This paper illustrates some linguistic and statistical tools that can be profitably used by historians and social historians in the study of events (such as strikes, demonstrations and other types of collective conflict). More specifically, the paper shows that “semantic grammars” provide rigorous tools for the collection of rich event narratives. Semantic grammars structure information around the “canonical form” of the language: noun phrase/verb phrase, or subject, action, object and their modifiers (e.g. time, space). The fact that semantic grammars can be easily implemented in a computer environment using relational database systems (RDBMS) makes feasible the practical application of such powerful coding schemes. The data that computer-based semantic grammars make available are richer, more flexible and more reliable than those delivered by more traditional content analysis methods. They are also very well suited for the application of new tools of data analysis such as network models. Both semantic grammars and network models are fundamentally concerned with actors and their actions, with agents and agency. As such, these linguistic and statistical tools should draw sociology closer to history, traditionally much more concerned with issues of agency. I illustrate the power of both the linguistic and statistical tools using data that I collected from some 15,000 newspaper articles on the 1919-1922 period of Italian history, a period characterized by widespread working-class mobilization (1919–1920, the “red years”) and fascist counter-mobilization (1921-1922, the “black years”).

This paper examines labour disputes in London between 1790 and 1870, based on a systematic coverage of working-class newspapers. Disputes were classified by type, cause and trade. Evidence exists for 294 disputes, the large majority of which were strikes. The incidence of disputes roughly paralleled cyclical and seasonal fluctuations in the economy. Wage claims were the main cause for conflict, although interpretation of such disputes needs to be related to price movements. The most serious disputes were associated with significant changes in control over employment and the labour process. Skilled and unskilled workers were involved in disputes, both taking advantage of specific circumstances to exert power at the workplace. The extent to which London was prone to disputes is discussed and tentative comparisons drawn with other regions in Britain.

Social scientists often face a fundamental dilemma when they conduct social research. On the one hand, they may emphasize the complexity of social phenomena – a common strategy in ethnographic, historical and macro social research – and offer in–depth case studies sensitive to the specificity of the things they study. On the other hand, they may make broad, homo genizing assumptions about cases, and document generalities – patterns hold across many instances. Research strategies that focus on complexity are often labeled “qualitative”, “case–oriented”, “small–N”, or “intensive”. Those that focus on generality are often labeled “quantitative”, “variable–oriented”, “large–N”, or “extensive”. While the contrasts between these two types social research are substantial, it is easy to exaggerate their differences and t o caricature the two approaches, for example, portraying quantitative work on general patterns as scientific but sterile and oppressive, and qualitative research on small Ns as rich and emancipatory but journalistic. It is important to avoid these caricatures because the contrasts between these two general approaches provide important leads both for finding a middle path between them and for resolving basic methodological issues in social science Social scientists who study cases in an in–depth manner often see empiri cal generalizations simply as a means to another end – the interpretive understanding of cases. In this view, a fundamental goal of social science is t o interpret significant features of the social world and thereby advance our collective understanding of how existing social arrangements came about and why we live the way we do. The rough general patterns that social scientists may be able to identify simply aid the understanding of specific cases; they are not viewed as predictive. Besides, the task of interpreting and then representing socially significant phenomena (or the task of making selected social phenomena significant by representing them) is a much more immediate and tangible goal. In this view, empirical generalizations and social science theory are important – to the extent that they aid the goal interpretive understanding.

Australian data can reflect on British questions, about the quality of immigrant labour, and the opportunities gained by migrating, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three case studies are presented. The first uses quantitative methods and convict transportation records to argue that Ireland suffered a “brain drain” when Britain industrialized, siphoning off the cream of its workers to England and some, eventually, to Australia. Drawing on an entirely different type of data, the second study reaches strikingly similar positive conclusions about the qualities of Australia's early assisted immigrants: three splendidly visible immigrants stand for the tens of thousands of people who sailed out of urban and rural Britain to the distant colonies. A no less optimistic view of Australia's immigrants half a century later is demonstrated in the third case study on female domestic servants. Often referred to as the submerged stratum of the workforce, the most oppressed and the least skilled, the label “domestic servant” obscured a wide range of internal distinctions of rank and experience, and too often simply homogenized them into a sump of “surplus women”. This study helps to rescue the immigrant women from this fate and invests them with individuality and volition, offering the vision of the intercontinentally peripatetic domestic, piloting her way about the globe, taking advantage of colonial labour shortages to maximize her mobility and her family strategies. Best of all, these migrants emerge as individuals out of the mass, faces with names, people with agenda.

In the past two decades, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major analytical paradigm in sociology and now occupies a strategic place in disciplinary debates on a wide variety of issues. Historians, however, have been slow to adopt the approach for at least three reasons. First, the conceptual orientation of sociologists practicing historical social network analysis (HSNA) remains unfamiliar to the majority of professional historians. Just when SNA was maturing in the late 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary interest in social science theory among historians, so characteristic of the 1970s and early 1980s, began to wane. The subsequent turn toward post modernist thinking in history left the profession increasingly uninformed about both classical and contemporary social theory. Second, those quantitatively-oriented historians who might be predisposed to use SNA's specialized statistical methods constitute less than a quarter of the profession today, thus the risk of SNA finding its way into mainstream historical scholarship is low to start. Third, SNA's data requirements are formidable. SNA demands evidence of social interaction among all members of a social system for a variety of behaviors, and thus necessitates a broad range of high-quality records for the place, time and activities being studied. Because historians are plagued by an incomplete historical record and imperfect understandings of past social relations, HSNA remains an inherently problematic enterprise. Yet despite conceptual, methodological and evidentiary obstacles, SNA possesses real potential for historical analysis.

This article uses the concept of labour commodification to critique common historiographical portraits of skilled workers in transition to industrial capitalism. The meanings with which skilled workers in late nineteenth-century Australia understood their own labour went far beyond a repertoire of technical abilities. They viewed skill as a socio-biological disposition specific to a human type (adult, male, Anglo-Saxon), and this view intimately connected artisans' work and selfhood. Capitalist industrial change threatened to disrupt those connections. The notoriously exclusive union policies skilled workers invented can thus be seen as designed not simply to position their members more advantageously on the labour market, but to protect artisanal selves and identities from the corrosive effects of labour commodification.

Event-structure analysis (ESA) is a member of a family of formal analytic procedures designed to analyze and interpret text, in particular the temporal sequences constituting the narrative of a historical event. Its basic purpose is to aid the analyst in “unpacking” an event – that is, in breaking it into constituent parts – and analytically reconstituting it as a causal interpretation of what happened and why it happened as it did. ESA focuses on and exploits an event's “narrativity” – its temporal orderliness, connectedness and unfolding – thereby helping historians and social scientists infer causal links between actions in an event, identify its contingencies and follow their consequences, and explore its myriad sequential patterns. Unlike most other formal analytical techniques, it is completely non-numeric and non-statistical: ESA's value is largely heuristic and centered on how it relentlessly probes the analyst's construction, comprehension and interpretation of the event.