This article describes household activity in 13 Indigenous communities in Alaska around 1940. Alaska is too often ignored in discussions of Indigenous economic development. Our focus contributes to a greater understanding of economic development among Indigenous communities in the region and provides an important counterpoint to Indigenous economies in the contiguous United States where agency was more limited. Certainly in 1940, Alaskan Indigenous communities were less constrained relative to many Indigenous communities in the contiguous United States. Using novel household survey data from the late 1930s that provide highly detailed demographic and economic information (assets, income, household production, and liabilities) for each Indigenous household in these villages, we get a comprehensive picture of Indigenous economic well-being at the end of the Great Depression. In particular, we document the interplay of traditional Indigenous economic activity, or the bush economy, with market opportunities. One important feature of these villages is that half were reindeer owning, which allows us to compare reindeer-owning villages and households to non-reindeer owning. Our analysis of the data shows little differences between any of the villages. Perhaps most importantly, these surveys show that Native households were robustly using both traditional and market sectors and, in 1940, none were insolvent, bankrupt, or indebted.

The standard of living is a conceptual object of great concern to governments, social scientists, and the public. How people lived in the past is likewise of much interest to historians. There is wide (if not universal) agreement that a higher standard of living is preferable to a lower one. Congruence ends there, however, as what constitutes the appropriate measure of people’s well-being is subject to a wide range of parallel, overlapping, and sometimes even conflicting opinions. How to collect the evidence necessary to calculate whatever measure we settle on, from both the contemporary world and the historical record, is equally contested. Indeed, in the case of efforts to measure well-being in the past, the evidence we might want may not exist at all. The question is too important though to settle for narrow and often misleading metrics that capture material wealth alone. Measures of our lifespan, the expansion of our mental capabilities, and our ability to feel secure and to participate in our collective governance make essential contributions. Finally, we need measures that are sensitive to the requirements for shared human sociability in different historical contexts. The insights of historians and other observers of human societies will be essential to complement the theorizing of social scientists.

This article explores the causes of nationalist civil war, a subtype of ethnic civil war in which anti-state actors fight for greater communal autonomy. It presents a theoretical framework claiming that grievances over lost communal autonomy commonly motivate nationalist civil war, but that other conditions are needed to put this motive into action: Nationalist frames and expectations must make communities sensitive to lost autonomy, and mobilizational resources must be available so actors can organize nationalist movements. Nation-state building, in turn, commonly promotes reductions in communal autonomy, and British colonial pluralism frequently strengthened nationalist frames, expectations, and mobilizational resources, suggesting that nationalist civil war should be common in former British colonies after transitions from empire to nation-state. To test the framework, this article provides a comparative historical analysis of Zomia, a region that has the highest concentration of nationalist civil wars in the world and in which half of the countries are former British colonies. The analysis provides strong evidence supporting the theoretical framework.

This article poses a synthetic analytical approach to casing migratory projects that set out to effectuate a redistribution of power and resources: migration as contentious politics. Contentious migration is presented as an attempt by a collective to mobilize adequate political leverage to advance claims in the location of immigration through spatial relocation and demographic change. To demonstrate the analytical leverage of this approach, this article then conducts a case study of the under-examined Hechalutz settlement movement active in North America between 1905 and 1953, which facilitated the settler migration of American youth to rural agricultural colonies on the colonial frontiers of late-Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine. It draws on extensive, original findings in colony and national archives, examining official movement publications, correspondences, emissary notes, meeting minutes and daily records from the training farms across North America, diaries, and obituaries. Through eventful analysis, the article explicates three salient mechanisms of the mobilization for contentious migration: (1) environmental (attributing political opportunity and threat); (2) relational (forging networks, as a proxy for diffusion and organizational cohesion); and (3) cognitive (devising resonant diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings).

