In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This paper aims to show the relevance that institutions governing common-pool resources (CPRs) play in peasant resilience. It outlines nine variables for resilience taken from socio-economic and ecological anthropological theories focusing on subsistence and minimax strategies and used for the comparative historical analysis of African case studies. These include drylands (Morocco, Ghana), semi-arid areas (Sierra Leone, Malawi, Tanzania) and wetlands (Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia). The variables could be found under pre-colonial common property but were no longer operating during colonial and postcolonial institutional change from common to state property and privatisation via land grabbing, leading to commons and resilience grabbing.

The introduction of rewards for the conviction of serious criminals fundamentally transformed English criminal justice. The prospect of rewards totalling up to £140 encouraged additional prosecutions, more full (as opposed to partial) guilty verdicts, and more death sentences. In the process, in a series of largely unintended consequences, two fundamental pillars of early-modern justice were undermined: reliance on the public to prosecute, and the death penalty to deter crime. Policing agents began to play a much more important role in apprehending criminals, while the high level of executions contributed to growing doubts about the efficacy of capital punishment.

We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.