In state-of-the-field surveys of historical sociology and of historical social science at large, the study of the public sphere is missing. The rise of historical social science has not led to an established tradition of comparative historical research on the public sphere. This article gives an introduction to this topic and to this special issue, seeking to clarify the definition of the object of study and its stakes and providing an overview of analytic and historical dimensions relevant to the comparative historical study of the public sphere. The article argues that this search for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative historical research, for incorporating the fragmented research from numerous disciplines, and thus for improving our understanding of the historical formation and the transformations of this central sphere of social life.

This article explores labor transnationalism in the Brazilian auto sector. It argues that industrial structure, state institutions and practices, and labor ideologies affect the form and frequency of labor transnationalism. In Brazil in the 1980s, labor transnationalism was mostly limited to information exchange and occasional economic support, and political pressure in the form of letters of solidarity from foreign unionists. By the 1990s, when Brazil opened itself to world trade in the auto sector by dramatically lowering tariffs and domestic content requirements, labor began to pursue new strategies. Yet while facing similar challenges in the same industry and at times within the same corporation, unions of opposing political tendencies pursued different strategies. Conservative unions responded to economic globalization by deepening their ties with the government and the business sector, while left-oriented unions increasingly made use of new forms of transnational actions. By the early 2000s, in Ford and Volkswagen, solutions to labor conflicts were achieved after Brazilian auto unionists traveled to the headquarters of the auto firms in Detroit and Wolfsburg and negotiated directly with corporate headquarters.

Project RADIR (“Revolution and the Development of International Relations”), conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the years following the Second World War, was probably the first large-scale, quantitatively-based empirical research enterprise in contemporary political science. Inspired Dy the theories of Harold D. Lasswell about world revolutionary developments in the modern era, the project was in some respects the successor to work done in wartime Washington at the Library of Congress by Lasswell’s Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, and by the Organizations and Propaganda Analysis Section that Lasswell had helped to set up in the Special War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. When published in the early fifties, the Hoover Studies, as they came to be called, were noted not only for their substantive findings but also for their theoretical suggestiveness and their methodological boldness of overall design. Most pre-war empirical, quantitative work in political science had been hyperfactual, but the Hoover Studies represented a genuine break with that tradition. Some early reviewers, if not ignorant of quantitative analysis, had trouble with the project’s theoretical formulations, and others were methodologically innocent.^ The methodological novelty of the Hoover Studies consisted in the demonstration that quantitative data could be generated out of the verbal contents found in newspapers and conventional biographies. Although some political scientists had made use of aggregate data reported in the Census, government budgets, legislative roll-calls and electoral statistics, the notion that one can “create” one’s own massive body of data was still relatively new at mid-century. Public opinion polls had come into existence only in the middle thirties and had yet to be exploited fully for scientific purposes. It was in this research context that the Hoover Studies were published.

Data quality is a central analytical issue in most studies of historical populations. There is often a need for data correction as well as for a careful consideration of the sources and types of error in data collection. Cross-identification of enumerated or registered events in independent sources often can be used as a check on data quality. This study investigates data quality of two sources by their enumeration comparability and in addition discusses some of the problems with such a comparison. The two sources compared are household listings of the United States manuscript federal censuses and independently prepared maps detailing property owners and the location of their property. The method employed estimates the correspondence of listings in each source based on the other and the combined enumeration correspondence of both sources. Further, this paper examines some of the village-level demographic and economic factors which may be associated with differences in the relative completeness of these sources.

The early nineteenth-century decrease in several West Indian slave populations has been a subject of intense interest among historians of the region, of slavery, and of population dynamics (Higman, 1973; Curtin, 1969). Further data on birth rates, death rates, causes of deaths, and quantity and quality of slave importation and migration will help explain the phenomenon of “natural decrease. “The slave registration records of the island of Grenada provide useful information on this piece of demographic history. The records enumerate slave births and deaths and list causes of death, signed by a physician. There are few published reports on death rates and causes of death in West Indian slave populations (Higman, 1973; Handler and Lange, 1978; Roberts, 1952). The purpose of this study is to describe the causes of death, estimate specific death rates, and construct a life-table for slaves in Grenada in 1818.