In the US, scholars have long argued that white people across class lines share a taken for granted interest in property. Yet in the antebellum period, as land was concentrated in the hands of a few slaveholders, southern nonslaveholding white people were largely unable to partake in land ownership. Only after the Civil War did many more white people benefit from “whiteness as property,“ in part through homesteading (free land), a policy strongly pushed for by antislavery elites – who argued for, in addition to freedom from slavery, white people’s inherent interests in property. How do we explain what changed, and the specific ideology – that white people have an interest in property – which helped shape this policy? Using the case of the Homestead Act of 1862, I argue that antislavery elites articulated a property interest in whiteness. The Homestead Act is an example of struggles to articulate poor southern white peoples’s ideal relationship to landed property, according to antislavery conceptions of middle-class farming and agrarian capitalism. I show articulation processes, as antislavery figures responded to white poverty in the South, resulting in arguments for free land for white people. I also show a shift in rhetoric among antislavery Republicans in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in which they expanded their framing of homesteading to include an emphasis on bringing poor white people into modernity and civilization compatible with the politics of scientific agriculture. This article complicates accounts of whiteness as property by tracing historically specific ideologies of whiteness and land in the south in the antebellum period.

Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disentangle reasons for the high levels of persistence we find.

Databases of baby names are commonly available and have often been used to assess people’s reactions to events such as wars or diplomatic crises. Changes in the frequency of several candidate names are usually investigated around the event of interest. This approach misses key information simply because not all information-carrying names have been thought about. More fundamentally, whether exogenous shocks can significantly alter population-level naming preferences remains elusive. We present here a method to systematically study variations in name popularity during an event of interest and quantify its “total” effect on naming patterns. Using a nationwide database of first name frequencies since 1900, we apply the method to France during the First World War. We find several dozen first names the popularity of which was modified by the War. While we find macro-level traces of individual-level phenomena, in particular increased naming for kin, specific first names also provide key insights into the civilian population’s changing attitude – e.g., widespread pessimism in 1917. Using an individual-level database of ∼9.5 million individuals enables us to track such changes in morale month after month. The aggregate effect of the war on naming patterns was maximal and large early in the conflict, then gradually declined: the return of naming preferences to their prewar state illustrates and quantifies how the “banality of war” installed.

The analytical framework, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” elucidates how the policy implementation process can be restructured to affect its outputs. Three steps from the framework are applied to the case of Republican officeholders between 1906 and 1913, who centralized their control over immigration, by adding naturalization and enforcement in the new Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations used budgeting, staffing, and infrastructure to regulate immigration and naturalization laws, pivoting between easing and tightening them (resource adjustment). The shifts responded to coalitions for and against immigration (coalition management). Until the Bureau became obsolete and was reconfigured (system redesign). Although immigration was open in the Progressive Era, this study reveals how Republicans managed inflows with mixed results, leading to the structural foundation for the restrictive laws that followed. This furthers the immigration history and political control literatures as they emphasize policymaking through legislative and procedural, not structural, means.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

The transformation in the purposes, instruments, and conditions for the deployment of coercion was a central aspect of the modernization of Western European states during the long nineteenth century. Nowhere is this transformation as evident as in the emergence and diffusion of public, specialized, and professional police forces at the time. In this article, we employ automated text analysis to explore legislative debates on policing in the United Kingdom from 1803 to 1945. We identify three distinct periods in which policing was highly salient in Parliament, each of them related to more general processes driving the modernization of the British state. The first period (1830s–1850s) was marked by the institutionalization of modern police forces and their spread across Great Britain. The second period (1880s–1890s) was dominated by Irish MPs denouncing police abuses against their constituents. The third period (1900s–1940s) was characterized by discussions around working conditions for the police in the context of mounting social pressures and war-related police activities. Whereas the first and third periods have attracted much scholarly interest as they culminated in concrete police reforms, the second period has not been as central to historical research on the British police. We show, however, that policing became a major issue in the legislative agenda of the 1880s and 1890s, as it highlighted the tensions within a modernizing British state, torn between the professionalization of domestic police forces under control of local authorities and the persistence of imperial practices in its colonial territories.

