Historical Sociology

Barrington Moore
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966)

Some of the characteristics of this domain:

Global in scale, analytical comparison, comparison based on workings on certain
concepts; taxonomy, classification, configuration based on working with key conceptual
tools.

Specifically in Moores work, key concepts: historical relationship between two classes, landed
upper classes & peasantry. Comes up with a classification, the notion of revolution, difference
between bourgeois revolutions (or absence of) and peasant revolutions: from agrarian,
pre-modern to modern industrial societies, there are certain parts:
1) Capitalism coexist with parliamentary democracy reached by a bourgeois revolution.
(England, France, USA)
2) Capitalism, no democracy, failed or absence of bourgeois revolution + fascism.
(Germany, Japan)
3) Communism, peasant revolution. (Russia, China).
4) India.

Generalization for the sake of particularities. No bourgeois revolution no democracy (claims

the model above). To clarify the concepts working on. Democracy? Bourgeois revolution? Etc

Certain common characteristics of democracy: ability to check arbitrary rulers; ability to change
arbitrary rulers with just and rational ones; to secure a share for the substantial portion of the
population in the making of the rules.

Why there is parliamentary democracy in certain places and why not in others?The relationship
between classes that led to different historical developmental paths.

Feudalism, Western European: certain institutions that distinguish this part of the world from the
others. These institutions gave birth, many centuries later, to parliamentary democracy:
Immunity of certain people and groups from the power of the ruler; the right of resistance to
unjust authority; notion of a contract - mutual relationship of different groups: obligations and
rights. Landlords and peasants, together with their relationship to monarchies and bourgeoisie.

Absolute monarchy X parliamentary system: after revolutions in Britain, France no strong

state. No bourgeois no democracy. ~ commercial agriculture (markets) had different impacts
in different places depending on the relationship between classes.

England -- total subjugation of the peasantry. France -- they wanted to maintain the rental
system and were wiped out with the Revolution. Prussia -- landlords were able to subjugate the
peasantry, unlike the English, by enserfing them (second serfdom) as feudal serfdom:
plantations of grain (also in Russia) mid 19th c.

Looking back from parliamentary democracy to understand why and how it developed is
problematic. He says cultural explanations do not explain anything.

Cities and States in Europe, 1000-1800

Charles Tilly

Tilly tries to understand differences in the state formation in Europe and Russia.
Capital and coercion. Comes up with a diagram. Whether coercion or capital were more
important in the formation of each state. How did we end up from 1000 to nation states in 1800.
Why and how this form of state? Why not city-states but nation-states? R ather than backwards
(as Moore); Tilly looks from 1000 to onward. Looks at cities (where capital is located) and
states (where monopoly of coercion is going to be located). Statemakers need money to build a
state and the money is made in the cities. Periods: 1000-1500; 1500-1700; 1700-1800. First
period: capital is collected as tribute. Local - ruler, contractual through intermediaries, with
conquest. Second period: rulers apply other kinds of intermediaries: financiers. Loans, raise
taxes by tax farming through intermediaries again, increasingly rely on capitalist to raise
money/capital in order to stay as a state or build a stronger state. Third period: start as a ruler;
collect taxes directly, get rid of the intermediaries, tax farmers, local rulers; send your own
salaried officials of the state directly, not as tribute as taxes of produce, property, animals. This
change seen everywhere in different ways. First: retainers, militias, feed people, fiefs.
Second: mercenary forces. Third: bargaining change: bargain with social population not
with intermediary lords/capitalists/local rulers, welfare state to convince people to
conscript the army. Pension, payment to poor, public education etc.

Does not take one place as a model when comparing.

Shift in the importance of the cities, capital intense. Subjugated due to war-making capacities
into states.

World system:
Labor regime and type of state -- a classification
From the 16th century onwards, capitalist world economy emerges, different from world empires
existed before, a multi-state system, contained in itself a division of labor.
Core - periphery - semi-periphery
Core: free labor (wage labor), strong state
Periphery: forced labor/coerced labor, week state
Semi-periphery: not forced not free labor; not week not strong state.

Global division of labor from 16th century. Different state structures and workers status. Not
only from the perspective of core; how capitalism expands, incorporates different parts of the
world and how this incorporation changes the core. Tension between generalization and
particularity. Classification problems. Coexistence of different labor regimes. Dynamic model.
Modifications and criticism.

Hobsbawm

Social History: history of the poor/lower classes, history of social movements (i); manners,
customs, everyday life (ii); social was used in combination with economic history.

