Building European Society

This collection of essays surveys methodological techniques available to historians of work histories and occupational change. It explores the underlying causes of the transitions which took place between the onset of the industrial revolution and the beginning of the modern European world.

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The increasing sophistication of the contemporary study of intergenerational and intragenerational occupational change has equipped historians with powerful new tools of analysis whilst highlighting the need to apply them over a longer timespan. Social scientists have shown how casual has been the discussion of careers and social mobility in most histories of work, but by the same measure, historians have been able to demonstrate how restricted has been the chronological perspective of many modern findings. This collection of essays by leading scholars of work histories in 18th and early 20th century Europe constitutes a conspectus of the new generaton of research into the past of occupatonal change over time. Taken together, the essays survey the methodological techniques available to historians, chart the topography work histories which they reveal, and explore the underlying causes of the transitions which took place between the first manifestations of the industrial revolution and the beginning of the modern European world.
No single contributor covers every issue, but each makes some use of the new tools of research, and adds their own insight into the nature of the newly emerging landscape. The essays demonstrate how much can be achieved with the techniques of log-linear analysis, through the exploitation of various categories of evidence, and by means of the development of new dimensions of studying the temporal progress of individual working lives. They generate a new synthesis of the pattern of social mobility over a key century of change, and of its intereaction with class, gender, urbanization and industrialization. Particular attention is paid to question of whether and in what sense contrasting societies were becoming more "open" to the role of differential sectoral change in the economies, and to the part played by the state and its institutions and by the family and its traditions, aspirations and resources.