Shortly after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the Franco dictatorship forcibly converted nearly half a million hectares of village commons in the region of Galicia into centrally managed forests. Consistent with their long history of using litigation to resist state intervention in the use of their commons, rural Galicians inundated regional courts with lawsuits that opposed mandated reforestation. Prevailing accounts of these events are based on comprehensive definitions of state domination and peasant resistance that minimize local variations in the implementation of reforestation projects and ignore the differing stakes of village residents in the projects. This article casts the politics of reforestation and villagers' defense of the commons in a different light and suggests that ongoing changes in farm production, growing economic disparities among village neighbors, and the evolving nature of the state's reforestation plan promoted complex, fluid, and divided local responses to reforestation that belie the solidarity of interests expressed in written petitions against reforestation.

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.

This study explores how industry-specific technological, organizational, and managerial features affected the employment of old male manufacturing workers in the early-twentieth-century United States. Industrial characteristics favorably related to the employment of old industrial workers include high labor productivity, less capital- and material-intensive production, short workdays, low intensity of work, high job flexibility, and formalized employment relationships. Results show that aged industrial workers were heavily concentrated in “unfavorable” industries, suggesting that the contemporary argument of “industrial scrap heap” was applicable for most of the manufacturing workers in the early-twentieth-century United States.

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.

In recent decades, the Swedish economy has been characterized by rather fast economic growth. At the same time, income inequality has increased substantially. In the present study, I investigated who has gained and who has been left behind during this period—how disposable personal income has changed for men and women, as well as for those in different positions in the income distribution. Register data for the total population (aged 20 to 80 years old) from 1983 to 2010 were used and three different positions in the income distribution were investigated: percentile 10, the median, and percentile 99. Five years were selected: 1983, 1991, 2000, 2006, and 2010. Each selected year represents a snapshot and describes the general trend. Results show that women in the 10th percentile have increased their income quite well, a result of increased female labor force participation during the period. This has led to a decrease of the income gap between genders within this group. But results also show a masculinization of low income and poverty, as the male incomes in this group have not increased to the same extent as for males in the other income groups. At the median, both men and women experienced a steady increase of incomes, but the gender gap for ages younger than 50 widened between 2000 and 2010. At the very top, percentile 99, the increase in disposable personal income was enormous; however, the gender gap in income did not decrease.

This article delves into the processes of territorial transformation by foregrounding the material dimension of infrastructure. The entry of the research is infrastructure network design and planning. We will trace the concepts of territorial transformation inscribed into the material layout of large technical systems by analyzing the discourse of engineers and policy makers involved in the conception of infrastructure networks. In so doing, the material politics of infrastructure networks will be studied: How did engineers and policy makers design infrastructure to generate a specific territorial transformation? Moreover, how did technological plans hold the idea that one could influence modernization processes by means of a territorial transformation instigated by infrastructure? The neutral status of technology is thus fundamentally challenged by showing that engineers, in association with policy makers, were essential actors in the planned transformation of the territory as they organized infrastructure networks according to specific ideas relating spatial and societal transformation. The article focuses on two decades after the independence of Belgium (1831), when engineers conceived comprehensive networks of rails, waterways, and roads. The material politics of two major public works initiatives will be analyzed: (1) the centrally positioned railway network that connected all industrial centers within the territory as well as with the markets of neighboring countries, positioning Belgium into Europe as international turntable, and (2) a network of roads and canals in peripheral, so-called unproductive, regions that had to integrate these regions within national borders, and indeed extend these borders, as well as buffer and govern the side-effects and risks generated by the accelerating industrialization in the central parts of the nation.

This article uses census microdata to address key issues in the Mexican immigration debate. First, we find striking parallels in the experiences of older and newer immigrant groups with substantial progress among second- and subsequent-generation immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Mexican Americans. Second, we contradict a view of immigrant history that contends that early–twentieth–century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe found well–paying jobs in manufacturing that facilitated their ascent into the middle class. Both first and second generations remained predominantly working class until after World War II. Third, the erosion of the institutions that advanced earlier immigrant generations is harming the prospects of Mexican Americans. Fourth, the mobility experience of earlier immigrants and of Mexicans and Mexican Americans differed by gender, with a gender gap opening among Mexican Americans as women pioneered the path to white–collar and professional work. Fifth, public–sector and publicly funded employment has proved crucial to upward mobility, especially among women. The reliance on public employment, as contrasted to entrepreneurship, has been one factor setting the Mexican and African American experience apart from the economic history of most southern and eastern European groups as well as from the experiences of some other immigrant groups today.

