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Can statistics help historians to identify the events that are most distinctive of a particular era of time? This essay explores the use of a distinctiveness algorithm from library science for measuring the distinctiveness of manuscripts, tf-idf, recast as "tf-ipf" for the study of the terms most distinctive of historical periods. In a case study, tf-ipf is applied to the text of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, varying the "period" from a 20-year horizon to a 6-month or one-day horizon. It is shown that the algorithm's assessments of what is most distinctive of 20-year and 10-year periods largely matches the consensus of British historians, while debates that held parliament's attention for six months or fewer have largely fallen beneath the threshold of scholarly attention. Attending to concerns that took up parliamentary debate for six months or fewer, the essay argues that tf-ipf thus presents a metric of parliamentary attention that mirrors the exclusions of class, allowing scholars to retrieve a timeline of when the concerns of the distillers, bleachers, dyers, Chartists, crofters, and miners reached a national debate. More generally, tf-ipf represents an important new tool for discovering the distinctive aspects of historical periods based on past experience, not historical bias.

International audience; The present text was produced after a year and a half of the world pandemic, lockdowns, and strange and awkward educational sequences. Remote access to sources and materials that make possible the production and conveyance of a global history – a vital, shared necessity in today’s world – transformed technical issues discussed among specialists – i.e., burning issues from the news and issues of evidence – into the theme of worldwide conversation in the summer of 2021. Since during this global crisis, historians have revealed themselves to be dependent on complex and instrumented infrastructures, it seemed natural for us to open up the discussion to colleagues who had not only used digital resources, but who had also participated, in various capacities, in the development of the platforms, tools and standards that make up the historian’s digital world. In this complex space, each person’s experience; their inclusion in academic settings that rarely adhere to the same logic; their field of expertise; the place they hold within their institutions; and their functional role all orient their perspectives.

This chapter begins with an account of Bill and Liz Paddock, who were a husband-and-wife team that had been involved in efforts to develop modern agriculture in Guatemala and Honduras. The Paddocks sounded the alarm, arguing that the entire enterprise of international development as practiced at that time was hopelessly corrupt and in need of a drastic overhaul. The chapter talks about how the couple delivered an impressive analysis of reason in the form of a systematic survey of the undertakings abroad of the United Nations, USAID, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and other organs of international development. The chapter details how the Paddocks provided the American public with a reason to disinvest in land redistribution. Their prescription arrived just as the communities that might have most benefited from land redistribution at home were beginning to mobilize their own demands for land, demands that remain largely unacknowledged to this day.

This chapter discusses China and its grand schemes of the twentieth century, wherein land redistribution had a bipolar nature. Sun Yat-sen's promises of land redistribution were fated never to pass, but the early land redistribution projects begun by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s were voluntary and were successful by almost any measure. The chapter examines how Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward committed the nation to a rapid program of industrialization and urbanization, resulting in one of the worst famines in human history and marked by 12–38 million deaths. It looks at stories that circulated about China that would shape how the leadership of world powers interpreted the course of contemporary events. In the United States, anti-communist campaigners would be increasingly mobilized by reports of Chinese violence, fearing that the violent phase of land reform presaged an epoch of anarchy and slaughter around the world.

This chapter describes a new set of writers from developed nations that challenged government bureaucracy with a new vision of market efficiency in the 1940s and 1950s. These writers, which were later dubbed “neoliberal” for their adherence to propositions about capitalism derived from eighteenth-century classical liberal thought, viewed proposals for government rent regulation and land redistribution as heresy. The chapter looks at historical research that has concentrated extensively on the twentieth-century impact of neoliberalism on ideas in the university, in social policy, and in law. It defines neoliberal as the twentieth-century movement that endorsed market competition as the basis for political decision making. After the 1970s, the most visible impact of neoliberal ideas was on housing and land policy.

This chapter provides a background on a tradition of thought, tactic, strategy, and paradox that forms the long story of occupancy rights in the past. It explores the occupancy rights that appeared in urban areas and rural ones alike that are propagated through a variety of techniques, such as rent strikes, squats, national policies, and international mapping programs. It also discusses the genealogy of those techniques and how those techniques altered the idea of property as the right to exclude. The chapter looks at contemporary debates about productivity, farm size, technology, democracy, and poverty, confirming what can be said about the long trail of displaced persons and bureaucrats who worked toward an end to a culture of displacement. It reviews an intellectual history of movements, both elite and common, that contemplated the tools for securing freedom from displacement.

