In a quest to establish the principles behind various migration currents, a great body of research has shown that there is keen interest in the differentials in socio-economic conditions between the places of origin of migrants and their destinations, with special focus laid on wage rates, employment opportunities and availability of information. Although useful in explaining some of the elements involved in the migration process, this conventional approach based on the functional analysis of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors often fails to give adequate attention to the peculiar historical contexts in which individual migration events have occurred. Recent advances in research into the inter-parochial migration of the labouring poor in rural England under the laws of settlement have clearly illustrated how inappropriate the conventional approach can be. From surviving settlement material such as examinations, certificates and removal orders, historians have successfully identified distinctive features of pauper migration and of the settlement material from the migration has been traced. (For those unfamiliar with the laws of settlement, some basic terms are explained in the Appendix.)

First of all, the settlement material is not, strictly speaking, direct evidence of actual migration. Examinations may have been used just for information-gathering purposes, and removal orders could be issued to cajole the immigrants' parish of settlement into producing certificates or agreeing to non-resident relief. What the settlement documents show is, therefore, not so much actual mobility as inter-parochial tensions over the cost of employment and poor relief. Secondly, those who moved to other parishes under the laws of settlement hardly achieved equality with the native parishioners. Many parishes had strict village regulations giving priority to the parishioners in the allocation of work in the harvest fields, in the chances of partaking in gleaning, in access to local charity and in the exercise of various common rights. Thirdly, these migrants were particularly vulnerable to changes in the social and economic conditions of the parishes in which they resided. The parishes of residence were inclined to force non-parishioners to return to their parishes of settlement when there was no further need of their labour or when they became less useful due to decrepitude, injury or other circumstances. Migration through the process of the laws of settlement was not permanent in many cases, and return migration was usually forced rather than voluntary. Finally, it was not uncommon for a conflict of interests to develop between pauper migrants, parish officers and magistrates. Over such issues as employment, poor-relief expenditure and the social cohesiveness of local communities, they often had different interests as waged labourers and peasant workers, as tenant farmers and other ratepayers and as landowners, respectively.

These features highlight the point that the functional explanation, which rests on the notion of the autonomy of the parishes of origin and destination as decision-making units, can be seriously misleading. A more important issue is whether the framework of pauper settlement hindered ‘free’ labour circulation and, if so, to what extent, in what way and in whose interest it did so. These are crucial questions for understanding not only the structure of the English labour market but also the political contours of rural society between different classes, and for further evaluating the overall role of the laws of settlement for the industrial and urban growth of the time. Focusing on the critical period 1751–1834, this article seeks to answer the questions through a careful reconsideration of the Oxfordshire settlement material.

In 1776, in the parish of Puddletown, Dorset, Sarah Dibben, an elderly, impoverished widow, was examined as to her place of settlement by the local justice of the peace to determine whether the parish should pay for her poor relief. At the same time, the JP interviewed her son, Melchizedeck, with whom Sarah had been living, to shed further light on Sarah's situation. Melchizedeck told the justice that because Sarah was his mother he ‘thought it his Duty to assist her if he could without injuring his family’. However, he was at the marginal level of poverty himself, ‘having nothing but what he can earn to support his family’. As a consequence of these examinations, Sarah was removed to the neighbouring parish of Piddlehinton, where she had borne her children over forty years earlier.

The case of Sarah Dibben's settlement highlights the main issues surrounding provisions for the elderly in eighteenth-century England. (Here, the elderly are defined as those aged 60 and above.) The provisions of the poor law of 1601 meant that both the local community and the family had a legal obligation to support the aged. This law stated that ‘the aged and decrepit’ of every parish were to be supported by a tax, collected from all those who held property in the parish. At the same time, the law dictated:

The father and grandfather, mother and grandmother, and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other person not able to work, being of sufficient ability, shall at their own charges, relieve and maintain every such poor person, in that manner, and according to that rate, as by the justices in sessions shall be assessed: on pain of 20s. a month. [I will be referring to this clause as the family-support section of the poor laws.]