Although writers like Stephenson (1979) have questioned the assumption, many historians of immigration continue to argue that geographic mobility and levels of working-class consciousness (as expressed in trade unions, strikes, or workers’ political parties) are negatively related. In so arguing, recent studies follow the work of MacDonald and MacDonald, who claim that where migration from Italy was high, labor militance was low (MacDonald, 1963, 1958; MacDonald and MacDonald, 1964). For example, Barton (1975) and Yans-McLaughlin (1977) argue that familist southern and eastern European peasants living in fluid, complex societies were most likely to emigrate to the United States, in hopes of improving their positions in their home villages. Their familism—strong solidarity within the nuclear family and concomitant competitiveness in relations with those outside the nuclear group—discouraged voluntary associations, including participation in workers’ organization both in Italy and in the United States.

In attempting to understand more fully the U.S. Supreme Court’s impact on national policymaking, scholars have examined Supreme Court policymaking as part of the “relatively cohesive alliances that endure for long periods of time” (Dahl, 1957: 280). These alliances or “party systems” represent relatively distinctive patterns in the general shape of national policy (Chambers and Burnham, 1975). It is common for historians to characterize the Jacksonian party system of 1828-1860 as a period in American history when national policy was aimed at aiding agrarian interests, or the First and Second Republican party systems in the later part of the nineteenth century as periods when national policy favored the rising industrial and financial interests. The change from one party system to another is the result of a process political scientists and historians have termed “partisan realignment” (Key, 1955). Periods of realignment in American politics are marked by a rapid change in the social and political agenda, which results in a significant and durable change in the party support in the electorate as well as in a significant change in institutional roles and national policy (Burnham, 1970; Jahnige, 1971; Sundquist, 1973; Trilling and Campbell, 1980). The new party balance may give rise to a shift from the dominance of one party to another, or an entirely new party system may develop. A relationship between mass electoral behavior and public policy appears to exist during periods of partisan realignment. The elections that produce this change in the party systems are termed “critical elections.”

As hand-harvest labor disappeared from the American cotton fields after World War II, labor market dynamics differed between two key production regions, the South and the West. In the South, predominantly resident African Americans and whites harvested cotton, whereas in the West the labor market was composed of white residents, domestic Latino migrant workers, and Mexican nationals temporarily immigrating under the sponsorship of the U.S. government (braceros). We use newly reconstructed data for the two regions and estimate for the first time the regional causes of the demise of the hand-harvest labor force from 1949 to 1964. Whereas cheaper harvest mechanization substantially affected both regions, the downward trend in cotton prices and government programs to control cotton acreage played important roles in the disappearance of hand–harvested cotton in the South, but not in the West.

Joyce Burnette's (2008) book investigates why women earned lower wages and had different occupations than men during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of more relevance in the present is why women often have lower earnings than and work in different occupations from men today. The answers from the past and present have some similarity, but the differences are considerably greater. The world of “brawn” jobs was transformed by technological change and sectoral shifts into a world of “brain” jobs. I will first address the question posed in the book and will end with that concerning today.

Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time.

Understanding the replacement of soil nutrients removed by harvests makes it possible to understand the influence of humans on long-term soil fertility. This article calculates nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium balances for cropland in 1920 for three agroecoregions distinguished by particular historical settlement patterns, land use, geography, and climatic characteristics in Catalonia, Spain. The analysis assesses and compares the regional potential for farmers to have returned the nutrients extracted from croplands at a time of transition, when only a few synthetic fertilizers were yet available. From sustainability science, the article borrows a methodology to reconstruct soil nutrient balances in historical agroecosystems from available regional historical sources. The soil balances indicate that nutrient extractions were balanced with the additions in Catalonia’s wetter Pyrenees and eastern regions, but were in deficit in the arid western regions, where less livestock manure was available. In Barcelona province, farmers made considerable use of synthetic fertilizers already in 1920. Such fertilizers were mainly intended to supplement phosphorus in the eastern region, suggesting that they played an important role there too, where there was not enough manure.

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as a heuristic tool for understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” or sē (without) curitās (care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.

This article offers the first multivariate regression study of international migration in early modern Europe. Using unique eighteenth-century data about maritime workers, we created a data set of migration flows among European countries to examine the role of factors related to geography, population, language, the market, and chain migration in explaining the migration of these workers across countries. We show that among all factors considered in our multivariate analysis, the geographical characteristics of the destination countries, size of port towns, and past migrations are among the most robust and quantitatively the most important factors influencing cross-country migration flows.

While quantitative methods are routinely used to examine historical materials, critics take issue with the use of global regression models that attach a single parameter to each predictor, thereby ignoring the effects of time and space, which together define the context in which historical events unfold. This problem can be addressed by allowing for parameter heterogeneity, as highlighted by the proliferation of work on the use of time-varying parameter models. In this article, I show how this approach can be extended to the case of spatial data using spatially varying coefficient models, with an eye toward the study of electoral politics, where the use of spatial data is especially common in historical settings. Toward this end, I revisit a critical case in the field of quantitative history: the rise of electoral Populism in the American West in the period between 1890 and 1896. Upending popular narratives about the correlates of third-party support in the late nineteenth century, I show that the association between third-party vote share and traditional predictors such as economic hardship and ethnic composition varied considerably from one place to the next, giving rise to distinct varieties of electoral Populism—a finding that is missed by global models, which mistake the mathematically particular for the historically general. These findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for the study of political action in a world where parameter heterogeneity is increasingly recognized as a standard feature of modern social science.

Finance is often considered a constraining or compelling force in war. This article examines an alternative role of finance in war, asserting that investors can inform states about adversarial intentions and resolve under certain conditions. This signaling mechanism can reduce information asymmetry between states and decrease the probability of conflict. In the context of these theoretical expectations, I examine the case of Austria and the Rothschild Bank in the nineteenth century. I find that instead of being a constraining force on Austrian foreign policy, the Rothschilds helped inform Austria and other European powers during interstate crises. The information provided by the Rothschilds helped Europe avert war in several cases during the nineteenth century.

A significant literature demonstrates that the presence of historic missionary societies—especially Protestant societies—during the colonial period is significantly and positively associated with increased educational attainment and economic outcomes. However, we know less about the mechanisms underlying the long-run consequences of institutions, as it is commonly very hard to disentangle direct effects from indirect effects. One clear way to do so, however, is to explore the long-term impact of missionary influence in places in which the direct beneficiaries of missionary education are no longer present. The present article considers one such region, the Anatolian region of the Ottoman Empire. Due to the ethnic violence and population movements at the start of the twentieth century, the newfound Turkish nation-state was largely religiously homogenous. This provides us with a unique situation to empirically assess the long-run indirect effects of Christian missionary societies on local human capital. For this purpose, I present an original dataset that provides the locations of Protestant mission stations and schools, Ottoman state-run schools, and Armenian community schools contained within Ottoman Anatolia between 1820 and 1914. Contrary to the common association found in the literature, this study does not find missionary presence to be correlated with modern-day schooling. Rather, I find that regions with a heightened missionary presence and an active Christian educational market perform better on the gender parity index for pretertiary schooling during both the Ottoman and Turkish periods.

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.

This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well as smaller datasets for other dates and locations. The results of this analysis are surprising. In spite of a high degree of consistency in the notarial profession and terminology (a trait that facilitates our comparisons), the notarial style of each city varied greatly. Variations within a single state were sometimes greater than those across state borders. Both supply and demand of notarial services differed from city to city. Overall, our conclusions are as important as the methodology that we adopt to reach them. Our aim is to offer a replicable analysis that puts quantitative methods in the service not only of the study of a source (notarial records) that is widespread across late medieval and early modern continental Europe and its overseas empires but also of a renewed comparative social history that does not shy away from the heterogeneity of primary sources.

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”