West Africa’s disease environment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was decidedly hazardous to the health of Europeans who ventured there. Comtemporary observers reported die-offs of white troops reaching the 80 percent mark annually, while the loss of one half of a ship’s company on the coast was not all that unusual. Philip Curtin has calculated that on the average England’s loss of white troops ranged between 300-700 per 1,000 mean strength per annum with his most recent word on the subject placing the overall white death toll at about half of the white soldiers, government officials, and civilian personnel who reached West African shores. K. G. Davies, on the other hand, would have the “risks of the African station” even higher with an individual facing “three chances in five of being dead within a year.”

West African natives by contrast positively thrived amidst European death. Again referring to Curtin’s data, the biggest killer of whites by far was “fever.” The fevers of Sierra Leone, for example, dispatched white troops at the rate of 410.2 per thousand per annum during the years 1819-1836, yet caused the death of only 2.5 African troops per thousand per annum. A similar differential experience with fevers occurred throughout West Africa—an experience which Professor Curtin has suggested constituted a crucial reason for the Atlantic slave traded Europeans would have preferred to locate plantations in tropical Africa close to a seemingly inexhaustible source of cheap labor, but they were persuaded by the lethal nature of West African fevers to locate those plantations instead in the more salubrious New World. Put plainly, they found the expense of transporting African workers across the Atlantic eminently preferable to challenging the odds against their own survival in Africa.

The subject of the course that I shall offer this year at the Collège de France is the economy and society—or, better, the traditional ecodemography of the world long gone—as they “functioned,” if one may use this term, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, or, more precisely, from 1300-1320 to 1720-1730. Forsake of convenience, this world will be de-limited by the present frontiers of France—a decision of pure form with no implication of tri-color or fleur-de-lys. We shall be concerned with about 15 to 20 million people in every period, although there will be long intervals between actual dates. To be sure, a similar study could be carried out (and probably will be if it has not been already) among our neighbors: Germany, Italy, without a doubt Spain, but possibly not the British Isles. One of the paradoxes of such an undertaking is that the Kingdom of England, where The World We Have Lost was first defined with such penetrating insight, is of all western countries the one where that world was the least typical and the least stable.

A prominent feature of much of the “new” social history of the past decade is the use of various representations to convey socioeconomic status. Most of these studies have been concerned with aspects of horizontal and vertical mobility, but they include urban and community studies and miscellaneous topics as well. Using scales developed by sociologists in the twentieth century that were initially created to judge a family’s suitability for adoption or to assist the United States Public Health Service in analyses of vital statistics raises interesting problems vis-à-vis current historical applications. One of these problems involves a familiarity with huge theoretical and empirical literature on status of the last half-century. Starting from Counts’ scale in 1925, a sociologist inventorying the literature in 1953 counted some 333 publications on the topic to that year.

With these problems in mind, two objectives are proposed in this article. First, the use of socioeconomic status evaluations will be discussed from an historian’s perspective. This will be done under three general headings: context, ascription, and measurement. Second, having established the necessary critical background, the utility of using socioeconomic status evaluation to characterize and evaluate multidecade and aggregate developments in socioeconomic structures will be proposed.

In recent years there has been some penetrating historical writing on the pre- and early conditions of rapid industrialization in Britain and western Europe. While not establishing any exact theoretical framework, these studies affirm a number of general propositions, such as: the importance of social, including political, preconditions; the necessity of an adequate business structure; and the value of studying change more minutely to see the effect of regional as well as national differences. An overall conclusion that emerges is that rapid change to substantially higher productivity is a very complex social process in which the same conditions may operate in various areas with differing force and effects. Furthermore, it appears that no single social science provides an adequate array of questions. Studies in anthropology, economics, geography, political science, social psychology, and sociology can contribute to theory, or isolate important variables, but these must in some fashion be tested against reality over time by materials supplied chiefly by historians.

The United States with its continental differences and semi-autonomous state administrations offers excellent opportunities for both regional and comparative study. One topic that is particularly attractive, because it has been relatively neglected, is the rapid industrialization of the Delaware and Susquehanna areas—southern New Jersey, eastern Maryland, northern Delaware, and eastern Pennsylvania. This article is a brief preview of the types of research that some of us will pursue in forthcoming years. The examples cited come more from Pennsylvania than from the other states because of a larger secondary literature.

