The study of mass public opinion has been an important area of social science research, and it has been of particular concern for political scientists, because the relationship between public opinion and government policy is central to theories about democracy and political power (e.g., see Dahl, 1956; Downs, 1957; Devine, 1970; Weissberg, 1976). Our main argument in this essay is that political scientists and others should be open to a variety of approaches in studying trends in public opinion and the relationship between public preferences and government policies, and that they should begin to pay attention to the findings and methods of recent historiography and, especially, the “new social history.”

One of the persisting problems in the religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has been a question of taxonomy. Authors still puzzle over whether we should have a name for the moderate, conforming section of the Church of England, to distinguish it from those whom we call Puritans. Was there, in fact, an essential difference between those two groups? A second question is, How far to the “left” on the religious “continuum” can we go before Puritanism changes into something qualitatively different? This usually becomes the problem of whether the Quakers were the extreme fringe of Puritanism or something altogether different. This study will offer evidence, statistically expressed, that there were consistent and significant differences between these positions.

American ethnic groups vary in terms of movement on the economic ladder, position on the political spectrum, and educational attainment. Members of individual groups also congregate in particular occupations; Koreans in Los Angeles are overrepresented in the retail liquor industry (Light and Bonacich, 1988) and Greeks in New England are concentrated in pizza businesses (Lovell-Troy, 1980). While many of these differences may be obvious, an explanation for why they occur poses a serious challenge to social scientists. In response, scholars have proposed two theoretical frameworks, cultural and contextual, for understanding ethnic behavior. A cultural interpretation stresses that American ethnic groups’ behaviors are based on cultural traits brought from their countries of origin. In contrast, a contextual analysis explains ethnic conduct as immigrants’ responses to their new societies.

These three papers were among those presented at a conference entitled “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost?” held under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Institute of the University of Rochester in October 1988. Other papers from this conference will be published in Social Science History over the next several issues, and the full set of papers will be published by Duke University Press.

Municipal administration was changed dramatically in the United States during the Progressive Era. Most explanations of this transformation have been society centered rather than state centered. Society-centered explanations, based on such factors as social movements, ethnicity, religion, social class, occupational composition, and population size have not provided a coherent account of the range and nature of the transformations in municipal administration in the Progressive Era. For example, democracy was expanded through municipal autonomy delegated by state legislatures and contracted by limiting ward representation, business practices were copied organizationally and challenged legally, and municipal administration was decentralized in proprietary functions and centralized in bureaucracy. Most importantly, society-centered factors have not accounted for the legal shaping of the state, in particular in framing the municipality’s administration and proprietary transactions. Empirical relationships between such state-centered changes as court-mandated contract responsibilities and, for example, social class or ethnicity have not been established—nor can they be cogently argued.

This paper deals with the distribution of power among Belgian political parties during the interwar period. In the 1930s Belgium, like most European countries, was confronted with the electoral success of extreme right- and left-wing parties that wanted to change the existing political system into an authoritarian one. Usually, historians draw attention to the rapidly growing share of seats in Parliament held by extreme parties as a sign of their increasing influence on Belgian politics. Among game theorists, however, it is widely accepted that the proportion of seats is a poor proxy for power relations (Schotter, 1979). It is indeed possible that a political party acquiring a higher proportion of seats in Parliament loses its capacity to influence the outcome of a vote, and vice versa.

Any communicable disease that strikes urban populations poses difficult problems for public health officials. First, treatment in the early stages of these diseases may be based primarily on guesswork; before the etiology of the disease is fully known, public health officials are often prompted by public fear to take action to curb and treat the disease (Terris, 1985). Second, even when effective treatments have been identified, these may be politically costly. When dealing with communicable diseases, responsible public health professionals have at times concluded that measures such as quarantine, mass screening, or mandatory reporting of the disease are necessary. Mandatory reporting of previous sexual partners by carriers of any sexually transmitted diseases may prove embarrassing or destructive to an individual’s business or social life. In the face of such threats, individuals who face such measures may mount political campaigns against them, making them risky for public health officials. Third, even when effective treatments are known, they may be very expensive to administer and may tax existing public facilities (hospitals, clinics) and funding for public health.

From the point of view of the preindustrial world, the development of the English cotton textile industry in the eighteenth century was truly revolutionary. The industry was established early in the century as a peasant craft (section 2; note 2), and by 1850 it had been almost completely transformed in terms of the organization and technology of production. Of the total work force of 374,000 employed in the industry in 1850, only 43,000 (approximately 11.5 percent of the total) were employed outside the factory system of organization. In terms of technology, the industry was virtually mechanized by this time: there were 20,977,000 spindles and 250,000 power looms in the industry in 1850. What is more, steam had become the dominant form of power used in the industry—71,000 horsepower supplied by steam as opposed to 11,000 supplied by water (Mitchell, 1962: 185, 187). Value added in the industry by this time exceeded by about 50 percent that in the woolen textile industry, the dominant industry in England for over four centuries. This rate of development was something that had never been experienced in any industry in the preindustrial world. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution in England, in the strict sense of the phrase, is little more than a revolution in eighteenth-century cotton textile production.

By the 1920s, social reformers believed that the requirements of modern industry created an increasing disadvantage for older people “in competition with those who have the greater quickness and adaptability of youth” (Nassau, 1915: 15). Old-age poverty resulting from unemployment was considered to be an urban problem because in rural communities “there is always work . . . and rent is negligible” (Nassau, 1915: 15).