This article examines why the late-industrializing Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden over the long nineteenth century developed civil societies and political parties with an ability to compromise. Based on comparisons with contemporary Prussia and within-case evidence, it traces the explanation to Scandinavia’s impartial state administrations, forged before the French Revolution and the era of modern mass politics and democracy. This emphasizes the importance of a penetrative bureaucracy in forging auspicious state-society relations and downplays the separate impact of peaceful agrarian reforms for Scandinavia’s stable democratization.

How migrants navigate their sense of home between the place left behind and the new place of destination is a crucial question. The social scientific perspective has increasingly come to emphasize the multiplicity of home and appreciates that home provides a bridge between “here” and “there.” In this article we explore how notions of home compare between migrants who arrived in the US throughout the 19th and 20th century. We can draw on a uniquely rich comparative set of letters written by people who left German-speaking Europe or Ireland. Our analysis of more than 12,000 letters uses methods of linguistic analysis to navigate between a macro-perspective, focused on term frequencies, a meso-perspective focused on the contextual meaning of the terms home and Heimat, and a micro-perspective providing in-depth details of two sets of letter collections. We find that the emotional words used to express an affective link with home reveal a deeper process of socio-cultural integration among the two groups. Indeed, we find that home is being talked about a lot more frequently in the Irish compared to the German letters, pointing to a profound divergence in the integration process. In the German letters, America quickly became home, which occurred at a much slower rate among the Irish. Moreover, the Irish maintained a desire to return home to Ireland for longer, an idea that the German writers contemplated only rarely.

This article is concerned with analyzing the occupational attainment of American Jewish men compared to other free men in the mid-19th century to help fill a gap in the literature on Jewish achievement. It does this by using the full count (100 percent) microdata file from the 1850 Census of Population, the first census to ask about the occupation of free men. Independent lists of surnames are used to identify men with a higher probability of being Jewish. These men were more likely than others to be managers, salesmen, and craft workers, and were less likely to be farmers and laborers. The Jewish men have a higher occupational income score on average. In the multiple regression analysis, it is found that among Jewish and other free men, occupational income scores increase with age (up to about age 43 for all men), literacy, being married, having fewer children, being native-born, living in the South, and living in an urban area. Even after controlling for these variables that impact the occupational income score, Jews have a significantly higher score, which is equivalent to about the size of the positive effect of being married. Similar patterns are found using the Duncan Socioeconomic Index. This higher occupational status is consistent with patterns found elsewhere for American Jews in the eighteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.

This article uses online genealogy data from the United States over the nineteenth century to estimate period and cohort-based sex differences in longevity. Following previous work, we find a longevity reversal in the mid-nineteenth century that expanded rapidly for at least a half-century. For measures of conditional survival past childbearing age, females enjoyed a longevity advantage for the whole century. Unlike most mortality databases of this period, genealogical data allow analysis of spatial patterns and the impacts of fertility on longevity. Our results suggest very limited evidence of spatial (state) variation in these patterns. We do, however, find evidence that the associations between fertility and longevity partially explain the trends.

We conduct the first modern econometric analysis of the historical deaf population in the United States by incorporating deafness into a model of human capital. We find that the deaf population invested less in observable educational and physical human capital. Lower literacy, employment, and occupational scores also suggest that unobserved human capital investments were not substantial enough to improve productivity to the level of the hearing population. States that subsidized schools for the deaf provided deaf people with improved social capital and access to intangible goods that they pursued at the cost of higher economic achievement. Finally, we argue that substantial lifecycle differences between the hearing and deaf populations have implications for unbiased school attendance and employment rate estimation.

