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Introduction -- 1. The first meeting: Brussels 1853 -- 2. All the world's a stage: Paris 1855 -- 3. The expansion of Europe: Vienna 1857 -- 4. On waves of passion: London 1860 -- 5. The German phoenix: Berlin 1863 -- 6. Nationalism unbounded: Florence 1867 -- 7. Small gestures in a big world: The Hague 1869 -- 8. 'Sadder and wiser': St Petersburg 1872 and Budapest 1876 -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index

This book is a history of an illusion. It is also a history of the dream that preceded the illusion. The book discusses statistics as the field of tension between the scientific claims of neutrality and universality on the one hand and the political and economic reality of the conflicting interests of nation-states on the other. The various paths of state- and nation-building that European countries traversed in the nineteenth century are recognisable in the objectives of government statistics and are reflected in the topics selected for statistical study and in the categories used in the research. Each congress was clearly dominated by the specific interests of the country in which the statisticians convened. The book shows in each case how the organisation of government statistics and national concerns influenced the international agenda. It describes the perceptions, goals and dilemmas of the protagonists and their contact with each other, and in so doing unravels the complex relationships between science, government and society, wherever possible from their point of view. The genesis of international statistics was inspired by a desire for reform. Belgium's pioneering role in the European statistical movement was informed both by its liberal polity and the special status of statistics within it, and by Adolphe Quetelet's key position as an intellectual. The consolidation of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a new medium-sized state in the Rhine Confederation and later in the German Confederation, offered great opportunities for the development of official statistics.

The inaugural lecture of the current SHCL Director, Nico Randeraad, delivered on 10 September 2021 in the Aula of Maastricht University, deals with a new focus of the Centre on the 'social history of landscape'. In his lecture Randeraad zooms in on the 'Imperial Route' between Paris and Hamburg, in particular the stretch through the small town of Rekem in Belgium, ten kilometers north of Maastricht. He proposes to regard the road as an entity with agency within a network of people, materials, and natural phenomena. Research along these lines into the past of roads, rivers, canals, pipelines and the like easily interconnects with broader (cross-)regional social histories of infrastructure, economic development, life stories and migration.

This book is a history of an illusion. It is also a history of the dream that preceded the illusion. The book discusses statistics as the field of tension between the scientific claims of neutrality and universality on the one hand and the political and economic reality of the conflicting interests of nation-states on the other. The various paths of state- and nation-building that European countries traversed in the nineteenth century are recognisable in the objectives of government statistics and are reflected in the topics selected for statistical study and in the categories used in the research. Each congress was clearly dominated by the specific interests of the country in which the statisticians convened. The book shows in each case how the organisation of government statistics and national concerns influenced the international agenda. It describes the perceptions, goals and dilemmas of the protagonists and their contact with each other, and in so doing unravels the complex relationships between science, government and society, wherever possible from their point of view. The genesis of international statistics was inspired by a desire for reform. Belgium's pioneering role in the European statistical movement was informed both by its liberal polity and the special status of statistics within it, and by Adolphe Quetelet's key position as an intellectual. The consolidation of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a new medium-sized state in the Rhine Confederation and later in the German Confederation, offered great opportunities for the development of official statistics.

Linked data is rapidly entering the practice of historical research. The project underlying this contribution (2TBI) set out to link a research database of persons who were internationally active in the 19th and early 20th century, with the person entity repository of currently online available biographical resources in the Netherlands. The result is a group of 1115 Dutch social reformers, whom we can now easily trace in various datasets. The research objective of this paper is to show to what extent and in which ways these social reformers were active at the local level, on a national scale, and at international congresses, in order to explore the transnational embeddedness of the reform issues that they were involved with. This ties in with current historiographical debates about the origins of the welfare state, which look beyond the legislative achievements at the national level.

Between 1853 and 1876 nine international statistical congresses were held in different European cities. The aim of the congresses was to bring about uniformity in the themes and methods of national statistics. However, this goal could not be attained overnight. Much of the failure to bring about rapid change was due to the difficulties in realizing effective knowledge transfers, that is, effective communication, in an age that was not quite ready for truly international activities. It has been shown that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of numerous experiments in internationalism, but at the same time rampant nationalism nipped many initiatives in the bud. Increasing nationalism, however, is not the only explanation for the collapse of the international statistical congress. The implicit faith in the possibility of a neutral science of statistics also created huge difficulties. Realizing statistical uniformity presupposed that the underlying facts and figures were comparable. This uniformity was far removed from the rapidly changing administrative reality in nineteenth-century Europe.

Deze editie van het Jaarboek zoekt de ruimte. Verschillende bijdragen focussen op onderwerpen met een uitgesproken ruimtelijk of landschappelijk karakter. Verder komen aan bod: de geweerfabriek van Petrus Regout, de Franciscus Xaveriusvereniging in Sittard en Glasatelier Flos uit Steyl. Het fotokatern illustreert de geschiedenis van vijftig jaar COC Limburg.

The chapter explores the ways in which the Union of International Associations tried to carve out its distinct, allegedly non-political, role in the postwar world. On the one hand, the Union emphasized its 'technical' and supporting role, which came to the fore in studies on the history and present-day practice of international meetings, while on the other hand, behind the scenes, its board members and staff were campaigning for subsidies, and striking deals with governments and private institutions.

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".