Protestant Missionary Education and the Diffusion of Women’s Education in Ottoman Turkey: A Historical GIS Analysis

A significant literature demonstrates that the presence of historic missionary societies—especially Protestant societies—during the colonial period is significantly and positively associated with increased educational attainment and economic outcomes. However, we know less about the mechanisms underlying the long-run consequences of institutions, as it is commonly very hard to disentangle direct effects from indirect effects. One clear way to do so, however, is to explore the long-term impact of missionary influence in places in which the direct beneficiaries of missionary education are no longer present. The present article considers one such region, the Anatolian region of the Ottoman Empire. Due to the ethnic violence and population movements at the start of the twentieth century, the newfound Turkish nation-state was largely religiously homogenous. This provides us with a unique situation to empirically assess the long-run indirect effects of Christian missionary societies on local human capital. For this purpose, I present an original dataset that provides the locations of Protestant mission stations and schools, Ottoman state-run schools, and Armenian community schools contained within Ottoman Anatolia between 1820 and 1914. Contrary to the common association found in the literature, this study does not find missionary presence to be correlated with modern-day schooling. Rather, I find that regions with a heightened missionary presence and an active Christian educational market perform better on the gender parity index for pretertiary schooling during both the Ottoman and Turkish periods.

The Working Week in the Long Nineteenth Century: Evidence from the Timings of Political Events in Britain

Debates about patterns of time use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain go back to the seminal work of E. P. Thompson in the 1960s. But the lack of systematic evidence means that many of these questions remain unresolved. In an attempt to advance those debates, this essay uses three catalogs of political events to reconstruct the working week in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Three patterns emerge. First, observance of Saint Monday appears to have been widespread in the early nineteenth century before declining slowly in the mid-1800s, a process that happened faster in factory towns than elsewhere. This finding supports the orthodox narrative about Saint Monday against its recent challengers (in particular Hans-Joachim Voth). Second, I find that political organizers in the early nineteenth century were reluctant to profane the Sabbath by arranging public meetings on Sundays, but that this came to an end during the heyday of Chartism. Third, these catalogs also provide some, more speculative, evidence that the working day and the working week became more ordered as the nineteenth century wore on.

Socioeconomic Status and Group Belonging: Evidence from Early-Nineteenth-Century Colonial West Africa

This study provides a novel analysis of occupational stratification in Sierra Leone from a historical perspective. By employing census data for early-nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone, the present study offers a valuable snapshot of a colony characterized by a heterogenous population of indigenous and migratory origin. The study shows that an association between colonial group categorization and socioeconomic status existed despite the colony being of very recent foundation implying a hierarchical structure of the society. Although Europeans and “mulattoes” occupied most high-status positions, as common in the colonies, indigenous immigrants were also represented in high socioeconomic strata thanks to the opportunities stemming from long- and short-distance trading. However, later arrivals, especially liberated slaves, belonged within the lowest socioeconomic strata of the society and worked as farmers or unskilled labor, suggesting that the time component may also have influence socioeconomic opportunities.

Tax Expenditures and the Tax Reform Act of 1969 in the United States

In the United States, tax favoritism—an approach that has weakened the extractive capacity of the federal government by providing tax loopholes and preferences for taxpayers—has remained since the 1930s. It has consumed the amount of tax revenue the government can spend and therefore weakened the possibility of the redistribution of fiscal resources. It has also made the federal tax system complicated and inequitable, resulting in undermining taxpayer consent. Therefore, since the 1930s, a tax reform to create a simple, fair, and equitable federal income tax system with the capacity to raise revenue has been long overdue. Many scholars have evaluated the Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA69), which Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 30, 1969, as one of the most successful steps toward accomplishing this goal. This article demonstrates that TRA69 left tax favoritism in the United States. Furthermore, it points out that TRA69 turned taxpayers against the idea of federal taxation, a shift in public perception that greatly impacted tax reform in the years to follow.

Vocational Rehabilitation and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from World War I Veterans

This article uses a linked sample of World War I Army veterans from the state of Missouri to study the impact of vocational rehabilitation on labor market outcomes for men wounded and disabled during the war. Veterans’ military service abstracts are linked to the 1940 US Census and a subset are linked to rehabilitation records. This creates a new dataset that contains information on military service, rehabilitation, and labor market outcomes. I find that 70 percent of veterans that were both wounded in action and disabled when discharged from the army participated in the rehabilitation program. These same veterans had significantly better labor market outcomes, which can be attributed to the rehabilitation program under certain assumptions.

Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, China, 1967–1968

During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi’s death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia’s army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.

Social Scientization and the Schooling State in UK Parliamentary Discourse, 1803–1909

Traditional accounts of state expansion and of the rise of state schooling in the nineteenth century emphasize economic, political, and social development as well as conflict and domination. These accounts explain the introduction of new state structures, like ministries of education, rules of compulsion, and the general elaboration of bureaucracies. This article contributes to the historical sociological study of state expansion with specific regard to schooling by refocusing on the role that macrocultural processes of social scientization played in shaping the discursive construction and expansion of the state. Designed to analyze the 1.3 million speeches given in the UK parliament during the nineteenth century, the research reported here supports the argument that the development, professionalization, and institutionalization of the social sciences—social scientization—was a powerful force of cultural construction across the West and was positively associated with expanded notions of the state, as evidenced with the case of the United Kingdom. This article therefore not only provides an important alternative view to those who emphasize economic and social transformation but it also advances the empirical study of the powerful role that social science, as generative institution of cultural construction, played in shaping official discourses of the state—in this instance, the schooling state.

Regime and Sociology: A Comparative History of Sociology in Postwar Europe with Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.

Trawling the Ocean of Grass: Soil Nitrogen in Saskatchewan Agriculture, 1916–2001

Using a socioecological metabolism approach to analyze data from the Census of Agriculture, this article examines the underlying soil fertility of two case study areas in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan through the calculation of soil nitrogen balances. The Rural Municipalities of Wise Creek and Livingston are 300 miles apart and therefore have different topography, soil types, and rainfall levels, even though both are within the northern Great Plains. Over 85 years, from first settlement in the 1910s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wise Creek agriculture focused increasingly on livestock production while in Livingston farmers began to grow a greater variety of crops, most notably incorporating canola into rotations. Despite the differences between the two case studies, the pattern of soil nitrogen losses was remarkably similar, with biomass yields declining along with soil nitrogen. The addition of chemical nitrogen fertilizers since the 1960s did not produce yields matching historic highs, nor did a renewed focus on livestock. Wise Creek and Livingston showed two different responses to declining yields, but neither one ultimately provided a long-term solution to the problem of soil nutrient depletion and consequent productivity declines.

Internal Migration and Sectoral Shift in the Nineteenth-Century United States

We study the relationship between internal migration and industrialization in the United States between 1850 and 1880. We use the Linked Representative Samples from IPUMS and find significant amounts of rural-urban and urban-urban migration in New England. Rural-urban migration was mainly driven by agricultural workers shifting to manufacturing occupations. Urban-urban migration was driven by foreign-born workers in manufacturing. We argue that rural-urban migration was a significant factor in US economic development and the structural transformation from agriculture to manufacturing.