This article revisits the levels of temporary employment in Franco’s Spain from an international perspective. Using a wide range of unexploited or novel data, I shed light for the first time on the incidence of temporary employment during the late Franco dictatorship, 1959–1975. The results show that fixed-term contracts reached 20–30 percent during this period and were not only concentrated in unstable employment branches such as agriculture, tourism, and construction. The analysis suggests that temporary employment was widespread in many service and industrial branches. Furthermore, external numerical flexibility was not confined to fixed-term contracts. Outsourcing, self-employment, family work, and the underground economy, particularly home work, played an essential role in many branches of the economy. In this context, women’s work constituted a key source of flexible employment for many branches of the Spanish economy. As a result, Spain was already an anomaly in the international context in terms of the prevalence of temporary work and labor regulation of temporary employment. This evidence suggests a reframing of debate on labor market functioning during the Francoist period and its legacy.

This article presents new estimates of the material living standards among the rural population in southern Sweden from the 1670s up to 1865. The development of rural consumer patterns over the period is analyzed using a newly constructed database of 1665 probate inventories from three benchmark periods. It finds that that all rural households, no matter their socioeconomic status, diversified their composition of movable goods during the eighteenth century with a special focus toward increased comfort rather than household reproduction. The most visible change was an increase and diversification of cooking- and dining-ware, the furniture necessary to store and use these, as well as greatly expanded personal wardrobes. The consumer goods and behaviors adopted by the peasants and rural laborers during the eighteenth century correspond partly to the consumer revolution spreading through Europe during the period and suggest the development of a distinctly rural consumer culture. This development coincided with a diversification of rural household production, which would have given households an extra source of income, increased their reliance on interregional markets for household reproduction, and integrated the south-Swedish countryside into the wider European market from which the new consumer goods and habits associated with the consumer revolution could be introduced.

Previous research has characterized those resisting slavery as quite atypical of the enslaved population: most of them being young, male, and engaged in particular occupations. In this article, we study transgressive behavior among an enslaved population quantitatively. We employ a unique census from the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1846, which allows us to study not only the characteristics of those that transgressed the masters’ order in some way, but also to compare them with those of the entire enslaved population on the island. We find that the individuals in our dataset who transgressed the oppressive institution were, in many respects, quite typical of the entire enslaved population under study. Opposition to the oppressive system could be found among all groups of enslaved persons in the studied society. Nonetheless, we find that specific characteristics, such as marital status and gender, were more likely to be associated with transgression on St. Croix.

Nearly all US Black children born before 1910 were born in the American South. We use a mixed-methods design to examine Black children’s survival disadvantage over the twentieth century’s turn under the rising regime of Jim Crow. We focus on 1910 Arkansas, taking advantage of within-state heterogeneity in agriculture (plantation vs. subsistence farming), disease environments, and geographic racial concentration (macro-segregation). This one-state focus allows purposive sampling of Works Progress Administration and Behind the Veil oral interviews of Arkansan Black Americans who were born or lived under the state’s Jim Crow regime. We also use the 1910 complete-count Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) linked to US Decennial and 1916 Plantation Censuses to examine race-related differences in child mortality rates among ever-married, parous Arkansas women (n=234,811). Count regression models find the Black-White child mortality gap widest among Arkansas mothers economically tied to plantation vs. subsistence agriculture; exposed to worse health environments; living in tenant farm vs. owned-farm households; and with limited individual resources such as literacy. Oral accounts illustrate how Black children’s lives reflected contextual, living standard, psychosocial, and other health risks associated with the racialized policies and practices of the Jim Crow South; they capture otherwise hidden historical processes that linked the era’s institutional racism and child mortality.

This article examines the role of women in the guild system of Lima, Peru, during the nineteenth century. Using data from the guild system of Lima between 1838 and 1859, it shows that women participated in a variety of guilds, primarily in retail trade and food manufacturing. Most women were not part of the guilds of merchants and professionals. A social stratification analysis reveals that women in guilds were concentrated at the lower end of the income distribution, with very few reaching the highest social classes. As the economy of Lima expanded during the Guano Era, enterprises had opportunities to grow and enter profitable sectors. However, women did not advance into the most lucrative sectors of the economy, with most remaining in the lowest social classes.