This article examines spousal cooperation in the early modern Dutch food markets. It shows that although husband and wife business partnerships were very common in market-based retailing, great differences existed in the way spouses worked together. Most urban retail trades were guild-organized and the guilds therefore had a significant influence on the family economy. Guild policy was, however, very flexible and responded to local economic circumstances. It appears that the size and the organization of the markets were crucial in shaping the roles of the men and women who held stalls. Processes of commercialization generally benefited independent female entrepreneurship over the more traditional husband and wife partnerships.

This article aims to provide an empirical test of Jan de Vries' theory of the ‘industrious revolution’, most notably his assumptions concerning the increased participation of married women in the labour force. The focus is on the pre-industrial textile industry in the Dutch Republic, within which a distinction is made between various ways in which family members cooperated in the work they undertook. This differentiation depended on the existing segmentation of the labour market, between social groups and between the sexes. It is shown that at least some groups within proletarian textile families were able to make a decent living, and that the earnings of wives played an important role in the increased industriousness of these families.

The evidence of criminal court records suggests that almost all London wives were engaged in gainful occupations in the eighteenth century. The records of the City livery companies and of Christ's Hospital show that the wives of craft masters and professional men worked, as well as those in poorer families where their income was essential. At lower socio-economic levels it was unusual for couples to work in the same trade. At middling levels it was more common, especially in textiles and retail, but no more than half of couples worked together or in related occupations.

This article examines the extent of compliance with the Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 through three parish studies. It demonstrates that the vast majority of the sample cohort of parents whose children were baptized in church, and indeed of couples living together, had married in church as required by the 1753 Act, and shows how the proportion of marriages traced rises as more information about the parties becomes available. Through a study of settlement examinations, the article posits an explanation of why some marriages have not been traced, and argues that researchers should be cautious in inferring non-compliance from the absence of a record in a specific parish. It is also argued that the reason for such high rates of compliance has less to do with the power of statute and more to do with the fact that the 1753 Act was not such a radical break with the past as has been assumed.

Little is known about the lives of criminal offenders prior to their incarceration in past time. Knowing the background of offenders, however, may explain why they broke the law. This article explores young offenders in the Sundsvall region of Sweden, 400 kilometres north of Stockholm, an area with a booming sawmill-based economy in nineteenth-century Sweden. First, using prison registers, large-scale structural concepts are employed to explain the increasing number of incarcerations of young people reported during the period 1840–1880. Second, to uncover the offenders' demographic backgrounds and their socio-economic circumstances when arrested, they are identified in Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB) at Umeå University. These sources permit the application of retrospective life-course perspectives that are increasingly applied in modern criminology. These perspectives show that offenders were not primarily migrants or of poor origin, but that they frequently came from the region. Thus their parents were often also present in the community. In providing informal social control these characteristics – being local and having at least one parent nearby – are thought to lead to lower levels of criminality and imprisonment, but they were of little effect in preventing crime or incarceration. This study thus challenges the view of the criminal in past time as a lone individual arrested in an unfamiliar settings. Among the few female offenders observed, however, these factors were more typical; although gender accounts for low levels of criminality, their isolation and poverty did lead some women to theft.