Systematically different than Rankean approach; evolution of the economy. Change in

economic history, leads social history to change. Not simpler as modernization models suggest.

How much societal historians can get from other social sciences; Also social scientists
employment of history, asking historical questions: conversion rather than convergence.

History of society is history, it has a chronological line (i); of specific units of people living
together and definable in sociological terms (ii); requires orders of research priorities and a
working assumption about what constitutes the central nexus or the complex connections of our
subjects (iii).

Calhoun

Mounted an attack on modernization theory, its unilinear development tendencies, its

problematic historical generalizations and dominance of culture and psychology over
political economy.

Poststructuralism: universalization, even trivialization of differences.

Cultural History

Darnton

Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the
workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting
point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in
an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque.
When you realize that you are not getting somethinga joke, a proverb, a ceremonythat is
particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning
in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to get a
basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.
Stone

Instead of a consistent scientific explanation of the change in the past, the culture of the
group and even the will of the individual are potentially at least as important causal
agents of change as the impersonal forces of material output and demographic growth.

The emphasis on the experiences of actual people led to a revival of narrative history.

Whether history can see itself as a science or if it can, how?

He never argued that consistent scientific explanation illusion renounced rational

research and factual reconstruction of history even though historical narrative has an
unavoidable literary characteristic.

consistent scientific explanation was adopted both by Rankean historiography and social
sciences oriented historiography however differently.

Hobsbawm

Not based on simply individuals, even the revival of narrative that Stone points out is
actually again a means of illuminating some wider question; not simply about
individuals, events, way of thinking etc They did not stop to try to find a wider
explanation actually. The choice of starting point. Nothing new in choosing to see the
world via a microscope or a telescope

Global History/Comparative History

29 November

Global History / World History / Comparative History

We have been reading comparative history from the beginning. Marxist, Marc Bloch,
Kenneth Pomeranz, Charles Tilly.

Arises in 1980s, globalization. Professionalization.

Moore: importance to McNeills work (origins of World History).

How and why do we write World History?

More comprehensive history. Not the first attempt to go beyond nationalist history
(Annales). Qualitative contribution. Also, Marxist historiography by instinct beyond nation state
borders / self-important person. Area studies was also another attempt in regional state. N otion
of civilizations. Also alternatives to histories of nation-states. Separate field of world history:
increasing recognition of parochialism (only from European or North American perspective).
Trying to write total history (annales)

Moore: emergence of world history, new conceptual and technological developments in

archaeology and social anthropology made it possible to g o beyond limitations geographic.
Becoming available of other types of evidence other than simple documents made it possible to
link in material and conceptual way different parts of the world. Importance of comparative
method. Continuation of Annales historians effort: being able to use all the material evidence
you need teamwork, scientist, paleontologists, biologists etc. In order to be able to write
long-term; world history claims to write the big story (comp. microstoria) from the
beginning to present.

Problems: what can be considered to fall within this field? What is the world history?
1. Working with connections, links and comparison; in time and space.
2. To write more long term such as environmental history; history of a disease; history of
potato. More concentrated study of certain questions and things; events and structures.

Common practices transgressing regional and national borders (peasantry). Eric Wolfe (peoples
without history). People and their relationship to their hinterland (Tilly).

Moore: cambridge history series; contributors (specialists) are asked to contributor. In 1930s,
different than 60s and 80s: questions asked are different. Could end up as an encyclopedia, a
compilation of information, not a historical work, no questions.

Wallerstein: world-systems theory

Defensive histories: other parts of the world (other than west) have marginal attention.
Post-colonial and subaltern theories (make reference to golden age of non-western
corrupted by western; if not, it would have prospered) included. [criticism: reproduces the
dichotomy between east and the west; dominated and dominator].

Chakrabarty - Provincializing Europe: (decentralizing) west - non-west polarities are based on

an association of political modernity (bureaucracy, capitalism, citizenship, rule of law,
democracy etc.). West claims these are not found in east; east says these are not local all
west (it is reproducing). One should be underline the hypocrisy of colonialization (bringing
democracy) practicising not they preached.-->hypocrisy; such values should be upheld;
claimed not to any geographic area but all humanity; it is the only way to provincialize Europe:
go beyond these defensive histories.

Dirlik: when does postcolonialism start? Third world intellectuals arrived in first world universities
:) Relate critique of eurocentrism with the ideology of globalized capitalism. No mention to
it because it is a metanarrative in postcolonialism; paradoxically, emphasis on identity in
postcolonial studies to counteract eurocentrism keeps reproducing these mechanisms.

