Abstract The case of the Bulgarian Esperanto movement under state socialism demonstrates a social movement can survive under authoritarianism by establishing a legitimate activist culture acceptable to the regime while pursuing its intrinsic goals. Bulgaria, a close Soviet ally, was a difficult case of movement survival. In the early years following World War II, the national Esperanto periodical Bulgara Esperantisto was a key organizing tool for the movement reporting on its activities, reaching out to potential recruits, and legitimizing the movement under the new communist-led regime. Examining the periodical’s discourse over a two-year period, I find that the movement managed to carve a space for itself in the new political context by advancing a form of what I term “nationalized cosmopolitanism.” Bulgarian Esperantists were able to maintain activist networks nationally and internationally, pursue intrinsic Esperanto goals, and sustain cosmopolitan identities under unhospitable conditions. The movement successfully legitimated itself by drawing from three cosmopolitan sources: Esperanto cosmopolitanism, communist internationalism, and Bulgarian peasant universalism. In the context of the nation-state system, invoking the nation was an effective legitimation strategy, even for a movement with cosmopolitan orientations, even under a regime justified in universal terms. Espousing pragmatism and partnerships while avoiding conflict, Bulgarian Esperantists were able to thrive under the new communist regime, recruit new members, and reconnect with the global Esperanto movement. I conclude that a legitimate activist culture can adapt to a regime’s ideology and institutional environment without necessarily being co-opted.

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Abstract National party breakthrough has often been attributed to new or previously minor parties seizing favorable political opportunities. The role of their strategic choices in response to political opportunities, however, has been underexplored because less attention has been paid to relevant negative cases, that is instances when parties encounter favorable conditions without breaking through. This article argues for a historical perspective when selecting these cases and investigates an often overlooked case from Germany’s early postwar democracy: Gustav Heinemann’s All-German People’s Party (GVP). Relying on archival data and historical research, this article reconstructs the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that provided Heinemann with initially favorable conditions for party breakthrough. Strategic decisions on coalition building, the timing of party formation, and organization building explain the GVP’s failure to seize the opportunity. These findings highlight the importance of case selection as a part of the “historical turn” in political science and of new parties’ agency when explaining (the lack of) party breakthrough. The implications of these findings for the literature on new parties, case selection, and party system development are discussed.

Abstract 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.

Abstract This collection of articles combines a set of works that study the contribution of transport infrastructure to the process of state building in different countries in Western and Central Europe. The focus and the themes treated vary, but have two common denominators: firstly, they are based on either completely original, or previously little-used, primary sources; and secondly, each work reveals new ways of interpreting how transport networks have shaped the territories into which they were introduced. Each article is an example of the wealth of potential approaches available and also helps us to interpret the processes involved in state building, which are a necessary precedent to European Integration (EI). To put the seven works that make up this special issue into context, I shall start this introduction by examining three aspects that complement them. I shall firstly clarify what we mean by EI. Secondly, I shall examine whether EI processes existed prior to the creation of the institutions that were set up after World War II to promote integration. Then, thirdly, and finally, based on the previous analyses, I shall look at the emergence of a railway network in Europe and the role that the European states played in this process. The fourth section will present the articles.

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Abstract In contrast to most long-settled agricultural landscapes, the US Great Plains presents a rare example of well-documented agricultural colonization of new land. The Census of Agriculture provides detailed information about evolving grassland farm systems from the beginning of agricultural expansion and then at some two dozen time points between 1880 and the present. From early sod-busting, through drought and depression, and into late-twentieth-century modernization, it is possible to track how farmers used their land in any county. Treating farmland as an agroecosystem, a hybrid human-natural landscape, this article asks how farmers captured, altered, and replenished soil fertility. Did they extract more soil nitrogen than they returned, or did they maintain a balance? The article assesses land use from a soil nutrients perspective in several plains environments to capture variation in climate (especially rainfall), native soil quality, and availability of irrigation water. It traces farm management strategies through time to understand agricultural crises, growth periods, and technological transitions in the context of soil fertility. Soil management on an agricultural frontier was markedly different from that in places that had been farmed for centuries. A shortage of people and livestock and an abundance of deep, rich soils in the plains informed farmers’ calculations as they juggled labor, capital, and market forces against family and financial strategies. Uniform methods of estimating and representing soil nutrient processes make possible a direct comparison of the relative sustainability of historical agroecosystems.

Abstract Four synchronous epidemics of measles and scarlet fever are observed in the historical data collected by colonial authorities in Victoria, Australia from 1853 to 1876, suggesting some sort of synergistic relationship between the two diseases. While epidemics of measles, as recorded by the colonial record keepers, still occurred during the remainder of the study period (until 1916), no further epidemics of scarlet fever occurred after 1876. This is suggestive of a change in Victoria’s disease ecology in the late 1870s. After analysis of the historical data for potential artifactual cases, it does not appear to be the result of confusion in diagnosis and changes in case definitions do not appear to have affected reporting of the causes of death. We conclude that the most likely explanation for the observed pattern is an epidemic synergy that ended after the 1876 epidemic. We hypothesize that this synergistic relationship between measles and scarlet fever in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria ended due to a shift in the dominant group A streptococci (GAS) M-type or the loss of a GAS bacteriophage. Support for this hypothesis comes from observations that other diagnoses associated with group A strep infections also changed their mortality profiles during the 1870s, particularly “Bright’s disease,” a possible descriptor of post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis. We situate the emergence and end of this pattern within the demographic and socioeconomic conditions of the Victorian gold-mining boom in the 1850s to 1870s and postboom changes in fertility, mortality, and housing infrastructure, highlighting the importance of social conditions in disease evolution.

Abstract The state executions of 81 IRA men during the Irish civil war have long been a bitter, almost taboo subject in Irish society. This article provides a geographical perspective on these executions. While the origins of the policy can be traced to elite divisions, the geographical spread of the executions, especially in 1923, reflected the geography of the civil war, and the need to broadcast state power at the local level during its guerrilla phase. The article maps the geographical spread of the executions and analyzes their diffusion in terms of a number of general and Irish-specific theories of civil war violence. Because the civil war originated in elite differences over a treaty, and because the two sides of the conflict had been so personally close at the elite level, historians have tended to explain the executions in terms of elite psychology. Yet while the initial development of the policy reflected the centralization of power by the protreaty elite, in terms of timing, strategic rationale, and location territorial perspectives on civil war explain much more about their diffusion in 1923.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today's Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this paper we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.