Realignment of the American party system is a major focus for students of voting behavior, congressional policy making, and political history (Key, 1955; Burnham, 1970; Clubb, Flannigan, and Zingale, 1980; Kleppner, 1979; Sundquist, 1973; Campbell, 1977; Trilling and Campbell, 1980; Ladd and Hadley, 1978; Brady and Stewart, 1982; Brady, 1985; Sinclair, 1982). The transformation of the party system encompasses significant shifts in electoral support for the major political parties, changes in congressional policy making, and a redirection of national policy making. The rise of new party eras is intriguing because the constitutional structure seeks to minimize such major institutional and policy change. The separation of powers, federalism, and different recruitment patterns for political leaders are structural factors inhibiting major policy change (Brady, 1985). Realignment overcomes these barriers as highly volatile and cross-cutting issues arise. These issues produce linkages between electoral choice, congressional voting, and the broad shape of national policy making.

The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic population growth in the United States. In 1800 scarcely five million people resided in the fifteen states. By 1900 the populace had increased fifteenfold, and settlement stretched from the Atlantic coast westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean (Century of Population Growth, 1909).

The “numbers game” (Curtin, 1969: ch. 1; Darity, 1985) remains a favorite event in academic jousting over the Atlantic slave trade, not only because unexpectedly detailed quantitative records continue to turn up in archival repositories but also, more recently, because of the suppleness with which scholars have applied data discovered by the first generation of researchers to new, and increasingly more sophisticated, historical problems. Old, relatively formal, analytical categories—decades; large, internally diverse stretches of the African coast; colonial/national aggregates on the American side of the Atlantic—although comparable among themselves, now seem more revealing of the data than of the history of the trade and are very salutarily giving way to questions and issues arising more directly from the experience itself: the causes of slave mortality, the economic strategies of slavers, age and sex distinctions among the slaves, the meaning of slaving for specific regions in Africa, and the trade’s contributions to events in Europe and the Americas. Use of quantitative data now presupposes the discovery of historically relevant categories of analysis and at the same time informs the meaning of the categories employed.

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

For most of the nineteenth century, French people associated hospitals with death and destitution. These institutions served as places where the poor went to die, not to be cured. As a result, hospitals (including maternity hospitals) were shelters of last resort for the poorest classes of society. Anyone who could avoid going to one of these institutions would shun them, at all possible costs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, with the development of anesthesia and with the implementation of antiseptic and sterilization procedures, hospitals became safer places.

There have been several important contributions to the recent literature concerned with profits in antebellum southern manufacturing (Bateman et al., 1975; Bateman and Weiss, 1975a, 1975b, 1976, 1981; and Vedder and Gallaway, 1980). Much of what we know about industrial profits during this era stems from the pioneering work of Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss. In their work, these authors estimate rates of return to manufacturing investment for the South and the nation as a whole. They find that the rates of return in manufacturing were unusually high compared to returns in alternative investments in the decade preceding the Civil War. In fact, their estimates suggest that the financial returns in manufacturing were roughly twice as great as the financial returns to investment in agriculture. With these large sectoral differences in rates of return, Bateman and Weiss question why the South was so slow to industrialize and why the antebellum southern economy continued to be dominated by plantation agriculture.

Accounts abound of slaves suffering from lack of water during the middle passage, many of them collected during testimony before the British Parliament and by British abolitionists. A Captain Hayes spoke of a cargo “labouring under the most famishing thirst. . . being in very few instances allowed more than a pint of water a day” (Buxton, 1844: 154–155). Thomas Clarkson (1969 [1789]: 573) claimed that he had seen slaves “almost dying from want of water,” and Thomas Buxton (1844: 151-152) alleged that “there is nothing which slaves during the middle passage suffer from so much as want of water.”

Recently, I attended a seminar at which a historian of women presented a dazzling interpretation of the polemical writing of Olympe de Gouges and its (not to mention her) reception during the French Revolution. A crusty old historian of the Revolution rose during the question period and inquired, in his own eastern twang, “Now that I know that women were participants in the Revolution, what difference does it make!” This encounter suggested to me what I will argue are two increasingly urgent tasks for women’s history: producing analytical problem-solving studies as well as descriptive and interpretive ones, and connecting their findings to general questions already on the historical agenda. This is not a call for integrating women’s history into other history, since that process may mean simply adding material on women and gender without analyzing its implications, but for writing analytical women’s history and connecting its problems to those of other histories. Only through such an endeavor is women’s history likely to change the agenda of history as a whole.

The slave trade, death, and misery were inseparable long before abolitionist writers took up the slave trade as a subject in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the historiography there has been widespread recognition that Africans entering the trade died not only during the middle passage but during the process of enslavement and travel in the interior, on the African littoral awaiting shipment, and after arrival in the Americas. Europeans directly involved in the traffic were at risk in the last three of these four phases of transition between life in Africa and life in the Americas, and tended to die at rates comparable to their human cargoes. In the shipboard phase, and probably also in other stages of the journey, mortality in the slave trade normally exceeded that in other long-distance population movements. In the nineteenth century this differential widened as rates on other long-distance routes fell (Cohn, 1984; Eltis, 1984; Grubb, 1987; Klein, 1978; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1989, forthcoming). To date, most explanations have focused on morbidity and mortality on board ship; data on the preembarkation phases are no more available to us today than to the abolitionists 150 years ago. For shipboard mortality, overcrowding on the ship, psychic shock, and violence have not fared well as explanations in the work of the last two decades, although the interplay between the first two and resistance to disease suggests further consideration. The present study focuses on shipboard mortality, but it is based on a large and complex dataset. It begins with a discussion and preliminary analysis of the nineteenth-century data. This is followed by a review of the various hypotheses on mortality in the slave trade.