Abstract Spatial studies of British Victorian cities have been historically limited either in scope or specificity due to the unwieldiness of census data. However, over the last decade, the digitization of historical source material has created new possibilities for the exploration of geodemographic patterns. For the case of Manchester, the “shock city” of the British Industrial Revolution, these advancements are especially pertinent in order to settle long-standing debates as to the extent of segregation in the city. This article presents a method for the highly granular georeferencing of census data for the Manchester Township for the second half of the nineteenth century by drawing on historical material, including geographic and commercial surveys. Linking households to specific buildings presents increased possibilities for studies of heterogeneity and neighborhood patterns at a micro-scale. This approach ultimately lays the groundwork for future revisitations of nineteenth-century cities and the traditional claims that have been made around their urban dynamics.
Abstract Wages earned by men are often used as an indicator of the material standard of living (MSoL). However, this indicator relies on several assumptions when used for comparisons across time and space. Considering these assumptions will improve estimates of the MSoL from wages. One necessary assumption is that households in the compared populations relied on the primary income of the male head of household to a comparable degree. I demonstrate that the degree of reliance on the male income was closely associated with the complexity of households within the population. Nuclear households – typical of English-speaking countries – were more reliant on the male income than more complex households found elsewhere. Consequently, estimates based on male wages are less accurate for populations with complex households, likely underestimating their MSoL. While the complexity of households in historical populations is seldom known, it can be predicted using demographic and economic indicators. I conclude that populations at similar stages of industrialization and the demographic transition are the most comparable when using male wages to estimate their MSoL. Further, I use a reductive model to show that a household’s MSoL is determined by the following three factors: time spent on productive work, the market wage for men, and the female/male (F/M) wage ratio. My analysis shows that including the F/M wage ratio does not change the ranking of the MSoL based on male wages. Nonetheless, I argue that there are compelling reasons to expect the wage ratio to be a useful addition when comparing the MSoL of historical populations.
Three great waves of public anxiety about census privacy swept over the United States in the twentieth century. In 1940, 1970, and 2000, newspapers reported on fears of the public and politicians about invasive census questions. This article focuses on the second wave of privacy concerns surrounding the 1970 census, which focused on Big Brother and government overreach. The Census Bureau response stressed the confidentiality of census responses, but it failed to address the public concerns and sources of resistance to census inquiries. In addition to analyzing newspaper reports and congressional testimony, we examine individual refusals to respond to the census by members of the public and the Census Bureau’s responses to such refusals. By focusing on specific individual complaints instead of the general characterizations of concern found in newspaper coverage, we can gain a clearer understanding of the motives of the objectors.
Social scientists have long examined the relationship between war and state formation, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, work on non-European and colonial cases questioned the significance of war for state formation. Analyzing the Israeli case, I examine the relationship between war and state formation in a colonial context by focusing not on war itself but on the crises war may cause. I argue that war can shape state formation in a colonial context and suggest that theorizing crisis in political development reveals novel ways in which the relationship between war and state formation plays out. Empirically, I show that some of the main obstacles that hampered Zionist colonization and state formation in Palestine were the country's health conditions, which seriously deteriorated during World War I. These health-related obstacles to colonization and state formation were removed by the work of American Jewish organizations after the war. Importantly, the critical work of these public health organizations stemmed from the local and global crises caused by the war. I also consider how responses to the postwar health crisis in the Jewish sector shaped the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Having noted the significance of crisis, I build on existing literature to theorize it as a potentially structurally transformative "event." But unlike eventful analyses, I claim that transformative crises are not necessarily rifts or radical breaks from past patterns. Rather, preexisting patterns and conditions that precede eventful crises shape how transformation plays out.
Gwageo in Joseon Korea (1392-1897) was a civil service examination system rooted in meritocratic principles, selecting government officials based on Confucian scholarship. From its inception in 1393 to its abolition in 1894, a regular gwageo examination was mostly held every three years, while special examinations were held irregularly. The frequency of special examinations increased over time, and their total number eventually reached nearly three times that of the regular examinations. The sociology of education proposes that educational expansion and changes in selection rules tend to benefit the privileged more before benefiting the less privileged. Using historical records of successful civil service examination passers that are linked to information on family backgrounds, this study examines the differences in the family backgrounds of passers between regular and special examinations. The results show that the privileged, such as those with more ancestors who passed previous examinations and those who came from powerful family clans, accounted for a higher proportion in special examinations than in regular examinations. This tendency was more pronounced during periods of the Joseon Dynasty when the power of the privileged was particularly strong. These findings suggest that the privileged groups' adaptation strategies to new and varying rules are applicable even in premodern examination systems, such as the gwageo in Joseon Korea.
