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This contribution looks at foreign visitors and organisers of a selection of penitentiary congress sessions between 1880 and 1910. Using lists of members from the congress proceedings, it seeks to assess the relative importance of civil society and governmental visitors at the penitentiary congress sessions, seen as an emerging expert plat- form of private and public stakeholders in social welfare. Several empirical approaches towards a clear division between public and private stakeholders are presented, experimentally using networking-, named entity recognition- and visualisation techniques. The article argues that in the historical context of the penitentiary congress a clear antithetical division of public and private stakeholders is difficult to sustain. Instead it proposes a more dynamic characterisation of the penitentiary congress visitors where, gradually by the turn of the century, elements of the philanthropic and governmental merge into the hybrid type of the all-round penitentiary expert, well connected to governmental circles and well-versed in philanthropic considerations. ; This contribution looks at foreign visitors and organisers of a selection of penitentiary congress sessions between 1880 and 1910. Using lists of members from the congress proceedings, it seeks to assess the relative importance of civil society and governmental visitors at the penitentiary congress sessions, seen as an emerging expert plat- form of private and public stakeholders in social welfare. Several empirical approaches towards a clear division between public and private stakeholders are presented, experimentally using networking-, named entity recognition- and visualisation techniques. The article argues that in the historical context of the penitentiary congress a clear antithetical division of public and private stakeholders is difficult to sustain. Instead it proposes a more dynamic characterisation of the penitentiary congress visitors where, gradually by the turn of the century, elements of the philanthropic and governmental merge into the hybrid type of the all-round penitentiary expert, well connected to governmental circles and well-versed in philanthropic considerations.

SummaryWho 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".

In the second half of the nineteenth century a new kind of social and cultural actor came to the fore: the expert. During this period complex processes of modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and nation-building gained pace, particularly in Western Europe and North America. These processes created new forms of specialized expertise that grew in demand and became indispensible in fields like sanitation, incarceration, urban planning, and education. Often the expertise needed stemmed from problems at a local or regional level, but many transcended nation-state borders. Experts helped shape a new transnational sphere by creating communities that crossed borders and languages, sharing knowledge and resources through those new communities, and by participating in special events such as congresses and world fairs