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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article investigates tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis, the capital of the Greek island of Syros, during the period of continuous cause-of-death reporting from 1916 to 1940. Contemporary reports identified Greece as having one of the highest levels of tuberculosis mortality in Europe, with Hermoupolis ranking at the top within the country. In the early twentieth century, Greece launched an anti-tuberculosis campaign, primarily supported by philanthropists due to limited state intervention. The study examines the actions, if any, taken by the local authorities in Hermoupolis and analyzes mortality attributed to tuberculosis by age group and sex. The results reveal that tuberculosis mortality declined across all age groups in the 1930s, particularly among females. Deaths were concentrated in infancy, early adulthood (20–39 years), and the elderly. Clear differences in tuberculosis fatality rates among occupational classes were found, although they did not markedly differ from all-cause mortality patterns. Factors such as the lack of sanitary reforms, poor living standards, inadequate nutrition, and overcrowding could have potentially played key roles in the high tuberculosis mortality in the city. Considering the inefficacy of sanatorium treatment before the mid-1940s, it is plausible that improvements in factory working conditions and the decrease in industrial activity in the city may have contributed to the reduction in tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis during the 1930s.

This article examines the evolution of the role played by the number and gender of siblings in the survival and biological well-being of individuals in rural Spain during the twentieth century. Our aim is to test how two fundamental theories – the cooperative breeding hypotheis and the resource dilution hypothesis – about how the number of siblings affect the individual come together in this area of study during a period of economic, health, and social transformation. We used a sample of 19,331 individuals born between 1900 and 1979 from 14 rural villages, for whom data on sibling count and various family and environmental variables are available. Using these data, we ran several statistical models to discover the effects of siblings on survival. In addition, we studied the long-term effect of siblings on height using height data from 2,783 male conscripts. Our results show that the number of siblings positively influenced survival, either through the cooperation of older siblings in the care of their younger brothers and sisters or through parents exhibiting higher offspring survival abilities. However, increased reproductive success may come with a disadvantage. The biological well-being, as measured by height, of male conscripts was significantly lower among individuals with more siblings in the early decades of the study. Conversely, in the later decades, the negative relationship between sibship size and height was not statistically significant when the number of living siblings was fewer than five.