an enormous impact on cities in the Midwest and North including Hartford, Connecticut. This study examines the movement of African Americans to Hartford at the neighborhood and street level. The new arrivals, many from Georgia recruited to work in the Connecticut River valley tobacco farms, joined long-established African American residents of Hartford. A geographic information system (GIS) analysis at the street level illustrates residential differences within the African American community based on place of birth, socioeconomic status, and voting. In the north end of Hartford migrants from Georgia and Eastern European immigrants, for a moment in historical time, shared residential space at the street level. However the Eastern European immigrants had higher occupation status and moved out of the North End neighborhoods, which became increasingly racially segregated as the Great Migration continued.

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.

The Whig and Tory parties played an important role in British politics in the decades following the Glorious Revolution. This article introduces new data on the political affiliation of all Members of Parliament in England and Wales between 1690 and 1747. The data have numerous applications for research. The focus here is on majority party representation and the electoral politics of constituencies. I show that the Whigs had stronger representation in municipal boroughs with small and narrow electorates, whereas the Tories were stronger in county constituencies and in boroughs with large and more democratic electorates. The Whigs were stronger in the Southeast region and the Tories in Wales and the West Midlands. After the Whig leader, Robert Walpole, became prime minister in 1721 the Whigs lost some presence in their traditional strongholds including counties where the Dissenter population was large. Finally, I incorporate data on electoral contests and show that the majority party generally lost strength in constituencies following contests.

This article combines perspectives of the sociology of quantification and field theory in analyzing the emergence of a field of global evangelical missions. Drawing analogies to Werner Sombart's thesis on the relationship of double-entry bookkeeping and the genesis of capitalism, it shows how the introduction of statistical methods and accounting techniques into the realm of missions in the nineteenth century constructed a visibility of a global distribution of religious adherents that spurred, oriented, and perpetuated an interorganizational sphere geared toward the conversion of the world to Christianity. The article identifies the soteriological and eschatological prerequisites that led to the coalescence of demographic notions and missionary perspectives and draws attention to the extensive reporting system of missionary societies that further consolidated logics of “bookkeeping” in missions. It argues that this ongoing evangelical missionary enterprise is an instance of a more general mechanism of quantification spawning a social field dedicated to the maintenance or alteration of particular “quantities.”

Using a socioecological metabolism approach to analyze data from the Census of Agriculture, this article examines the underlying soil fertility of two case study areas in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan through the calculation of soil nitrogen balances. The Rural Municipalities of Wise Creek and Livingston are 300 miles apart and therefore have different topography, soil types, and rainfall levels, even though both are within the northern Great Plains. Over 85 years, from first settlement in the 1910s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wise Creek agriculture focused increasingly on livestock production while in Livingston farmers began to grow a greater variety of crops, most notably incorporating canola into rotations. Despite the differences between the two case studies, the pattern of soil nitrogen losses was remarkably similar, with biomass yields declining along with soil nitrogen. The addition of chemical nitrogen fertilizers since the 1960s did not produce yields matching historic highs, nor did a renewed focus on livestock. Wise Creek and Livingston showed two different responses to declining yields, but neither one ultimately provided a long-term solution to the problem of soil nutrient depletion and consequent productivity declines.

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.

Most recent explanations of social welfare and development outcomes have focused on the role and impact of formal institutional arrangements, particularly the state. The institutional legacies of colonial rule and the role of democratic institutions have been common explanatory variables. This article focuses on the historical origins, persistence, and increases in inequality in Mexico and Chile during the twentieth century. It argues that despite important historical economic and political institutional differences, similar processes account for the unequal distributional outcomes that characterize the two cases. Critical conjunctures involved bitter struggle between social groups. While popularly based countermovements (along the lines predicted by Karl Polyani) arose periodically and struggled to improve social conditions, these movements were unable to alter the underlying sources of inequality. By mid-twentieth century, popular pressure had been able to exact only an unequal form of embeddedness (or social protection from the market) that contributed to inequality. Further, waves of popular mobilization linked to critical conjunctures produced reactive historical sequences involving fierce resistance from propertied elites and their middle-class allies. This resistance inevitably gave rise to new conjunctures ushering in new institutional arrangements that entrenched or increased inequality. The absence of a distributive settlement between propertied classes and popular groups was at the heart of the mobilization and countermobilization cycles in both cases; indeed, it was the depth of this disagreement, particularly the disagreement over private property, that fueled reactive sequences and their unequalizing outcomes.