30 November

Comparative trend:

Ottoman and Chinese historians - general description of field. Criticizing assumptions that
dominating the writing of world history. Its past and future trajectories vis-a-vis present.
Assumptions repeating the nature of given society, possible roots, comparative to other regions.
Any historian has certain assumptions, whether declared or implied. The problem: study of
western and non-western societies; their relation. C ertain assumptions on certain absences
and presences. Europe - presences; non-European - absences.

Presences: bourgeois revolution, dynamic commercial classes, liberal constitutional

state, private property.

Stagnant agrarian economies, halted commercial developments, absence of revolutions

backwardness. > not an innocence academic attempt: instrumental in legitimizing
western, european rule over other parts. Not only about non-european areas, at the same
time defines Europe, a way of negative self-definition.

Importance of historicizing; in 19th century this categorization solidified. 16th to 18th century for
philosophes in France Ottoman sultan was an enlightened leader: critique of French king by
praising Ottoman sultan. Praising good ruler is a way of criticizing your own leader.
Orientalism is related with actual par relations.

Two schools: modernization school (mid-20th c.) and the world-systems theory.

Modernization: the idea of westernization is the only way out for non-European regions.
By adopting European institutions you can break the stagnation.

World-systems theory: divides the world into a dynamic core (europe and north america)
and a stagnant, dominated, dependent periphery. (slamolu-Perdue). Change can only
happen with capitalist diffusion; both reproduce the dichotomy of dominant west and dominated
periphery.

Why failure of in China/India/Ottoman Empire etc

Culturalist explanation: repression of trade (Hinduism/Budism etc.)

Revise the historical narrative ask different type of question for both the Ottoman and Chinese
Empires (revisionist historiography).
Late divergence (china and europe was not that different - comp. Pomeranz)

Historical contingency opposed to unilinear understanding of history (present is written on the

stone in ancient times).

Contingency: conjunctural not so much structural development. Environmental bounty in

England (Pomeranz).

Not making comparison of assumed totalities. Not privilege, god-given right but global. Both in
their origins and consequences. Implication of this argument: we have to be aware of there are
multiple roots to capitalism as a global process, not one way - ideal, typical English way -
emerged globally and there were different responses to emergence in different places. Multiple
roots to modernity. Not privilege of the Europeans not modernities, only one modernity it
is global. Notions of multiplicity.

In order to do all those things we need to come up categories to go beyond borders; equally
valid for any part of the world but transcends east-west dichotomy. Universality in the
concepts. Common modernity between the east and the west.

State formation is fundamental. State and society are not apart. State as a negotiated enterprise
in early modern period. In 19th century, rigid, solidified, centralized state structure, central
bureaucracy and state lost its flexibility and led to the dissolution of the Empire; did not
negotiate (Akarl, longevity, oppose to slamolu). slamolu claims 19th century negotiated
continued but reach of it changes, the site of it change within law and bureaucracy. Negotiation
must be explained. All changes are result of copying, a vulgar way to put it.

China did not want to centralize, Ottoman Empire wanted to and succeeded to some extent but
Ottoman empire collapsed. There are different responses.

slamolu article:

State environment to go beyond the state-society dichotomy. Freeholders are created

(malikane-ayan), peasant household. Parallel to Charles Tilly, in order to build that you need
strong state, taxation, fiscality, viable army, land tenure and taxation systems.

Distributionist (accommodationist), reciprocity(polanyi): resources in return for soldiers. Central

ruler grants the right to collect revenues to elites. Also happens in China, what changes is
particularities, timar 16th century.

17-18th c. distribution nature, reciprocity changes, tax farmers. Military technology changed.
Janissaries, regular training etc negotiate with tax farmers, revenue distribution. Tax farmer
elites are different.
Accommodationist aspect ruler presenter of justice, flock, rules and regulations can changed
due to provinces because contract with local elites are different and kanunnames of the
provinces also.

19th c. distributionist productionist logic. Different type of state, get rid of elite, collect
taxes directly. Talk directly with the ruled. Costly. If you do this, you think, you will have
more revenue (parallel to Tilly again). Bargaining is with social population, social welfare
enters. Before it was local elites responsibility. You cannot enlarge borders, cannot increase
tribute, instead work better with whatever you have. Hence the importance of efficiency and
agricultural production.