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

V. O. Key’s proposition that one-party politics in the American states has been destructive of both the dominant and minor parties in such systems fits California’s political experience very nicely. From 1893 to 1932 California Republicans captured almost all statewide offices and they maintained huge legislative majorities. Furthermore, both parties entered the 1930’s with little institutionalized capacity for performing the basic nominating and campaigning functions. It appears, therefore, that the notorious weakness of political parties in California could be accounted for in terms of Key’s theories of the debilitating impact of one-party politics. Understandably, however, this line of speculation raises questions in the minds of those students of California politics who are aware of the several studies that particularly credit crossfiling for the weakness of California parties at mid-century. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between intensity of interparty competition and crossfiling in California politics during the first half of this century. In establishing this relationship, this study first shows that crossfiling did not become a general practice until after the end of California’s one-party era (1893-1932). The analysis then goes on to demonstrate that, during the one-party 1920’s, crossfiling occurred more often in the relatively competitive areas of the state than in the most profoundly one-party areas. Finally, a deviant case analysis develops the correspondence between the incidence of successful crossfiling (winning both parties’ primaries) and the relative competitiveness of types of offices.

Migration, social mobility, and social change are questions that have aroused animated international research debate during recent years. Throughout this discussion, migration often is found to be the triggering mechanism for upward social mobility and social change in the life cycle of individuals. The connection between long-distance migration and social progress in an expanding labor market is thus an important one. In American investigations, a significant amount of social mobility, both upward and downward, has been registered between roughly defined strata in the society. With a corresponding social structure in three Swedish cities investigated in the so-called “Three City Study,” almost the same results are evident.

The design of an efficient sampling scheme for the study of population and space in the nineteenth century is a challenging problem for historians. To examine the relationship of social life to the general form of the city, the sample must cover the whole territory. Working on that scale however, a researcher ordinarily sacrifices detail to achieve coverage. But to examine the constraints and the routine which are part of everyday experience, the sample must provide that very detail- intensive observations of small areal sub-populations. When the researcher has that detail, he/she ordinarily sacrifices the attempt to achieve uniform coverage of the city as a whole. The two goals have seemed mutually exclusive in any single sampling design. Thus the historical study of the American city has often followed two distinct lines of approach: either gross patterns in urban land use have been investigated to understand aspects of the city’s change, its dynamics of growth, and the development of suburbanization, for example; or intensive studies of the experience of neighborhoods or single ethnic or social groups have been conducted.

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

This paper undertakes an examination, in the light of economic theory, of the growth of English agricultural productivity before and after the Civil War. The hypothesis is simply that the mid-seventeenth century witnessed an inflection point in the growth of agricultural productivity, specifically, a significantly more rapid growth after 1650 than before.

In Part I of this study, our focus was on the bases of crime in Imperial Germany during the 1880s—the “take-off” stage of German industrial development. In Part II, we will extend the time dimension of our analysis to include the period of growth between the 1880s and 1914, and we will also broaden the scope of the issues and explanatory variables to be considered.

In many ways, German society in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I represents an excellent historical context for a study of the impact of urban-industrial development on crime. The German criminologist Aschaffenburg notes: “The last twenty years [1885-1905] of German criminality are especially suitable for such an analysis, because no transfiguring upheavals have taken place; the years having been marked by a great economic and cultural advance.” German society during this time enjoyed a period of international peace unknown since the years between 1815 and 1848. This period of relative tranquility allows the scholar a chance to analyze the problem of crime in its relations to socioeconomic conditions without having to control for the serious disturbing factors induced by war. La belle époque, as this period has been referred to by contemporary historians, also graced Germany with a respite from the bellicose domestic turmoil that it suffered in the past century. The movement for national unification had finally been completed, and the struggle for social reform had changed from the vitriolic confrontations of the watershed years of 1830 and 1848 to a peaceful and evolutionary, if no less manifest, nature.

In recent years, the gap between the traditional study of history and the concerns of modern social science has been bridged by a number of interdisciplinary minded scholars who have sought to undertake a more rigorous and theoretically relevant examination of the basic structural components of societies as they have changed over time. I Within this emergent field of socio-historical inquiry, it is possible to locate a growing body of quantitatively oriented research designed to relate various forms of social dissent and political unrest to the conditions and dislocations engendered by the processes of urban-industrial development. In particular, patterns in various types of social and political pathologies (e.g., crime, social disorganization, popular disturbances, etc.) have come to represent important foci for quantitative historical research, especially in the industrializing contexts of 19th-century Europe, where ample documentation of a statistical nature concerning many of these phenomena has existed for well over a century and a half.

In the summer of 1886, the conservative “Whig” wing of the Liberal party, led by Lord Hartington, together with a small group of Radical Unionists under Joseph Chamberlain, broke with the Liberal leader, Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and formed the Liberal Unionist party. This not-unexpected event occurred in two stages. The first was the defection of ninety-three Liberals to the Conservative opposition on the second reading of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in June, resulting in its defeat. The second stage was the decision of Hartington, Chamberlain, and their followers to contest, with Conservative support, parliamentary seats against Liberals in the ensuing July election which Gladstone called on the issue of Irish Home Rule.