This chapter discusses the interpretation of the politics and utopianism of a bibliography, which requires a careful reading of its pedestrian genre as it is easily overlooked as a tool of making myths and destroying memories. The chapter recounts how the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began collecting a library and issuing bibliographies, becoming a publisher of pamphlets, books, and maps of increasing number and ambition. Beginning in 1952, the organization began issuing a monthly bulletin of agricultural statistics that surveyed the agricultural production of the nations of the world. The chapter highlights how the FAO's commitments to supporting bibliography mirrored the mood of the time, but they would also help to create and drive a culture marked by the relentless production of research. FAO came to oversee the development of bibliographies that attempted to provide an overview of new research related to land redistribution and modern farming.

This chapter highlights the claim of anarchist writer and social historian Colin Ward of the “one-night house.” According to Ward, it was a universal rule that anywhere in the world, if someone constructed a house between sundown and sunrise, the builder would have gained a moral entitlement to the house and land, enforced by occupation. The chapter explains that Ward's theory encapsulated the idea of a universal right of occupation, a concept with origins in popular movements that had captured the attention of academics and policy makers around the world. The chapter then describes the activities of squatters who built one-night houses on empty land in the countryside or moved into abandoned houses in the city at the beginning of the 1970s. Squatting appealed to individuals who rejected the role of the state in a functioning society, and who trusted markets and individual initiative to distribute resources fairly.

This chapter describes a democratic ecology movement over decades and continents that insist on the idea of a global revolution that would bring food, water, and shelter to everyone. It talks about the people marching through their respective cities and decades, of which many recognized that they were jointly celebrating the end of empire. Marchers asserted that human existence had only one limit: humans require a place to lay their heads, typically in proximity to other humans, where they can work and find something to eat. The chapter traces the unfolding episodes that composed the land parade by inviting challenging questions about the historical significance of resistance when faced with the challenge of a world system that depends on the exploitation of both soil and labor. How could peaceful marchers, tracing the land by foot, reverse the forces uprooting bodies from their homes, millions at a time?

This book offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years. The book tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974. It provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, the book works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

This chapter talks about Vinoba Bhave, who became one of Mahtama Gandhi's acolytes in the 1930s that help run the ashrams associated with the satyagraha movement. After Gandhi's assassination in 1948, Vinoba became the prophet of a new political movement that drew on Gandhi's ideas. The chapter explores Vinoba's strategy that was grounded in nonviolent action but had a new meaning in the context of Indian independence. It details how Vinoba challenged Indian society to collaborate to extend the opportunities available to the poor through radical, spontaneous, and individual acts such as the gifting of land. Vinoba's insistence on voluntary individual actions provided a pivotal new vision for both Asian and Western skeptics of the state's centralized authority.

This chapter considers the steel hoe used by East Asian farmers as a symbol of a development program that might see poor people manufacturing their own implements, turning farms into factories. Farmers, in other words, would become heralds of a future that was simultaneously industrial and rural. The chapter mentions supporters of the Rome Consensus that believed that a global peasant revolution was in the future of almost every nation working toward its independence from Europe. It talks about Norris Dodd, who spelled out a program that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would implement over the 1950s and '60s—the creation of an information pipeline. It then explains how the information pipeline conveys seed catalogues, agricultural statistics, prices, lists of agricultural experts, maps, and bibliographies of modern research to universities and ministries around the globe.

This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majorities, such as the agrarian models embraced by Ireland and Mexico. Postwar social scientists influenced by Doreen Warriner frequently assumed that post-colonial nations would choose the agrarian model, emphasizing the redistribution of land. The chapter discusses appropriate technology, which featured an intellectual set of ideas about how and why small-scale technology should play a key role on small farms across the developing world. It clarifies how appropriate technology was identified with the idea of the small farmer in the post-colonial world. The farmer's relationship to land as an owner was created by mid-century redistribution programs like the ones designed in India, which worked in direct contrast with the formulae for economic development promoted by many U.S. economists that promoted technological investment.