How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey's infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey's infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state's predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.
Historical and criminological studies of female participation in gangs and organized crime have tended to focus on mixed-sex, male-dominated groups. This article offers an examination of the "Forty Elephants" gang, an all-female criminal group that operated in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on digitized newspaper sources, the study uses social network analysis (SNA) to trace structural shifts across two periods associated with different leaders of the gang. The findings reveal a shift from a relatively centralized network in the gang's earlier years to a looser, more diffuse structure in the later period, with influence spread across multiple figures rather than concentrated in a single, dominant leader. These structural changes are contextualized within broader historical developments, including internal gang conflict, law enforcement attention, criminal justice responses, and shifts in offending methods. By combining quantitative SNA with qualitative historical analysis, the article demonstrates how digital methods can reveal overlooked patterns of female collaboration and co-offending. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes of women as marginal offenders and provides a methodological model for applying network analysis to historical crime research, where such methods remain underused.
How and why did East Asians develop their tight-knit social relationships? In answering this question, I have developed a theoretical notion, the social cage, which is a social institution that rice-farming societies have built to discourage their members from exiting. Initially, this comparative-historical study traces back to the Song Dynasty to consider two institutionally complementary revolutions as the sources of contemporary social cages in East Asia: the emergence of the wet-rice transplanting technique and the evolution of Zhu Xi's neo-Confucianism (Sung Idea). Next, by comparing the Jiangnan area of Southern China, Korea, and Japan during the premodern period, this article provides antecedent, premodern footages of contemporary rice cultivation cultures and their caging institutions. The article also suggests that the social cage institutions shaped through ecology-human interactions in the premodern era persistently affect industrialization outcomes today. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings as they pertain to contemporary social theory.
Decolonization left the future of small, city-states uncertain. Without large domestic markets to turn to, some city-states developed financial industries. Comparing Kuwait and Singapore, I examine how these states developed their financial sectors after decades of colonial underdevelopment. While both states sought to develop international financial centers, Singapore was far more successful in doing so. Kuwait opened numerous merchant-owned, domestic commercial banks but with sluggish rates of growth, while Singapore saw the emergence of new state-run banks; the consolidation, modernization, and growth of privately owned banks; and the establishment of a rapidly growing global financial center. I identify three processes to explain this divergence: (1) the state's ability to discipline merchant-capitalists; (2) the institutional legacies of colonialism and postcolonial maneuvering; and (3) the incorporation of transnational experts into ruling coalitions. By unearthing the mechanisms of financial development, this article contributes to sociologies of development, finance, expertise, and small states.
This article interrogates the formation of a national political consensus around coal in the United States. In the postwar era, the domestic future of coal was seriously challenged by the oil, gas, and nuclear alternatives. In less than two decades, however, coal mining shifted from being one of multiple energy options to being a national political project tied to regional development and energy sovereignty. Why did this shift occur? Using archival data, I argue that it was not primarily a response to market forces or corporate pressures but was furthered through the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). In the years following its inception in 1965, the agency articulated the coal consensus as both a solution to the problem of Appalachian underdevelopment and to the looming energy crisis. In doing so, it brought together the interests of regional, federal, and corporate actors around this consequential project. In this article, I delineate a pathway through which bureaucratic agencies can play a decisive role in the formation of political ideas and advance our understanding of the conditions that make energy transitions possible.
This presidential address discusses the developing body of research on the quality and idiosyncrasies of historical data, focusing in particular on historical census microdata. I argue that greater attention to source criticism as a genuine subfield of social science history is essential for four reasons: to fully benefit from the expansion of big historical data, to imagine new ways to analyze historical data beyond the intentions of creators, to share insights with a wider range of scholars, and to contribute nuanced perspectives on historical data to public debates surrounding the use of these sources. I contend that historians outside social science history are vastly underestimating the creativity that is happening in our field. I also argue that social science historians are underestimating how important our work is to informing public discourse.
How did Protestant female missionaries influence women's political participation in colonial Korea? Under Joseon Confucian norms, women were excluded from education and public life. The first Western female missionary arrived in 1885 and trained Korean "Bible women," creating spaces for women's education and organization during colonial rule (1910-1945). While existing research examines missionary effects on education and fertility, impacts on political participation remain unexplored. Using historical mission records and data on independence activists, I find that greater exposure to female missionaries led to greater female political activism. Gender-specific ordinary least squares analysis reveals that female missionary exposure strongly predicts women's activism, whereas it has no effect on men. To strengthen causal identification, I employ missionary children as an instrumental variable. Mechanisms operate through female role models and informal networks, including Bible classes and home visits. These findings provide the first systematic evidence linking Protestant missions to women's political empowerment before suffrage, with effects persisting in female political representation after 1945.
