Historical and criminological studies of female participation in gangs and organized crime have tended to focus on mixed-sex, male-dominated groups. This article offers an examination of the “Forty Elephants” gang, an all-female criminal group that operated in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on digitized newspaper sources, the study uses social network analysis (SNA) to trace structural shifts across two periods associated with different leaders of the gang. The findings reveal a shift from a relatively centralized network in the gang’s earlier years to a looser, more diffuse structure in the later period, with influence spread across multiple figures rather than concentrated in a single, dominant leader. These structural changes are contextualized within broader historical developments, including internal gang conflict, law enforcement attention, criminal justice responses, and shifts in offending methods. By combining quantitative SNA with qualitative historical analysis, the article demonstrates how digital methods can reveal overlooked patterns of female collaboration and co-offending. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes of women as marginal offenders and provides a methodological model for applying network analysis to historical crime research, where such methods remain underused.

This article interrogates the formation of a national political consensus around coal in the United States. In the postwar era, the domestic future of coal was seriously challenged by the oil, gas, and nuclear alternatives. In less than two decades, however, coal mining shifted from being one of multiple energy options to being a national political project tied to regional development and energy sovereignty. Why did this shift occur? Using archival data, I argue that it was not primarily a response to market forces or corporate pressures but was furthered through the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). In the years following its inception in 1965, the agency articulated the coal consensus as both a solution to the problem of Appalachian underdevelopment and to the looming energy crisis. In doing so, it brought together the interests of regional, federal, and corporate actors around this consequential project. In this article, I delineate a pathway through which bureaucratic agencies can play a decisive role in the formation of political ideas and advance our understanding of the conditions that make energy transitions possible.

Why did almost every Latin American state embrace the norm of Indigenous constitutional inclusion over the past five decades? Established sociological answers focus on the spread of global norms or on bottom-up pressure from social movements. However, these accounts are incomplete, overlooking the core political logic within the state that drives Indigenous inclusion – namely, legitimacy. In this article, I present a historical analysis of every instance of constitutional Indigenous inclusion in Latin America between 1970 and 2023, documenting significant variation in the timing (chronology) of norm adoption. In addition, I introduce a novel index of inclusion, shedding light on another significant source of variation: the degree of inclusion. Using comparative-historical analysis, I argue that these sources of variation largely reflect instances of legitimacy deficits: situations in which governments face pressure to demonstrate their legitimacy to specific legitimacy audiences. The cases analyzed show that policymakers enacted inclusionary policies in order to bolster state legitimacy in the eyes of domestic or international audiences and that domestic stakeholders generally achieved stronger forms of inclusion than international actors. Indigenous groups usually gained much less when governments pursued reforms mainly in order to appease eternal audiences.

How did Protestant female missionaries influence women’s political participation in colonial Korea? Under Joseon Confucian norms, women were excluded from education and public life. The first Western female missionary arrived in 1885 and trained Korean “Bible women,” creating spaces for women’s education and organization during colonial rule (1910–1945). While existing research examines missionary effects on education and fertility, impacts on political participation remain unexplored. Using historical mission records and data on independence activists, I find that greater exposure to female missionaries led to greater female political activism. Gender-specific ordinary least squares analysis reveals that female missionary exposure strongly predicts women’s activism, whereas it has no effect on men. To strengthen causal identification, I employ missionary children as an instrumental variable. Mechanisms operate through female role models and informal networks, including Bible classes and home visits. These findings provide the first systematic evidence linking Protestant missions to women’s political empowerment before suffrage, with effects persisting in female political representation after 1945.

Gwageo in Joseon Korea (1392–1897) was a civil service examination system rooted in meritocratic principles, selecting government officials based on Confucian scholarship. From its inception in 1393 to its abolition in 1894, a regular gwageo examination was mostly held every three years, while special examinations were held irregularly. The frequency of special examinations increased over time, and their total number eventually reached nearly three times that of the regular examinations. The sociology of education proposes that educational expansion and changes in selection rules tend to benefit the privileged more before benefiting the less privileged. Using historical records of successful civil service examination passers that are linked to information on family backgrounds, this study examines the differences in the family backgrounds of passers between regular and special examinations. The results show that the privileged, such as those with more ancestors who passed previous examinations and those who came from powerful family clans, accounted for a higher proportion in special examinations than in regular examinations. This tendency was more pronounced during periods of the Joseon Dynasty when the power of the privileged was particularly strong. These findings suggest that the privileged groups’ adaptation strategies to new and varying rules are applicable even in premodern examination systems, such as the gwageo in Joseon Korea.

Decolonization left the future of small, city-states uncertain. Without large domestic markets to turn to, some city-states developed financial industries. Comparing Kuwait and Singapore, I examine how these states developed their financial sectors after decades of colonial underdevelopment. While both states sought to develop international financial centers, Singapore was far more successful in doing so. Kuwait opened numerous merchant-owned, domestic commercial banks but with sluggish rates of growth, while Singapore saw the emergence of new state-run banks; the consolidation, modernization, and growth of privately owned banks; and the establishment of a rapidly growing global financial center. I identify three processes to explain this divergence: (1) the state’s ability to discipline merchant-capitalists; (2) the institutional legacies of colonialism and postcolonial maneuvering; and (3) the incorporation of transnational experts into ruling coalitions. By unearthing the mechanisms of financial development, this article contributes to sociologies of development, finance, expertise, and small states.

How and why did East Asians develop their tight-knit social relationships? In answering this question, I have developed a theoretical notion, the social cage, which is a social institution that rice-farming societies have built to discourage their members from exiting. Initially, this comparative-historical study traces back to the Song Dynasty to consider two institutionally complementary revolutions as the sources of contemporary social cages in East Asia: the emergence of the wet-rice transplanting technique and the evolution of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism (Sung Idea). Next, by comparing the Jiangnan area of Southern China, Korea, and Japan during the premodern period, this article provides antecedent, premodern footages of contemporary rice cultivation cultures and their caging institutions. The article also suggests that the social cage institutions shaped through ecology–human interactions in the premodern era persistently affect industrialization outcomes today. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings as they pertain to contemporary social theory.

Moral management with its three main elements – classification of patients according to the nature of their mental disorder, elimination of mechanical restraint, and employment and occupation of patients – was the basis of mental healthcare in Britain in the nineteenth century. Despite consistent doubts about its effectiveness, moral management was implemented throughout the British West Indies following a scandal in Jamaica. Based on annual reports submitted by British West Indies colonies, we created a cross-colony time-varying dataset of mental healthcare practices and patient outcomes from 1869 to 1942 to study the implementation of moral management and its success in the West Indies. Regression analyses reveal the importance of employment, religious services, and female attendants in reducing deaths and increasing cures among patients. Physical restraint, which was still used despite being discouraged, had positive effects on survival and cures among patients.