This chapter reviews the entire slow-motion collapse of the movement for occupancy rights, frame after frame, from a contemporary perspective. It explains how the great dream of redistribution of the earth's soil on a global scale was never realized during the optimistic decades although there were many piecemeal reallocations. Naive accounts of land reform generally attribute its failures to an inviolable right to property or to the disappearance of communism, including an increasing attitude of unconditional skepticism directed at centralized administration of all kinds. The chapter talks about how skepticism paralyzed national and international initiatives for redistributive justice that had been decades in the making. It proposes the causal dimensions of how climate change and land redistribution are bound up.

This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. It considers the movement of FAO from Quebec to Rome as a symbol of its founders' desires to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. The chapter discusses how advocates of redistribution at the FAO labored through the 1950s to create an international organization largely concerned with land and invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. The FAO was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let There Be Bread,” being charged with the explicit mission of defending and feeding peasants around the world.

This chapter describes technology, which was central to many ideas about a world marked by occupancy. Technology was a key element that explained how post-colonial countries might simultaneously redistribute their land and build a solid economic future. The chapter explains how some visionaries imagined peasants as potential micro-industrialists, manufacturing buckets and hoes for their neighbors. It looks at Indian ideas about small-scale technology and its role in supporting peasants that eventually inspired UN projects for the distribution of hoes, maps, and bibliographies. The ultimate evolution of that vision might be best symbolized by the Curta, a handheld calculator that would plug the Indian peasant into global networks of information about price, opportunity, and credit and help them to bid on prices.

This chapter reviews the origins of the paper partitions that lay in the failure of a coordinated, mapped, and planned scheme to turn India's land over to the poor. Families able to hire lawyers found that they could entrust their land to children or cousins, officially escaping the ceiling, even while the family as a network retained its holdings. The chapter discusses how the process was mocked as an exercise in making paper partitions, because the rich were able to game the legislation through dealings done on paper. The chapter considers paper as the heart of the tangled reasons that land reforms were failing. The process eventually created a map that frequently supported legal claims about whose ancestors had worked the land, who should take responsibility for the well, or what factory was responsible for poisoning the fish.

This chapter describes writing, maps, and other devices of paper as instruments of power, as only the few could read in colonial India and most nations under British rule. During the Raj, and for many centuries before it, written laws tended to reflect the values of these literate few. The chapter talks about Indian economists and American observers that agreed on the historical role of paper under colonization: Britain's regime of paper documentation and regulation of the economy favored the colonizer. It analyzes the need for maps in developing nations, which attracted the notice of the United Nations. The administrators at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization attempted to contrive a plan that would support farmers and peasants around the world in creating an open system of land governance, capable of supporting a global redistribution of land.

Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research (2019) presents and interrogates the challenges and opportunities that born-digital materials have for historians. Milligan argues that historians who wish to grapple with the archived internet need to think much more aggressively about engaging with digital methods and tools that can complement and extend the well-honed practices of close reading with approaches that can help analyze the vast and often unstructured archives of internet data. In this AHR Review Roundtable, three historians—Jo Guldi, Tim Hitchcock, and Michelle Moravec, all of whom incorporate digital approaches and concerns into their work—engage with a set of questions developed by Digital Scholarship Librarian Daniel J. Story, to discuss Milligan’s treatment of the digital archive of the web and its implications for historians’ work. Milligan offers a response to these insights and critiques, emphasizing the need for the historical discipline to change from within and build upon its valuable qualities.

This article explores the promise of institutions and infrastructures associated with democracy to limit the worst consequences of climate change. The article highlights the apparent conflict between expert governance on the one hand, and, on the other hand, calls for democratization that reflect the diverse perspectives of groups whose rights and labor have been exploited over historical timescales. Drawing on the history of bureaucracy and governance, this article argues that the apparent contradiction between the two poles of discourse can be reconciled by a system of information infrastructure designed to create a robust, accountable system of environmental data monitoring that also accounts for the work of inclusive community groups as stewards of landscapes. The article concludes by recommending a 6-point “Outline of an Information Infrastructure for Responsive, Accountable Governance of the Environment,” which includes the following recommendations: (1) broadcast efforts to enlist communities—especially vulnerable communities on the front lines—in efforts to document environmental degradation and the effects of climate change; (2) equitable and sustainable solicitation of the voices of populations underrepresented in traditional science; (3) centralized preservation of the data in an archive where it can be found, retrieved, revisited, and implemented for action; (4) analysis of the data by both community participants and laboratory scientists; (5) the creation of accountability through the establishment of centralized, powerful organs of governance capable of holding polluters to account on the basis of data collected by both citizens and scientists; and (6) transparent mechanisms for negotiation.