The global wave of anti-racist social movements in the summer of 2020 was marked by calls for the removal or recontextualization of statues in public space. Conservative politicians and pundits, in turn, framed cultural activism as a "culture war" and a crisis that entailed "erasing history" by calling national heroes into question. I argue that framing the toppling of statues as a historical crisis derives from a colonial understanding of knowledge as singular, universal, and fundamentally European. This understanding of knowledge analytically bifurcates the past and refuses anti-colonial histories of insurgency and contestation. To counter this approach, I engage with the concept of postcolonial critical realism, which theorizes the power of colonial discourses to shape material institutions and esthetic forms, as well as the anti-colonial potential of counter-discourses. To illustrate this argument, I consider the history of two contested statues: Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, and Jos & eacute;phine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France, Martinique. By revisiting this crisis and the responses it engendered, we can make sense of the present "culture war" not as a contemporary crisis but as a response to a longer historical crisis.
This article considers indicators of group similarity and difference and their relation to institutional discrimination in the United States and Japan. For this inquiry, discrimination is operationalized as the extent to which exclusion or marginalization in society is determined by the embodiment of difference (in this case, the Western conception of race). I contend that belonging and race are tightly coupled within the US context because its society was founded on a racial hierarchy that subjugated all groups deemed "not white" for the direct benefit of enfranchised white males. Although some racial groups have made substantial gains, race remains highly consequential for the life outcomes of most individuals in the United States. Japan, however, has a much looser association between Western race and belonging. This is largely because ethnocultural identity, not the Western construction of race, has historically been the primary axis of discrimination in Japanese society. Although race as understood in the West is relevant for some forms of interpersonal discrimination, ethnocultural identity remains the primary determinant of belonging or exclusion in Japan.
This article examines the enduring connections between past and present in world history by analyzing recurrent social mechanisms and evolving practices that enact them. While sociology has traditionally emphasized discontinuities and social change, I argue that some foundational mechanisms persist across time and space, yet they appear under varying practices. Drawing from Charles Tilly's framework of mechanisms and repertoires of practices, I identify six recurrent mechanisms in world-historical processes: threat attribution, group identification, subordination, affinity bridging, rebellion, and commodification. Then, I provide a broad historical narrative tracing their gradual emergence, beginning with threat attribution in early hominid evolution, group identification in the Upper Paleolithic, and subordination with the transition to agrarian civilizations. During the Axial Age, institutional entrepreneurs and their followers developed affinity bridging and rebellion, which emerged as a reaction to subordination, first manifesting through religious movements and later through secular political practices. I then combine these mechanisms to briefly discuss further historical processes, including the trajectories of Islam and Christianity, the European conquest of Hispanic America, the rise of modern society (where I discuss the intensification of commodification), and the evolving global order following World War II. This perspective views human history as structured by both continuity and change between the past and the present: while mechanisms persist and recur, they are enacted through historically specific and evolving repertoires of practices.
In the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, W. E. B. Du Bois deployed imperially charged terminologies such as "progress," "nation," and "civilization," entangled with racism-imbued linear-progressive historiography. Rather than discounting Du Bois's usage of these terms as a passive internalization of the imperial episteme, we regard Du Bois's adoption of these terms (and curation in the exhibition more broadly) as a fruitful avenue for us to consider the methodological, theoretical, and public-sociological implications of using imperially entangled terms. Centering Du Bois' embeddedness in collaborative epistemic communities and his socio-political context, we read his work for the Paris Exhibition of 1900 as a strategic response to the double crisis of social science and post-Reconstruction Black America. We argue that Du Bois subverted and dislocated the concepts of "progress," "crisis," and "nation" from their contemporary decontextualized usage to address grounded problems facing Black people in the United States and undertook this redefinition through his dialogic interactions with Black American and Pan-African activists of his time. With a plethora of images, statistics, books written by Black authors, photographs, and cultural artifacts, he provided a narrative of social development that challenged racial stereotypes and the developmental model favored by empire-states. Today, historical social sciences are also undergoing institutional and epistemological crises. Building on Du Bois's subversive exhibit and adopting the conceptual framework of "reverse tutelage," we argue that contemporary historical social scientists should also approach conceptual development and global linkages by being grounded in communities of resistance to grasp and recover radical potentialities.
Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of "articulation," in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party's expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power.
