Marco H. D. van Leeuwen

The Construction of HISCAM: A Stratification Scale Based on Social Interactions for Historical Comparative Research

Abstract A new occupational stratification scale, “HISCAM” (historical CAMSIS), has been developed to facilitate the analysis of data coded to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. This article describes the derivation and properties of the HISCAM measure. The scale was derived using patterns of inter-generational occupational connections, replicating a method of “social interaction distance” analysis which is widely used in contemporary sociology. Analysis was performed on data for the period of 1800–1938, principally derived from marriage registers covering Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and encompassing over two million inter-generational relationships. Researchers report how several different HISCAM scales were evaluated and show how this approach can explain social stratification and inequality in the past.

Endogamy and Social Class in History: An Overview

The social identities of marriage partners [...] are among the most sensitive and acute indicators of community or class feelings. Who marries whom, without courting alienation or rejection from a social set, is an acid test of the horizons and boundaries of what each particular social set regards as tolerable and acceptable, and a sure indication of where that set draws the line of membership.

Total and Relative Endogamy by Social Origin: A First International Comparison of Changes in Marriage Choices during the Nineteenth Century

The introductory chapter to this volume presented a number of theories and hypotheses on the determinants of endogamy; the following chapters described endogamy in different historical settings and tested some of those hypotheses. The tests looked especially at the effects of individual characteristics of spouses, and sometimes of their parents. Results relating to changes in macro characteristics over time and their effect on the likelihood of endogamy were presented. Because all these chapters refer to only one country or region, regional comparisons are seldom made (there are some exceptions: Bras and Kok on differences between parts of the province of Zeeland; Pelissier et al . on differences between rural and urban areas, and Van de Putte et al . on differences between several Belgian cities and villages).

Industrialization and Intergenerational Mobility in Sweden

The relationship between industrialization and intergenerational mobility has been a topic of discussion for over forty years. In this article both total mobility and relative mobility chances are studied in the decades preceding industrialization and the decades during industrialization. A high-quality data set is used covering the male population of a region in the north of Sweden during the 19th century. Total intergenerational mobility increased during industrialization until, at the end of the century, both industrialization and the growth of mobility stagnated. Sectorial barriers resulted in unequal relative mobility chances before and also during industrialization. However, sons from self-employed classes were less likely to inherit the class position of their father after the onset of industrialization. At the same time, mobility between classes differing in status became less frequent. These results show a decline in the importance of the direct transfer of resources between generations and may indicate the increasing importance of education.

Status Attainment of Siblings during Modernization

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling- and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total—unmeasured—family effect on sons’ status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father’s occupational status, decreased gradually in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. A substantial part of this decrease was due to some, but not all, of the modernization processes adduced by the modernization thesis.

National Campaigns for Charitable Causes: A Literature Review

The authors present the first cross-national comparison of more than 300 national campaigns for charitable causes in the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States for the period 1950 to 2011. The authors study frequency and amounts raised, discuss successful and failed campaigns, and review the literature with regard to potential determinants of success. The authors group these determinants into three categories: (a) perceived characteristics of recipients, notably their need, agency, and blamelessness; (b) donor characteristics, such as geographical and cultural proximity, a gain in status or reputation, and material incentives; and (c) structural characteristics of the giving regime, such as the frequency and media formats of campaigns, fundraising rules and regulations, and trust.

Log-linear Analysis of Changes in Mobility Patterns: Some Models with an Application to the Amsterdam Upper Classes in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

(1991). Log-linear Analysis of Changes in Mobility Patterns: Some Models with an Application to the Amsterdam Upper Classes in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 66-79.

The Future of Economic, Business, and Social History

Introduction (by the editors of SEHR, Alfred Reckendrees and Jacob Weisdorf) On 25 May 2012, the Scandinavian Society of Economic and Social History celebrated the 60th anniversary of its international journal, Scandinavian Economic History Review, at Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen with a conference on ‘The Future of Economic, Social and Business History’. The editors of this journal invited three distinguished scholars in the fields of economic, business and social history, Stephen Broadberry, Geoffrey Jones and Marco van Leeuwen, to present their personal views and ideas about the future of their respective disciplines. Their talks led to inspiring and engaged discussions and we asked the three speakers to jointly publish their talks in SEHR. The future, however, is not a research field for any kind of historian and not a topic for an academic journal in the field of economic history; and thus, they hesitated. Yet, we are all curious about the future and we discuss also economic and social perspectives when we discuss our own historical research. This makes our subjects interesting and relevant, even though we may not be able to predict anything that others could not predict as well. We appreciate and respect that Geoffrey Jones, Marco van Leeuwen and Stephen Broadberry have agreed to present their personal views, opinions and reflections about their research fields to the broader audience of this journal. We hope that the three viewpoints encourage more of us to engage in a deeper discussion about the present challenges and future potential of economic, business and social history.

Giving in early modern history: philanthropy in Amsterdam in the Golden Age

Philanthropy was enduring in early modern Europe. For centuries local charities gave small sums that helped many people to survive. Such charity can be studied from below, from the persepective of survival strategies, and from above, from the perspective of social control, but it can also be studied as scholars of philanthropic studies do for contemporary societies. This article does the latter. It pays attention to benefactors and benefactions; how many people gave and who were they?; when, where and what did benefactors give, and what were their motives? The article places an in-depth study of Amsterdam from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century in the context of the literature on early modern European philanthropy.

Migration and Endogamy According to Social Class: France, 1803-1986

Summary: Does intra-national migration matter for partner choice? A number of conflicting hypotheses on the effects of migration on the likelihood of endogamy according to social class of origin are formulated and tested on the French historical record over the past two centuries. We conclude that migrants were less likely to marry endogamously, especially if they migrated from rural villages to cities; this is explained mainly by the fact that they thereby escaped the social pressure of their parents and peers and met more people from different social backgrounds. Contrary to what we expected, the relationships between migration characteristics and endogamy changed hardly at all over the two centuries. We also investigated whether temporal differences in endogamy could be explained partly by changes in migration patterns. We found that they could. The increase in the number of men and women living in or moving to cities was one particularly important cause of the decreasing likelihood of endogamy. Finally, we were interested in the possible bias in regional studies on endogamy. Our results show that this bias is especially large if these regions include only rural areas or cities. This is because the likelihood of endogamy differs between rural areas and cities, and is also especially low for people who move between these two types of region.