What can digital methods tell us about modernity? This article reviews a series of recent traditional and quantitative attempts to define ‘modernity’ in the nineteenth century. Mass digitization allows scholars to track modernity through counts of words per year, the study of discourses (through topic modelling), and relative statistical expression over time (through divergence measurement). The results of this work confirm recent scholarship in social history that demonstrates the rising importance of meat, other food and water to national policy, as well as understudied debates on the history of fisheries. It also demonstrates that different parties in parliament had different relationships to futurity. A case study compares Liberal and Conservative party relationships to past and future through an overview of particular speakers’ lexicons. As a survey of methods, this article’s conclusion is that digital methods can demonstrate not only shifting values, but also require us to think about different relationships to chronology and periodization of individuals and ideas embedded in the past.

When has a historical narrative offered a satisfactorily “complete” explanation of an event? In order to understand how useful archetypal narratives are in terms of historical explanation, ...

The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of history as practised by scholars of different methodological and political orientations and subjects of study is really more of a patchwork of different fields and sub-fields. While not every kind of digital history applies to each sub-field, some forms of digital technique has been put to use in practically every domain that historians study. Because of the relative novelty of historians’ exchanges about digital methods, it is important that those essays are pedagogical in approach and critical as to method. This conclusion hazards that the work ahead for digital historians includes theorizing the bridge between close and distant readings, theorising the difference between AI and statistical measures, transparent documentation of the choice of algorithm, text and result in the practice of critical search, and engagement with new standards of scholarship from the institutions of historical and cultural knowledge-making.

This article examines the forces, public and private, that have exerted political power over the longue durée of the modern city since 1848. The article identifies three major turning points that contextualize the modern moment: the rise of democratic movements of 1848 and their gradual targeting of city governments; the rise of an expert-managed, urban reform state beginning in 1870; and the birth of neoliberal state, from 1974 to the present. The article positions the knowledge of urban history within the rise of democratic, participatory movements concerned with opening, replicating, and publicly analyzing governmental data.

Can "distant reading" and digital tools enhance the history of technology by revealing hitherto undetected patterns in the record? Using the parliamentary debates of Britain in the nineteenth century, this essay revisits the history of infrastructure in the British empire, asking how tools compare with secondary sources. The author applies topic modeling and dynamic topic modeling to synthesize the historical record, and finds that the results largely match the known turning points, key players, and technologies in the history of British infrastructure. In several cases, however, digital investigation draws the researcher to new results. The domains where digital tools unveil new patterns include: the improvement of the River Shannon, the alignment of political parties with particular technologies, and the chronology of building public spaces in Britain's imperial capitals. The experiment documented here validates topic models as a source for periodizing technology over time.

From the 1970s, international networks spanning New Delhi to the Cree tribes of Canada collaborated in experimenting with many-to-many mapping. Their work generated techniques for the participatory management of land use that preceded the creation of the many-to-many map online and, in many ways, surpassed the radicality of its politics.

How likely are utopian futures of the kind that Jeremy Corbyn has recently envisioned for the future of post-Brexit Britain? Such utopian scheming to restore the welfare state at the cost of the state gibes with the forecast of austerity from the Chancellor’s office, and pronouncements from canny observers that a post-EU Britain will need cash to support even its current programs, and therefore be forced to come to terms with the demands of banks and corporations. Corbyn’s utopianism is ridiculous unless we take into account long-term forces like the rebellion against expert rule and advocacy of democratic accountability by participatory movements. A deeper history of state, democracy, and expert rule in Brexit can highlight the underlying tensions and point to some sources of possible outcomes.