Who were the people at the cutting edge of social reform in Europe between 1840 and 1880, and how were they connected? This article proposes a method to locate a transnational community of experts involved in social reform and focuses on the ways in which these experts shared and spread their knowledge across borders. After a discussion of the concepts of social reform, transnationalization, and transfer, we show how we built a database of visitors to social reform congresses in the period 1840-1880, and explain how we extracted a core group of experts from this database. This ''congress elite'' is the focus of the second part of this article, in which we discuss their travels, congress visits, publications, correspondence, and membership of learned and professional organizations. We argue that individual members of our elite, leaning on the prestige of their international contacts, shaped reform debates in their home countries. We conclude by calling for further research into the influence that the transnational elite were able to exert on concrete social reforms in different national frameworks in order to assess to what extent they can be regarded as an ''epistemic community in the making''.
Between 1853 and 1876 nine international statistical congresses were held in different European cities. The aim of the congresses was to bring about uniformity in the themes and methods of national statistics. However, this goal could not be attained overnight. Much of the failure to bring about rapid change was due to the difficulties in realizing effective knowledge transfers, that is, effective communication, in an age that was not quite ready for truly international activities. It has been shown that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of numerous experiments in internationalism, but at the same time rampant nationalism nipped many initiatives in the bud. Increasing nationalism, however, is not the only explanation for the collapse of the international statistical congress. The implicit faith in the possibility of a neutral science of statistics also created huge difficulties. Realizing statistical uniformity presupposed that the underlying facts and figures were comparable. This uniformity was far removed from the rapidly changing administrative reality in nineteenth-century Europe.
This article seeks to assess in which ways tracing mobilities provides new insights into the strategies pertaining to transnational knowledge exchange related to social reform in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It follows four visitors to international congresses in the period around 1900 to evaluate to what extent their movements were likely to effect change at the international, national or local level. In order to structure the analysis I have identified two "frames", i.e. two pairs of opposing aspirations, which emerged in the transnational social reform debates of the turn of the century: (1) the tension between international and national (sometimes also local) ambitions; (2) the interplay of state intervention and civil society organisations in providing welfare. The four actors occupied different but by no means fixed positions on these axes. 2 Quoted in Nico Randeraad: States and Statistics in the Nineteenth Century. Europe by Numbers. Manchester 2010, 14. 3 Quoted in Anne Rasmussen: Les Congrès internationaux liés aux Expositions universelles de Paris (1867-1900), in: Mil neuf cent. Cahiers Georges Sorel 7 (1989), 34. 4 This is a rough calculation based on data in our Nodegoat-powered database, which includes information on the distances between home and destination cities of congress visitors. See tic.ugent.be for a summary of this digital humanities project. The database is described in greater detail in
In contrast to the image of the Netherlands as a solid state since the early modern period, this article argues that Dutch statehood was the product of a hard-won process that required a good part of the 19th century to reach any sort of administrative consolidation. We look at state building from a decentered perspective, not so much from above or below, but rather from the middle, concentrating on the province of South Holland, and from within, foregrounding the piecemeal fine-tuning of the administrative system at the provincial level. We show that every administrative intervention had a spatial element or – to put it differently – created its own spatiality. The province, in that sense, was not a fixed territorial entity, but an amalgamation of spatial properties, depending on the administrative issue at stake.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.