Results of an original analysis of Cherokee town placement and population c. 1721 are presented. Period and contemporary information were analyzed using local statistics to produce multivalued, mappable characterizations of the intensity of the processes of town placement and population. The analysis focuses on the scale and the space in which these processes took place among the Cherokee in order to open the way for examining the legacy of human-induced environmental change in southern Appalachia.

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.

It is revealing and important to preface this paper by noting the fact that a paper of this sort could hardly have been written as recently as 15 years ago. In sociology at large, historical methods and approaches were quite uncommon from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Further, mainstream American sociology organizations have distinguished themselves worldwide by their neglect of matters rural and agricultural. In part, this is because American rural sociologists have had their own professional association, the Rural Sociological Society, since 1937. There has accordingly been a fairly substantial separation and division of labor between “general” and rural sociology/sociologists, with “non-rural” sociologists having their major allegiance to the American Sociological Association (ASA) and regional disciplinary groups, while rural sociologists have had their closest identification with the Rural Sociological Society. Further, in American rural sociology prior to the late 1970s and 1980s, there had never been a major tradition of work along the lines of “historical sociology” as the notion is commonly understood today.

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).

The importance of suffrage expansion to the formation of “modern” political parties—and with them mass representative democracy as we know it today—is widely recognized. Nonetheless, most of what we know about the link between suffrage expansion and democratic politics concerns only the electoral arena. The major comparative studies of party development (Weber 1946; Duverger 1955; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966), for example, have stressed how larger electorates led to more elaborate and centralized extra-parliamentary organization, to “populist” campaigning styles, and to the promotion of socialist parties. This study concerns the legislative effects of extending the suffrage. Although we focus on nineteenth-century Britain, parts of our argument pertain to other cases.

Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh and New Orleans were a mess: trash filled the streets impeding travel, hindering commerce, and spreading disease. City officials in Pittsburgh turned to private contractors to collect trash at public expense while in New Orleans they relied on city employees (through the mechanism of widows carts). Like Pittsburgh and New Orleans, nineteenth-century cities faced a mounting garbage problem and, like Pittsburgh, northern cities more often chose contract while southern cities more often chose city collection. In this paper, we look in depth at how Pittsburgh and New Orleans chose contract and city collection, what those solutions looked like in practice, and how these two cases might shed light on the North-South difference. We find that both cities rebuffed offers of assistance that may have led to better trash collection and instead based their collection practices on politics. Moreover, the solutions in practice defied the dichotomous labels of public and private and the assumptions that underlie each.

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.

Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of global capitalism has important consequences for practices of solidarity. Specifically, I suggest that the spatial context within which they find themselves is likely to impact the types of political praxis in which workers engage. Thus, whereas globalization may encourage some workers to engage in traditional international solidarity campaigns it might also, paradoxically, lead others to focus on highly local campaigns, the consequences of which can quickly be spread far and wide as a result of the growing spatial interconnectivity of the planet that globalization has augured. Likewise, the spatial context within which they find themselves may lead some workers to defend their class interests while others defend their spatial interests. Equally, while some unions are focusing upon organizing what I call the spaces of production, others are organizing around the spaces of consumption. Given that workers’ spatial context impacts their spatial goals and political praxis, I argue that it is important to conceptualize international labor solidarity in explicitly spatial terms if we are to understand why different groups of workers may pursue radically different types of political praxis in different places and at different times.

Recent theoretical and methodological developments within anthropological archaeology have transformed the discipline in such a way that archaeology is now beginning to make contributions to a number of areas of social science. Two of the more significant of these areas are the question of socioeconomic change over long time spans and the study of past economic systems. The former contribution arises out of the stratigraphie character of the archaeological record and the development of increasingly accurate methods of measuring past time. Archaeological studies typically deal with change over periods of time equivalent to or even longer than Braudel’s (1980) “longue durée” (e.g., Sanders, Parsons, and Santley, 1979; Blanton et al., 1981), and many archaeologists see this diachronic social perspective as the primary contribution of archaeology to social science knowledge (Plog, 1973). The second major contribution of archaeology—the study of past economic systems—is made possible by archaeologists’ reliance upon material culture. Beyond the obvious link between material objects and the study of ancient technology, material culture can be quite revealing about many types of economic activities as well as other sociocultural phenomena (e.g., Gould and Schiffer, 1981). This focus on material objects is so crucial to archaeologists that some have suggested that the major social science contribution of the field is its concern with the relationship between behavior and material culture in modern as well as ancient societies (e.g., Rathje and Schiffer, 1982; Rathje, 1979).

