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.

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.

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.

For decades, people have viewed narcotics as a devil impeding the modernisation of China, but they have recently been faced with the challenge of declaring that narcotics are harmless in some instances. A deeper understanding of this issue requires historical approaches which show that the demonisation of narcotics has mainly been a political pursuit. In re-examining the drug problem and its correlation to political and socio-economic issues, data statistics based on substantial archives in modern China play a crucial role. Discovered in 2007 in Longquan, a city in southeast China, Judicial Records of Longquan remains the largest judicial record in modern China by far. Data analysis reveals government efforts regarding drug control were not in line with the peak periods of drug-related cases in Longquan. Drawing on previously unexamined documents, it can be shown that anti-drug mobilisation and hygienic conditions have been overstated to legitimise the authority of governments in modern China. However, the knowledge of local residents regarding medicine and health was indirectly promoted in this agenda. Compared with the negative image of drugs constructed under the biopower of government, the role of narcotics was a positive vehicle for accelerating health mobilization during the Republic of China.