Bundle of rights: property rights: right to title of the land, to the revenue of the land, to the use of
the land (not individual property) - miri lands (negotiation)

19th c. towards individual life, simplification. All the rights to an individual. Unit of taxation: timar
to peasant household. Unit of measurement: ift to dnm.

Oral History/Memory

Oral History

The way we do history changes the content/historiographical writing. Whether that form
transforms the content, leads to a new perspective of history writing.

A different way of writing history, transforms the history written. Svetlana Alexievich.

A new form of writing history. Attributed to it: a social purpose. Indistinguishable from
the method. Not a neutral writing of history but an engaged one / sort of activist.

Paul Thompson and Alessandro Portelli: whether an instrument of change and/or transforms the
purpose and content. Changes the form of writing the history, opens up new areas of research.
Ordinary people not included before. Thompson: varies between generations. G iving back the
voice to the ordinary people (E. P. Thompson --- Subaltern Studies [never did oral historical
work], also). As opposed to Rankean, 19th c. history, o ral history does not necessarily divide
the historical time into reigns of self-important rulers or dynasties. Depending upon the
particular locality. Particular scientification of history in 19th c. A tradition of historiography
whereby privileged source of history writing did not become archival documents. X
historians make use of oral accounts: Macaulay (songs, novels, memoir, autobiography 17th c.
onwards - 19th c. working people, travel writing, historical records & surveys in 19th c. important
parliamentary commission reports/observation/field work: Engels - conditions of working class in
revolution - direct observations. Beatrice and Sidney Webb - cooperative movement), Jules
Michelet (one of the first historians of french revolution, talked with different people), even Marc
Bloch (maps, land and landscape, folklore, origin of place names). Not privileging archival
documents as the major source.

Debate on nature of source material. - written sources are not so reliable also!

19th c. romanticism - importance of ethnography, folk tales-epics. Important in Germany and will
become in USA. German university USA university. Extreme relativism. Different cultures can
be understood in their own context. 19th c. triumph of documentation, Rankean school, rejection
he issue of objectivity. Historian is a person, not
of historical novel as historical evidence. T
personally involved in the act of research, remains aloof, apart. Only goes to the archive and
collects the information and lets the facts speak for themselves. American Folklore,
anthropology, New Deal (Keynesian intervention) increased funding for research on urban and
rural population. Liveliness of oral history in USA. Latin America, Italy, Spain. Italy, 20th c.
Second World War and partisan anti-fascist and afterwards, communist movements, resistance
to fascism and immigration, mostly involving rural people to towns. Spain, Franco regime and its
aftermath. Greece, resistance to Nazi occupation, the civil war. Ireland, resistance towards
British. Russia collapse of the USSR, triggering huge amount of research on history of USSR.
Gulag, camps, life under socialism.

Rankean objective vs. 19th century Romanticism incited. P ortelli: reaction against orality, not
objective, not conforming to the standards of scientific historiography. The dividing
issue is not whether one is objective and other is not. The issue is beyond that kind of
very superficial division, Portelli argues, written and oral sources are not mutually
exclusive. Both types of sources perform different functions and have different characteristics.
These different types of sources need different frameworks. Portelli: try out to bring out
distinguishing features, what is different about oral history? Portelli lists 1- Oral sources
are oral: historian needs to take the orality seriously, not from the transcript. The words, the
voice etc Once oral evidence transcribed it becomes written evidence. You need to analyze
them in oral form. Portelli argues, putting down on paper should be careful, notation of written
language is not sufficient to render the richness of what was said and how it was said. Tonality,
pace (emotional content: Portelli). Narrative sources. 2 - less about events than meanings.
Issue of meanings. We do not talk to people to get/ the primary intention, aim of oral historical
work is not to learn about the factual content of an event. Not interested at all of factual content
of event. It is derived from other sources, while speaking to this person, you seek s ubjective
evidence of that event by that person, how s/he interprets the event. It is also about facts,
factual validity. But subjective life experience of the person you speak is your primary concern. If
you dont know that event, you will not know the small details, you cannot get subjectivity of that
event, interpretation, changes. Subjectivity: what they wanted to do, what they now think they
did at the time --- personal accounts. Dynamic memory. Oral history is never complete. 3-
respectability and credibility, Portelli: oral history is a different notion of credibility, the
importance of oral testimony lies in its departure from reality, imagination, symbolism,
desire. (comp. Darnton) Written sources do not have a monopoly on credibility, they were the
oral sources of the past, e.g. court records. Not their ability to preserve the past but very
changes brought to the memory, reveal the narrators effort to make sense of the past
and give a form meaning to their lives. Acceptable things now can be unacceptable in the
past. How they tell this when reflecting back in time? Its not what they tell but what they hide.
You have to know what happened first.

