The articles in this special issue of Continuity and Change arose from a workshop held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, between 9 and 11 September 1999, hosted by the Universitat de les Illes Balears. The workshop was called to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of another conference, that held in Cambridge at the Faculty of History and at Trinity College in September 1969. It was this conference in 1969 that resulted in the publication of Household and family in past time: comparative studies in the size and structure of the domestic group over the last three centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial North America, with further material from Western Europe, which itself has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Household and family in past time (hereafter abbreviated to HFPT), in part largely due to the ‘analytic introduction on the history of the family’ contributed by Peter Laslett, subsequently became a seminal work in the field. It not only mapped out the methodological groundwork for the quantitative study of the historical co-resident domestic group, but perhaps unwittingly helped define a research agenda into comparative familial and social structural history that was followed for many years by Laslett, his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and researchers from around the world. It became in a sense a manifesto, and one with which Peter Laslett personally was inexorably linked. Thus, with the sad death of Peter on 8 November 2001, this special issue of Continuity and Change took on a new double purpose: not only to mark the path-breaking 1969 conference and the subsequent publication of HFPT, but also to pay tribute to the remarkable life and work of Peter Laslett.

The Nahua (Aztecs) of ancient Mexico lived in large, extended family households (calli). A fundamental tenet of family history is that in the past high mortality was a major obstacle to household complexity. This was not the case for the Nahua, whose life expectancy was probably worse than any seen in Europe since the Black Death. Nahua populations were characterized by patriarchy, child marriage and greater proportions of complex and more diverse households than in regions of Europe which historians have identified as containing many complex households. Among the Nahua, although relationships within the household could be either uxorilocal or virilocal (relationship through the wife or the husband), subordination of women to male patriarchs was extensive. Most girls were married (cohabiting) well before the age of puberty. Thus, childless couples were common, but males without children rarely attained headship. While neither polygamy nor abandonment was widespread, their significance for gender oppression should not be denied. Widowhood offered new opportunities for companionship, but only for widowers. For widows, remarriage was infrequent and subordination to a male relative was inevitable. In modern Mexico, few remnants of this pre-conquest household system remain. According to the 1990 census, fewer than 10 per cent of Mexicans live as extended kin or as non-relatives in a household, even in rural Morelos where four centuries ago the compound family was the norm. The few modern examples of multiple family households tend to be Hispanic-like virilocal, patrilineal extended families.

In Household and Family in Past Time (1972) Peter Laslett explicitly differentiated the study of kin relations within the domestic group from the study of those beyond it. Yet in subsequent decades the latter project – the conceptualization of the domestic group within the larger kin group – has not proceeded very far, even though it can easily be pictured as the ‘next step’ in micro-structural research. In part this is due to the inherent difficulties of recreating the larger kinship context precisely on the basis of available evidence. However, it is also because of changing conceptualizations of kinship and because demographic change demonstrably reduced the number of identifiable kin. If this project is to be pursued, its costs and benefits have to be weighed. On the one hand, the larger kin group may not have been important even if it can be identified as a group; also, migration might have dispersed kin groups so that only a few personal kin remained beyond the domestic group. On the other hand, the significance of kin groups is an empirical question which needs to be tested against historical evidence. Individuals also certainly had personal kin communities that were not corporate groups but still could have influenced the behaviors of persons within the domestic group. It is best to assume about the past that the domestic domain and the kinship domain interacted, creating the starting point for an interactive theory consisting of five propositions and their corollaries, outlined in the article.

This article examines the impact of landholding and differences in local economies on age at marriage, on frequency of service and on household size and structure in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Particular stress is placed on the role of economic rather than cultural factors as determinants of regional variations in marriage age and household structures. Households were more complex whenever land, the accumulation of capital and multiple occupations were required for economic activity. Conversely, wage work – whether in fishing or agriculture and regardless of geographical location (for example in eastern as well as western Finland) – favoured the formation of small nuclear households. Some aspects of the family system (servanthood and a late age at marriage) fit the characteristics of the north-west European household system as delineated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett better than others (frequency of complex households). It is concluded that there is no inevitable correlation between geographic location and the characteristics of a society's family system and that the model of the north-west European household system does not accommodate those societies where people were in a position to build strategies based on the continuous possession of land.

This article discusses the ‘Mediterranean model’ of household formation proposed by Laslett and others in the early 1980s and argues that the notion of a Mediterranean culture area has been used in significantly different ways by family historians and social anthropologists. Drawing its materials mainly from research conducted on Italy, it examines the changing relationships through time between nuptiality and household composition, the extent and structural characteristics of servanthood, and the functions of the family as a welfare agency. It is suggested that some concepts that recent generations of Mediterraneanist anthropologists have tended to question or utterly reject (including female honour) might still prove useful to shed light on a number of perplexing features of family life in Italy and the rest of southern Europe.

Revisionist historians maintain that the aged in nineteenth-century America and north-western Europe usually preferred to reside alone or with only their spouse. According to this interpretation, the aged ordinarily resided with their adult children only out of necessity, especially in cases of poverty or infirmity. This article challenges that position, arguing that in mid-nineteenth-century America coresidence of the aged with their children was almost universal, and that the poor and sick aged were the group most likely to live alone. The article suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family in the twentieth century is connected to the rise of wage labour and the diminishing importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance.