While technological progress played a central role in the British Industrial Revolution, statistical evidence on how inventors and entrepreneurs engaged in the process of technological innovation has typically received minor attention. In this paper I use quantitative methods to show that counties with a relatively high number of informal networks −in the form of Freemasonry, friendly societies, libraries, and booksellers− experienced more innovation as measured by new patents and exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace World’s Fair. Qualitative evidence and propensity score matching suggest that the mechanisms highlighted here were an important part of British technological leadership. Economic factors cannot account for these patterns.

2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States, a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years.

Welfare ministries are key institutions of modern nation-states. However, we still lack knowledge about when and why national welfare ministries were established. In this paper, we argue that both the First and Second world wars were major driving forces behind the establishment of independent welfare ministries. To test our argument, we introduce a novel dataset on the establishment of welfare-related ministries in 30 countries. Our empirical findings suggest that the establishment of independent welfare ministries was a product of wartime turbulence and the political, economic and social shockwaves set off especially by World War I, which affected many countries at the same time. Considering alternative explanations such as the Spanish Flu, the Bolshevik Revolution or the emergence of new nation-states, we argue that war triggered multiple, interrelated and chronologically staggered transnational events and transformations that had major effects on the social welfare systems of the countries involved. In this light, we conclude that World War I was ultimately the root cause behind the establishment of welfare ministries.

In the Global North, mass warfare created a huge demand for social protection, pushing governments to provide income for invalids, war victims, and the survivors of fallen soldiers. Most European colonial powers, including France and Great Britain, recruited soldiers and other security forces not only from their metropoles but also from their colonies during both World Wars. However, the question of how mass warfare influenced social reforms in former colonies has not been systematically addressed, particularly with respect to how these influences varied across colonial powers. To begin to address this gap, this paper explores the warfare–welfare nexus in the context of British and French colonies of West Africa around World War I (WWI). The paper finds that, while Britain and France had similar overarching imperial and military objectives in West Africa of securing their colonies, enforcing order within them, and promoting commerce to increase profit, they went about achieving them very differently, with direct and indirect implications for social reforms after WWI. While only a first step, research on the distinct nature of the warfare–welfare nexus in colonial contexts is critical in order to historicize and close research gaps by widening and deepening our understanding of social policy trajectories in countries of the Global South.

With only a few exceptions, the historical study of individual-level correlates of child mortality in the United States has been limited to the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when children ever born and children surviving data collected by the 1900 and 1910 censuses allow indirect estimation of child mortality. The recent release of linked census data, such as the IPUMS MLP datasets, allows a different type of indirect estimation over a longer period. By following couples across subsequent decennial censuses, it is possible to infer child mortality by measuring whether couples’ own children in the first census were still present in the second census. We focus our analysis on children aged 1–3 in the first of two linked censuses, who were less likely to be undercounted by the census than infants, and unlikely to be living apart from their parents in the second census. We estimate child mortality over the intervening decade and use OLS regression to correlate that mortality to the residence location and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents’ households. We limit our analysis to three panel datasets for married couples linked between the 1850–60, 1860–70, and 1870–80 censuses, when real estate and personal estate wealth data were collected. Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between wealth and child mortality across all regions of the United States and over the entire period examined.

The dominance of capital cities (urban primacy) is an enduring characteristic of Australian states. There has been limited empirical research examining the drivers of primacy in states despite some being extreme examples of the phenomenon, both in magnitude and scale. In light of institutional theories of settlement patterns, we developed a profile of Australian urbanization using a century of time-series data, descriptive statistics, and an empirical model of city populations. In Australian states high measures of primacy have endured with little evidence of disruption despite the enormous size of these states, their wealth, and population growth – factors associated with declining and low primacy. Statistically, state capital city status has a significant effect on city population size variation, with results suggesting primacy in states is in part a product of Australian federalism. This contrasts with views that suggest Australia’s scarcity of large non-capital cities is due to isolation, low population, and environmental determinism. The findings in this paper have major implications relative to national and/or state strategies that aim to decentralize population away from the primate cities.

The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated important differences between rural and urban communities, and between cities, but has so far failed to address intra-urban disparities due to varying living conditions and disease environments. This article examines the last nationwide upsurge of smallpox in the Netherlands through the lens of Amsterdam’s 50 neighborhoods in the period 1870–72. We use a mixed methods approach combining qualitative spatial analysis and OLS regression to investigate which part of the population was affected most by this epidemic in terms of age and sex, geographic distribution across the city, and underlying sociodemographic neighborhood characteristics such as relative wealth, housing density, crude death rate, and birth rate. Our analyses reveal a significant spatial patterning of smallpox mortality that can largely be explained by the existing social environment. Lacking universal vaccination, the smallpox epidemic was not socially neutral, but laid bare some of the deep-seated social and health inequalities across the city.