---

Orality much more important than studying its transcript. Emotional content, poses, velocity of
speech, tone, volume, rhythm.

Less about events than about meanings; relationship between fact and subjectivity; mutually
dependent complementary.

Oral sources have different kind of credibility. Importance of oral testimony lies in its departure
from facts; imagination, symbolism etc

Dealing with subjectivity, memory: memory is dynamic; meaning is not fixed as written sources.
Oral source is not passive. How that memory is presented is important. Narrator efforts to make
sense of that past and give a form of meaning to their lives. Oral sources are not objective in
this sense. Researcher is actively involved in this process. It is a dialogue; researchers can
introduce distortions; researcher involves with the choice of the interviewee -- interventions.
Passerini and Portelli: against questionnaire type. Let the interviewee speak. P ortelli:
researcher should give priority what the informant has to say. How you arrange this for
publication is also important. Voice of the interviewee must be included but to what extent their
direct voice will be woven into the published material. Unfinishedness. Paul Thompson and
others: element of democratization with oral history: teamwork, lives of ordinary people,
not only content-wise, also the researchers must be a group of researcher:
democratization. Facile populism (Passerini). Idea of the objective historian, on the other pole,
activist historian with a political agenda -- too much involvement, facile populism - it is not where
working classes speak for themselves.

Portelli - Uchronic Dreams:

Uchronia - Utopia

Uchronia - nowhen
What would have happened if something had not taken place?

Filipponi, after WWII, talks about a party meeting; issue put forth to vote. Anti-fascist
cooperation, not communism. All are not true.

Portelli takes Filipponi seriously. How these political decisions were made sense of. Rather than
leadership vs. rank positions, leading into debate on ideological positions, these are talked as
tactical decisions in the face of some particular events. Decisions reduced to tactical. Blaming
certain individual for taking decisions. Heroic working class betrayed by leadership.

Uchronia, defensive mechanism, suppressed desires.

Passerini:

What did you do around the time of the war?

To understand Italian working class culture, subjectivity of that experience. 1920s to WW2 and
afterwards.

- How far and in what ways coercion takes place in the sphere subjectivity? How to cope with it.
- What..

Against the conventional idea that leadership sold out. How the defeat is internalized.

Sheila Fitzpatrick - LRB on Alexievich

Orlando Figes - The Whisperers

Family histories.
Lewis Siegelbaum - LRB on Figes The Whisperers.

Microhistory & Digital History

1 - a conception about what social/individual action is about; how and where, under what
conditions, nature of that type of action
2 - movement between the different scales of observation in dynamic way
3 - interest in meaning and interpretation; anthropology, different than cultural history
(Robert Darnton)
4 - issue of the narration, narrative. Not only rhetoric, telling a good story but how you
tell is important. Involvement of reader in the research, evidence, questions etc. the
concern to involve the reader.
5 - context in which individual action, decision, behavior takes place, fundamental
importance.

Giovanni Levi: not a question of reducing the scale, writing about small people, events,
not only distinction btw quantitative / qualitative. Microfocus a tool than an object of
research. (comp. Hobsbawm against Stone) Other forms of quantification opposed to tables,
statistics such as drawing graphs of relational networks, chaos, game, probability theories.

Features Levi underlined:

Ginzburg and Cerutti, debate (mostly in Cerutti): Ginzburgs methodological article is written
as a microhistorical method, in the spirit of microhistorical work, openly talking to the
reader. Connection to Braudel, Darnton, Thompson. Reaffirmation of serial history;
counterposes microhistory in opposition to serial history. New generation of Annalists: only
statistics. Recurring in pattern, serial. Repetition of evidence is important to establish a pattern,
a structure. Anomalies in historical record are much more important. The book reconstructs the
ideas and attitudes of a sixteenth century miller. Cheese and worms were his cosmology, very
atheistic worldview. In addition to this reconstruction, book narrates the events. Purpose
of narration was to fill in the gaps in the documentation. (even Ranke accepts the literary
side) Through narration, obstacles interfering the research are openly discussed in a way to
make these problems of documentation a part of documentation. Things are not told are as
important as things told (oral history) his quietness, silence against the questions of
the prosecutors. Tolstoy (War and Peace): perfect understanding of this battle is to see it
from perspectives of every available person. gaps in historical documentation (we dont
have such a luxury). Analytical tool of microscopic level. Zoom in to certain characters, to view
general picture you need to zoom out, camera should move in and out. (Marc Blochs
method, working with close-up, long shots). (Giovanni Levi) the nature of social action
and its relation to social reality. No contradiction because hes labeled as post-modern but he
says he is not; textual dimension without cognitive dimension (po-mo). All phases through which
research take place are constructed. The nature of proof for judge and historian: difference?
Highly skeptical to relativism, postmodernism rejecting an external social reality.
Microhistorian concerns on establishing context. Not constructed, has an existence of its
own. Clues in signs as a historical proof. Enigma of Piero: unification of churches, signs in
painting, reads one painting. The Night Battles: witchcraft