Generally uniform and high rates of school participation have become an article of faith in postwar America. But at the turn of the century there was wide variation in school enrollment practices from one part of the country to another. This article will examine the determinants of interurban differences in school participation in 1900. Recent studies of school enrollment have focused on a narrow range of cities and have emphasized the importance of family background variables on the decisions of individual children to remain in school or to drop out (Katz, 1972; Troen, 1973; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1979). Most studies have focused on the ability of children from different backgrounds to attend school. In his ground-breaking article, “Who Went to School,” Michael Katz (1972) called for more research on interurban variation in school enrollment, but few historians have considered how the social and economic environments of different cities may have conditioned decisions to go to school in the past. In their studies on youth and early industrialization, Katz and Davey (1978a and 1978b) demonstrate that school attendance dropped when industrial jobs became widely available in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but they made little effort to identify the precise relationship between school attendance and the requirements of different sorts of jobs. Why should the advent of industralism mean lower school participation? This question will be addressed.

While state legislative rollbacks of public-sector workers’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other US states in 2011 appeared to signal an unprecedented wave of hostility toward the public sector, such episodes have a long history. Drawing on recent work on “governance repertoires,” this article compares antistate initiatives in Wisconsin in 2011 to two previous periods of conflict over the size and shape of government: the 1930s and the 1970s. We find that while small government advocates in all three periods used similar language and emphasized comparable themes, the outcomes of their advocacy were different due to the distinct historical moments in which they unfolded and the way local initiatives were linked to political projects at the national level. We explore the relationship of local versions of small government activism to their national-level counterparts in each period to show how national-level movements and the ideological, social, and material resources they provided shaped governance repertoires in Wisconsin. We argue that the three moments of conflict over the size of government are deeply intertwined with the prehistory, emergence, and rise to dominance of neoliberal political rationality and can provide insight into how that new “governance repertoire” was experienced and built at the local level.

Maintaining soil fertility was the most pressing problem in preindustrial agriculture. Prior to the arrival of industrial inputs, farmers relied on ecological soil replenishment processes and biological fertilizing techniques to sustain the productivity of soil. Central European farmers actively managed the cycling of nutrients by keeping livestock. Farm animals provided the means to recycle nutrients from crop production and to transfer nutrients from land-use systems dedicated for biomass extraction, such as grasslands. This article explores the unequal distribution of these vital resources in the Manor Bruck, Austria, and its impact on landlord’s and peasant’s abilities to meet the “land costs” of sustaining soil fertility. The article tests the hypothesis as to whether inequality was a major driver for unsustainable farming practices and the degradation of agro-ecosystems in the long run. Focal points are commons and communal land-use systems and their role in cycling nutrients through the agricultural landscape. Commons in the Manor Bruck comprised vast grasslands, which provided an important ecological buffer to balance the continuous export of nutrients from crop production for all actors. The aim is to demonstrate how social conflict emerging from the competition over commons guides us to the specific sustainability challenges faced by farmers.

The history of German research and writing about migration has been heavily influenced by politics. The assumptions and methods of successive generations of migration researchers demonstrate the interplay of social science and politics across very different political regimes. Soon after serious research began in the late nineteenth century, migration researchers divided into two camps. Urban statisticians with liberal political ideas used city migration registration data to analyze the circulatory movement of migrants within Germany. Conservative writers used census data to argue that migration was essentially movement from countryside to city, and was politically and morally injurious to the German people. These two sides hardened after World War I, as the conservative side increasingly incorporated racist ideas into their critique of migration. This debate continued even after the Nazis took power in 1933 with the competing publications of Rudolf Heberle and Wilhelm Brepohl. Heberle was forced to leave Germany and Brepohl became the Nazis’ favorite analyst of migration. After 1945, Brepohl retained his standing as a leading migration researcher in the German Federal Republic. The dominance of this conservative interpretation of migration continued into the 1970s. In recent decades, the writings of the liberal statisticians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been rediscovered, and German migration research has shifted again toward a more empirically based understanding of migration.