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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Virtually from the beginning “collective biography,” or “prosopography,” has been seen as one of the most powerful and useful techniques of the “new” quantitative history. As Lawrence Stone succinctly described that technique, it is “ … the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors by means of a collective study of their lives.” It is not case, of course, as Stone also makes clear, that the new quantitative historians invented collective biography. In fact, the approach was used by historians and other social scientists well before the advent of quantitative history. Even so, the technique has frequently been employed by quantitative historians and may even be seen by some as virtually a hallmark of that approach to historical studies.