Cerutti:
By dividing social and cultural (Levi, Grandi, Cerutti: social, Ginzburg: cultural). Essential
starting points. Part of a total history, context is all important, individual action takes place
in a social and cultural context as a unity. But the context is not something received, but
constructed. Point is not to take it as given. Grandi: land market in a small italian village. How
peasants and others entered into transactions and carried out. Impose something about that
community (general views), Cerutti: to see how this general context is also constructed. Not
only individual action but also in the way they make sense of general social, cultural
context. To construct the context within which these people behaved. Ginzburg, acc to
Cerutti, fails. Because, he does not follow the point of view of person involved but
imposes his understanding as a researcher; also relevant for E. P. Thompsons work, she
says. (fatmas story: what was fatmas strategy? Asking these questions are imposing them
game-acting, rational behavior, we should understand from the perspective of the people
involved.). Thompson: High culture in normative law, and low culture alternative to normative
law. Depending on the situation, working classes might use the language of alternative justices,
just price for bread; when they become seller in the market he might become a maximizer for
profit. Polarization might be to a level that is unnecessary. Take people seriously rather than
impose our understanding.
Concentric circles from Menocchio outwards or vice versa? DEBATE cerutti v. ginzburg

---

Microhistory notes

The reasons of decline in macrohistory concepts can be found in the optimism t owards
modernization theories.

Saving the stockinger and the peasant from the condescension of next generations.

Not history but histories, even stories: no reason for a history based on large social
change and a history focused on individual existences to stand together.

Discontinuities in the history does not allow grand narratives.

There is a reality to know about external to the historical texts.

(Ginzburg says he is not postmodern since micro historians accepts a

social and cultural context. As Hobsbawm opposes to Stone, the
revival of narrative is only a choice of method, still try to answer wider
questions. Historical sociology, global/comparative history, micro
history all are against to modernization theories, prioritization of the
West and World history claims to write the big story; whereas
microstoria tries to construct this context through a small scale; only
the starting point changes. Departure from reality is important how
people make sense of the reality in oral history; in cultural history, it
is important to start from things we did not understand with our
present day understanding. Democratization of history; digital - oral
history especially.)

Digital history:

digitization of non-digital material (scanning, storing archival documentation in another

format) it makes access easier b ut not guaranteeing. (technological aspect)
Visualization (spatial turn - as Franco Moretti does): highly facilitated by digital tools,
mapping, drawing graphs,
 Big data: immensely expanded potential of computer technology. Increased capacity
allow storing huge amount data, but also makes it available. Big data can be construed
as feeding in historical statistics.

Benefits: increased capacity, accessibility, more emphasis on open/public access,

flexibility. Easy to merge different data forms (text, sound, image, movie etc.) Not only
published book, web sites, online etc. Softwares make it easier to collaborate, forming
teams without physically be in the same places. More interactive, potential of
democratization. Easier to share, involve different people.

Problems: authenticity, copy/paste, quality. Potential and real danger of accessibility.

Digital divide, imposing monopolies or political censorship. Open source.

Moretti, stanford digital laboratory; digital history.

Old bailey online

EU Project of digitization - Europeana.

Robert Darnton; digitizing Harvard Library: case for books.

Guldi and Armitage, Big Questions, Big Data

Colin Wilders Republic of Literature project which, by digitising early-modern legal texts
and
linking the text-based information to a gigantic social networking map of teachers and students
of law, aims to show who drove legal change in early modern Germany, where many of our first
ideas of the public domain, private property, and mutuality emerged.

Fogel and Engermans work, slavery, cliometrics.

70s quantitative turn.

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