Historical Social Mobility Tables

Historical social mobility tables measure how much a person's social position depended on the position of their parents in past societies. The core device is the mobility table: a cross-tabulation of origin class (typically the father's) against destination class (the child's), built from linked parent-child pairs drawn from marriage registers, censuses, or genealogies. Following the framework Erikson and Goldthorpe codified for modern sociology and that historians adapted using HISCLASS, the table is analysed not by raw movement, which is dominated by changes in the class structure itself, but by odds ratios and log-linear models that isolate relative mobility, the strength of association between origins and destinations net of structural change. This distinction between absolute and relative mobility lets historians ask whether genuine fluidity, equality of opportunity, rose or fell across industrialization, migration, and demographic transition, independent of how the shape of the class structure shifted.