Since the early 1980s, the eighteenth-century beginnings of German mass migration to North America have been the subject of intense research and writing. In spite of the multifaceted results of this research on both sides of the ocean, the textbook explanation of early German Atlantic migration has demonstrated a striking persistence. To quote from one of the best English-language textbooks on German social history, ‘from about 1750 on, over-population fuelled…the beginnings of the exodus to North America’. This interpretation is exactly where scholars such as Wolfgang von Hippel stood more than a decade ago, and it dovetails with the migration theories of German population sociology of the 1970s. But is it right? And what alternative explanations are available? The most important alternative to the received approach is offered by the concept of networks. As Charles Tilly put it, ‘categories stay put, networks move’. If emigrants moved along lines of contacts and information, we do not need to refer to strong push or pull factors in order to explain why they were ‘uprooted’ from the territorial categories to which they belonged. Chain migration can be interpreted as a self-generating and self-sustaining process, a system in itself. In this perspective, migration becomes more and more likely because of flows of information, credit or capital between the areas involved in migration – contacts created by migration cause additional migration.

The German voluntary association (hereafter in German the Verein, or Vereine in the plural) played an important role in the evolution of German society in the later nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth. This sort of association (or male bourgeois club) was a cornerstone of European Enlighenment society at the end of the eighteenth century, of the liberal society of the Vormärz, and of the German political parties in the years 1848–1849. Furthermore, the Verein was one of the main characteristics in the rise and hegemony of German bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of the cornerstones of local society as it developed in Germany towards the end of the 1890s.

Research into the German Vereine is very advanced. To this day, historical research continues to benefit from Thomas Nipperdeys' breakthrough article concerning the importance of the Vereine in the rise of bourgeois-liberal society prior to 1848. Otto Dann, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Dieter Düding have expanded our knowledge concerning the importance of the Vereine for the rise of bourgeois nationalism and liberalism before 1848. Regional studies have also emphasized these aspects during the Vormärz period and after.

Folklorist-anthropological research is indebted to Hermann Bausinger's article on the importance of the connection between the Vereine and the development of German folklore. Similarly, Max Weber paved the way for the sociological research on the Vereine that has flourished since the 1860s, led by sociologists such as Hans Jürgen Siewert and Gerhard Wurzbacher. These are the two dominant streams in current research of the Vereine, although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore them here.

‘The most important principle of all our inheritance and family law is the preservation of the patrimony.’

—Josep Faus i Condomines, 1907

Marriage strategies leading to the biological and social reproduction of the family were the main goal of stem family households in Catalonia. This goal was closely linked to the maintenance or increase of the family inheritance, mostly in terms of arable land. The ‘house’, which in Catalonia connotes the family household, lay at the centre of this system. The aim of this article is to analyse some Catalan marriage strategies, together with inheritance and social customs. This will be carried out through an analysis of the matrimonial behaviour of a stem family living in the village of Sant Pere de Riudebitlles over 300 years, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. We will show how this family achieved its main biological and social reproduction goals. Our inquiries use the techniques of L. Ferrer-Alòs and A. Fauve-Chamoux. As D. S. Reher has remarked, ‘The only way to flesh this out adequately is to look at the system from inside out, in terms of the way individual families sorted out their destinies within the context they had inherited…it would also be most interesting to be able to observe succession strategies of families according to their concrete demographic constraints such as number, age, and gender distribution of their offspring surviving past early childhood.’

P. Laslett – first in 1972 and later in 1983 – coined a typology for the analysis of the household. He defined a household as a domestic coresident group, wherein people with or without family ties live together, sharing the main meals. The Laslett household classification scheme has been widely used by researchers. However, Laslett's scheme has had some critics, who object to its static approach to family and household analysis. Our view is that domestic coresident group analysis should be dynamic; that is to say, we should study the household by observing its different stages, and considering the social, economic and historical framework of its geographical area. This framework helps us to determine the logic of family behaviour and the various strategies which a family might pursue in order to achieve a particular goal. We believe that these aims do not stand in contradiction to the Laslett typology.