Conflicts resulting from the dual legitimacy problem of presidential systems (where the president and the legislature are elected by different majorities) sometimes result in legislative gridlock – a point made by those who criticize the alleged perils of presidentialism. The socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73), that ended with the breakdown of democracy, is often used as a poster child for legislative gridlock. With information on the 23,798 bills and 12,809 laws enacted in Chile between 1932 and 1973, we compare the passage of legislation in eight presidential terms and demonstrate that not to be the case. Legislative output showed an upward trend after the 1943 constitutional reform but was on a downward trend since the mid-1960s, before the 1970 constitutional reform restricted the scope of bills that legislators could introduce. Under Allende, while 1653 bills were introduced (438 of which were presidential bills), 642 laws were passed (38.8% and 68.2%, respectively) – compared to 53.8% and 39.9% for all presidents in the period, respectively. The evidence does not justify the claim that there was legislative gridlock under Allende. Instead, variations in legislative output across presidential terms in Chile can be explained by changes in the rules of the legislative process.

While existing research suggests that nineteenth-century child labor laws largely failed to significantly reduce children’s workforce participation, we examine whether policies that tackled the problem by providing aid – rather than by penalizing work – were more effective. Between 1910 and 1920, forty U.S. states enacted mothers’ pension programs, giving needy “deserving” mothers, typically widows, cash aid to support their dependent children. One purpose of the programs was to reduce child labor. However, we find no negative relationship between child labor and the generosity of states’ mothers’ pension laws. Furthermore, we find no negative relationship between child labor and county-level mothers’ pension generosity, in terms of expenditures, in the seven states for which we have data. We attribute this to the small size of the pensions as well as the programs’ limited coverage and general lack of conditionality on children’s behaviors, such as attending school or not engaging in paid work. We also note states’ and counties’ limited administrative capacity to enforce eligibility requirements, such as school attendance, where these existed.

This article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.

From the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, gangs and secret societies (banghui) exercised enormous influence on Chinese society and politics. The two portrayals of banghui in historiography – as modern criminal syndicates that came out of an emerging capitalist economy or, alternatively, a cultural succession of traditional secret society – are so distinct that their proponents often speak past each other. Revisiting primary and secondary materials on the Shanghai Green Gang, one of the most active banghui organizations during the Republican era (1911–49), this article aims to bridge the two understandings by focusing on the gang’s self-legitimation claims. Facing rapid social changes of the early twentieth century, I argue, the Green Gang reframed its use of violence as disciplinary, revolutionary, and nationalistic to gain public legitimation. Together with its involvement in state building and resource extraction, the gang’s cultural work contributed to its prominence and led multiple political authorities to promote it to an exceptional degree.

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines’ observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across different types of place, and that some of the mortality differences by social class might actually reflect the contextual effects of healthy and unhealthy places. Although this line of argument has received a considerable amount of attention in health geography literature, it has rarely been examined for a specific historic period, and then only within particular urban areas. In this paper, we apply multi-level models to a complete count individual-level dataset of the 1911 census of England and Wales, comparing influences on infant and child mortality at the level of the individual couple and for two spatial levels. We find that although most variation in infant and child mortality operates at the individual level, there is also important variation at the two spatial levels and part of the mortality differences between social classes is better explained by the areas in which people lived rather than by their social class. A consideration of independent variables at all three levels suggests that different spatial scales capture different sorts of influences on early age mortality.

This article rethinks the dynamics of collective contention by emphasizing the role of tactical ambiguity. In the face of high political uncertainty, contentious mobilizations work best when they avoid explicit claim-making and engage instead in what I call equivocal challenges—i.e. provocative actions whose meaning will be defined by the response they elicit from specific targets. I provide detailed illustrative support for this argument through a study of the 1948 Bogotazo, by analyzing network data and repertoires of action extracted from archival sources. I conclude that rushed claim-making in contexts of political uncertainty may very well be a losing tactic and that conversely collective equivocation has significant political payoffs.

Early in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the ‘80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state’s historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society.

This multi-method study uses statistical and comparative-historical investigations to find that abortion values shape genetic counseling practices across societies. Genetic counselors and genetically interested social scientists have long questioned, but never systematically demonstrated, whether this relationship exists. Genetic counseling data are drawn from cross-national surveys of genetic counselors (n = 2,906) from the mid-1990s, the key historical moment after this profession was globally established but before potentially confounding transnational professional effects. Data focus on Trisomy 21, severe open spina bifida, and Huntington’s chorea. Abortion data are drawn from a new comparative-historical investigation of abortion attitudes in 36 countries based on law, frequency of policy debate, incidence rates, and public opinion polling. The key overall finding is that the more controversial abortion is within a society, the less directive genetic counselors are willing to be, whereas the less controversial abortion is, the more directive the counseling. Polynomial regressions, t-tests, likelihood ratios, and Wald tests provide statistical evidence for the relationship observed through qualitative clustering.

Hobson v. Hansen (1967) is best known as the first federal court case to rule against discriminatory use of standardized tests in the context of educational tracking. It was also significant as one of the first desegregation cases after Brown v Board of Education (1954) to use psychological evidence in its ruling. This essay briefly examines the debates over ability testing before Hobson, the contexts of post-desegregation D.C. educational politics that shaped the case, the social scientific evidence presented in the case, and its application to the court’s ruling. It argues that while scholars have correctly acknowledged the court’s mistaken assumptions about testing, the evidence presented of testing bias nevertheless cogently illustrated a broader constellation of discriminatory District practices. A review of the testimony suggests that while the psychological evidence was central to the court’s ruling, the opinion rested less on the resolution of social scientific debates over testing bias than it did on the need to determine the justification of ability testing in the context of District tracking practices. Although sweeping in scope, the decision did little to resolve long running disputes over ability testing. Instead, it only helped inaugurate a more heated and contentious legal environment for educational testing in the coming decades.

Through a close reading of scattered, disparate, and largely unconnected secondary sources, supplemented with the analysis of primary sources, and backed by economic theory, this paper explores the origins, development, and socio-economic impact of so-called cosignatory lending institutions. These historical institutions were designed to issue small loans to small businesses and households and shared a reliance on cosigners to secure loans and on weekly instalments to repay them. Their shared lending format was flexible enough to display regional variations and this enabled cosignatory lending institutions to operate in societies characterized by notable differences in wealth and economic structure. It also allowed cosignatory lending institutions to fare better in a more urbanized, heterogeneous context than the more well-known credit cooperatives. As such, this systematic overview helps us better understand how credit markets were made more inclusive in urban contexts, which historical circumstances played a role in this, and perhaps even whether and how the success of cosignatory lending institutions may be replicated in present-day developed and less-developed economies.

Ireland is often seen as an outlier within the western world in terms of demographic behavior. As a society it has also been noted for its religious fervor, including religious division, at least until fairly recently. Might there be connections historically between these two spheres? One intriguing area of enquiry relates to possible links between religious denomination and child mortality. We explore this possibility using individual-level data from the household schedules of the Irish Census of 1911. The study area is Belfast, Ireland’s leading industrial city, which allows for a wide range of occupational and social class differences. Combining regression techniques and the mortality index proposed by Preston and Haines (1991), we seek to tease out the relationship between child mortality and religious affiliation while controlling for a range of other explanatory variables. We show that religious identity is clearly associated with different infant and child mortality outcomes. Of the three major religious denominations, Catholics suffered the most from high infant mortality, Church of Ireland (Anglican) families were only a little better off, while the largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterians, had the best infant mortality outcomes. These differences were related, in the main, to the varying socioeconomic composition of the three major religious denominations but religious affiliation also mattered in its own right.

The question of how and why women committed crimes was a topic of hot debate in 1930s Republican China. Although men sociologists during this period largely framed the origins of both men’s and women’s crime as a social issue, they nonetheless still seriously considered biological and physiological factors in women’s motivation for crime. At the same time, women sociologists who authored the two most comprehensive 1930s studies on women’s crime – Zhou Shuzhao and research team Liu Qingyu and Xu Huifang – pushed back on the connections between biology and physiology in relation to crime for both women and men. Instead, they argued unconditionally for the social causes of all crime and particular social challenges for Chinese women. Their methodologies and frameworks were especially influenced by work from the Chicago school of sociology, a department which itself produced a number of prominent women social scientists. This article traces the transnational conversation on women’s crime in Republican China through the work of U.S. sociologists who were cited by Zhou, Liu, and Xu; research by Chinese men sociologists, especially prominent sociologist Yan Jingyue; and finally, Zhou, Liu, and Xu’s own rebuttals, conclusions, and contributions in developing a theory of Chinese women’s crime. By also comparing the work of Chinese and U.S. women social scientists, this article argues that both groups pushed back, with varying strategies, on their men colleagues’ inordinate focus on criminalized women’s biology and physiology. In this way, both Chinese and U.S. women social scientists spoke into a largely male-dominated conversation and provided novel theories of women’s crime as women themselves.