Preliminary Programme

Was there greater social mobility in North America than Europe? This question has exercised social scientists and historians for centuries, and received particular attention from social science historians since samples of the population censuses became easily available in the 1960s and beyond. This paper reports on a new approach to this classic question. Using data from the North Atlantic Population Project we have constructed linked samples from the 1850s to 1880s and 1880s to 1910s in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. The samples were constructed in a comparable fashion to allow for precise comparisons of the levels of mobility without artefactual differences in the samples. By including two generations we are also able to comment on changes in inter-generational mobility across generations. We measure social mobility across generations by comparing the occupations and social classes of men at age 30-45 who were first observed living with their father 30 years earlier. Our project breaks new ground by extending the comparison of social mobility to both British and French Canada, giving us leverage to understand how politics, culture, and environment affected mobility. Like the United States, Canada was a federal country that eventually spanned North America, with low population density and cheap land in the nineteenth century. The Canadian economic environment was similar to that in adjacent American states. Yet Canada inherited a mixture of French and British culture and institutions, which were reflected in both intra-national and international socio-economic differences. We also add to this literature a new focus on how measures of family background and resources, aside from the father's occupation, affect mobility; and measure the influence of childhood community context. (Show less)

Was there greater social mobility in North America than Europe? This question has exercised social scientists and historians for centuries, and received particular attention from social science historians since samples of the population censuses became easily available in the 1960s and beyond. This paper reports on a new approach to this classic question. Using data from the North Atlantic Population Project we have constructed linked samples from the 1850s to 1880s and 1880s to 1910s in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. The samples were constructed in a comparable fashion to allow for precise comparisons of the levels of mobility without artefactual differences in the samples. By including two generations we are also able to comment on changes in inter-generational mobility across generations. We measure social mobility across generations by comparing the occupations and social classes of men at age 30-45 who were first observed living with their father 30 years earlier. Our project breaks new ground by extending the comparison of social mobility to both British and French Canada, giving us leverage to understand how politics, culture, and environment affected mobility. Like the United States, Canada was a federal country that eventually spanned North America, with low population density and cheap land in the nineteenth century. The Canadian economic environment was similar to that in adjacent American states. Yet Canada inherited a mixture of French and British culture and institutions, which were reflected in both intra-national and international socio-economic differences. We also add to this literature a new focus on how measures of family background and resources, aside from the father's occupation, affect mobility; and measure the influence of childhood community context. (Show less)

Eric Hobsbawm has launched that there was a “peasant road to agrarian capitalism” where the peasants remained as landowner and contributed to the development of capitalistic forms of production in agriculture. A vital part to understand this process is to study strategies on the land market during an era of severe structural changes. In this study it is shown that there was both a concentration and a polarization of ownership in the study area, an increase of both large and very small portions. It seems, as also has been confirmed in previous research, that commercialization in agriculture loosened up kin relations, especially when the family farm was too small to be profitable. The peasant’s actions on the land market were profound for the formation of a class of peasant proprietors. But the peasant’s strategies on the land market were also crucial for the development of a commercialized agriculture and led to a divided land market. (Show less)

This purpose of this research has been to explore patterns and tendencies in social, economic and household structures across mid-Victorian England and Wales, by means of applying multidimensional analysis techniques to geo-referenced census data. The basis of the research is the complete count census data for 1881: 25 million person records have been aggregated at household and parish level, providing indices for some 17,000 spatial (parish-based) unit, which can then be mapped. Both principal component analysis (PCM) and cluster analysis have been applied to the data.
This paper will be divided as follows into 3 key sections. Section 1 will present the underlying data source and outline the necessary data preparation steps and structuring of the database. Section 2 will present the initial results of the principal component analysis, describing the selection of the principal components and the related data aggregation and data evaluation processes. Section 3 presents the visualisation of the principal component analysis, utilizing an existing GIS and the VidaExpert application. This key section of the paper will also consider geographic structure visualisation, data visualisation from the values of the principal components, cluster analysis and elastic map visualisation. (Show less)