The election of July, 1886 proved to be a critical juncture in British party alignment. The shift in the strength of the parties caused by the return of seventy-eight Liberal Unionists to the parliament of 1886-92 and their support of the Conservatives ended forty years of Liberal domination and began a generation of Conservative hegemony. The Liberal Unionists maintained a parliamentary strength of about seventy members and a separate identity until they merged with the Conservatives in 1912; few of the dissident Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal party. The formation of the Unionist (Conservative and Liberal Unionist) coalition had long-term ramifications as well because it set the stage for the emergence of class politics shortly after the turn of the century.

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

A nation is minimally constituted by a population which shares two experiences, that of occupation of the same territory and of exposure to the exercise of a central state authority. Some societies are more self-sufficient in their economies and cultures than others; some societies surrender more or less political autonomy to a larger body than the nation. Nations, however, are generally the whole of which other bodies are the parts; the nation, in turn, is not usually part of another, larger whole. Edward Shils argues that the state creates conditions which are conducive to a national culture. By giving a population a “common focus of attention,” a common experience of the state’s exercise of its authority among those who share the same territory, and a belief in the legitimacy of the state’s power, conditions are generated which lead, often if not always, to a central culture which defines and expresses the history of the nation, the meaning of membership in the nation, and its basic commitments. Such a national belief-system is the “civil” or “civic” religion which a variety of historians and sociologists have located in American schools, national ceremonies, the regalia of office, and in political rhetoric. It is this culture which provides a non-theoretical answer to the question of what makes a nation “more than” the interaction of organizations and groups coordinated and controlled by a central state. But it is also this culture which becomes the source of new ambiguities concerning the grounds and limits of political authority.

The frequent association of memorable political leaders with formative political events is the source of the classic dispute over whether great men make great events or whether the events are themselves the conditions of great leadership. The long controversy over the role of leaders in history has often fastened on periods of fundamental political change—the creation of new states, major wars, changes of regime. Washington, Bolivar, Cavour, and Nehru are studied as fathers of their countries, Lincoln and Churchill as great war leaders, Lenin and Mao as architects of major revolutions, Ataturk and DeGaulle as founders of new regimes.

We are generally aware that such men, regardless of their personal distinctions, might well have escaped the notice of historians, had they lived in normal times; indeed each passed substantial periods of his life as a minor politician, local military commander, occasional writer, or unheeded prophet. We are also aware that the place of such men in history is the product of the interpretation—and reinterpretation—of succeeding generations of historians. On the other hand, we know relatively little about how these men were viewed by their leading contemporaries, less about the attitudes toward them of the general publics of their time, and almost nothing about the development of public attitudes toward them during their lifetime. Only with respect to the political leaders of our own time do we begin to have data which permits us to investigate the development of public perceptions of great leaders. In this way we can fill the gap in our knowledge of the complex and reciprocal relationship between historic political leaders and the members of their political communities who, in following them, gave them the possibility of shaping history.

Douglass North’s The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860, while not the most controversial of the works of “new economic historians” in the 1960s, was among the first and was probably the most widely used of any of these in undergraduate history courses. In addition to its widespread use—possibly the first introduction of many history students to an economic approach to their subject—it framed, if not originated, a number of hypotheses about the process of American economic growth and about various specific relationships which have been and remain the basis of empirical work. In examining its importance the question is not just whether on certain specific points North was right, but also whether the book generated important hypotheses for empirical testing. In these latter regards here clearly was an important book, and, while it may seem to be incomplete or to fail on some specific issues, we should add that even now it is often unclear what the “right” answers might be.

In recent decades historians have become increasingly interested in utilizing the approaches of quantitative social sciences to aid their understanding of the past. One aspect of social life that lends itself well to quantitative study is demographic behavior and indeed historical demography has been flourishing. Although the questions posed by social historians inevitably transcend purely demographic issues, a firm knowledge of demographic conditions can be a valuable asset in the pursuit of a broader understanding of society in past times.

For the latter part of the nineteenth century, a critical period in the transformation of western European populations into modern urban-industrial societies, abundant demographic data are available in the relatively easily accessible published census and vital statistics reports. Because nineteenth-century statisticians and bureaucrats considered the urban-rural division as a fundamental and meaningful delineation of society, statistical bureaus throughout Europe tabulated a large number of statistics, including those derived from censuses and vital registration, according to some scheme of urban-rural classification and frequently provided separate tabulations for individual large cities. In addition, a number of contemporary scholars wrote articles and monographs utilizing these data. * Together these sources can be particularly useful for assessing the differences between urban and rural conditions of life at a time when cities and towns were beginning to claim an increasing share of a country’s population.