Until late in the nineteenth century a considerable proportion of Dutch children had lost one or both parents by the time they reached adulthood. This was a consequence of low life expectancy, the high age at which reproduction started (partly due to late marriage) and high fertility within marriage. For the Netherlands in the period 1850 to 1900, the proportion of persons aged 20 or less who had lost one of their parents is estimated between 8 and 11 per cent; another 1 to 2 per cent had lost both parents. Despite the fact that orphanhood was a very common phenomenon in earlier centuries, little is known about how orphans in the past fared materially and psychologically, and our knowledge about the consequences of orphanhood, in particular full orphanhood, for the child is restricted. Only a general impression from diaries, letters, autobiographers and similar sources can be obtained. It is very difficult to acquire information on orphans – especially those outside institutions – from the customary demographic sources. Information on the effects of institutional care for orphans and their ‘institutional careers’ is also very limited, mainly as a result of the lack of good, individual-level data indicating the age, occupation or family background of inmates at the time of their admission or exit.

This paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

This article analyses the structure of and changes to the income-earning activities of Russian urban households from 1985 to 2000. An intensive diversification of income sources is observed, which indicates an engagement with every available (and individually acceptable) opportunity for paid employment, and also an intensive engagement in different types of household work. However, the growth in real income since 1999 has induced households to abandon specific types of income-earning activities, the first casualty being subsidiary agriculture, and the second labour-intensive, time-consuming types of household work. Another important change took place in gender specialization in domestic labour: though women still worked substantially more in the household than men, at the end of the period under consideration, there are signs that this gender gap has been partially bridged.

This article provides an overview of the evolution of the commons in the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the connection between the phenomenon of growing community debt, the loss of property held in common and the evolution of the institutions appointed to govern such properties. The later sections of the article will discuss the situation found in each of the Italian States: Venice, Spanish Lombardy, the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States. Two models will be used for reference; one characterised by state intervention; the second by the growth of institutions of self-governance.

This article investigates the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the migration patterns of elderly Swedish men and women in the town of Sundsvall during the nineteenth century. The geographical mobility of old men and women increased as industrialization proceeded. Social ties were important factors in the decision to migrate, and the study investigates in particular the significance of social networks for childless old persons. This analysis also examines migration patterns among elderly men and women of different social groups. Very few childless men seem to have moved to live with a relative, whereas a higher proportion of migrating women in this category had some kinship network. A similar pattern was found among widowers and widows. There was also a class dimension: relatives seem to have been most important for the group of women belonging to the petty bourgeoisie.

This article examines the many ways that stolen goods were sold and circulated in late eighteenth-century Bristol. It argues that while historians have been correct to identify the contemporary importance of second-hand markets and the ‘informal economy’ to the sale of stolen property, some of the ways that stolen goods markets have been described and conceptualised are not fully supported by the evidence from Bristol. This raises questions about the extent to which models of crime based on London can be applied to cities in provincial England. The article also examines the influence that timing, appearance and location had on the way that stolen goods were sold.

This article deals with merchants in international trade from the seventeenth and into the nineteenth century, most of them of immigrant background. Based on a discussion of the work of the household in gender terms the main point is to show how the merchants were eager to construct working network relations. Family and kinship relations are discussed as a crucial element in the merchants' networks, and throughout their world of household, regional contact networks and international networks run structures of hierarchical and patriarchal authority and at the same time non-hierarchical relations of equality.

Washerwomen in the Georgian period belonged, for the most part, to the small army of part-time and casual workers who found employment when and where they could. As handlers of one of the most coveted (as well as necessary) commodities of the period they were a focus of interest to a wide range of society and were growing in number as many householders came to rely less on resident domestic servants. Washerwomen were prime players in the ‘economy of makeshifts’, relying on a miscellany of supplementary activities to ‘get by’ and in which they showed both enterprise and agency.

This article presents two models of Polish peasant budgets. The first is a theoretical budget of a medieval peasant family and the second is a similar model for the early modern period, confirming some of the characteristic features of the transitional period in the Polish economy in this period. Variables taken into account in the construction of the budgets include the average size of a peasant farm, its productivity, the distribution of crops, family size, rents and taxes paid to the state, Church and feudal lords. The two factors that appear to have had the greatest impact on peasant budgets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the decrease in farm size and the sharp rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century. As a result, although comparison of the two models indicates a decrease in the level of commercialization of the average Polish peasant farm, the financial resources of Polish peasants actually grew.

It has been more than thirty years since E. A. Wrigley demonstrated, in a still-famous article, that the technique of ‘family reconstitution’, as developed in France by Louis Henry and before then applied only to French parishes and elite groups, could be used in English historical demography. Although English parish registers seldom supply nearly as much detail as found in some French ones, and many registers are incomplete owing to an interruption of registration during the Civil War – or after 1789, 1769, or even 1729 – some English parishes were discovered whose registers allow adequate identification of the participants in all demographic events. Furthermore, English parish registers have one advantage over the French: they often started in the mid-sixteenth century (not the early seventeenth).

The parish Wrigley chose to illustrate the alluring prospects for English historical demographers, as is well known, was Colyton in Devonshire. His article, however, was not merely a programmatic one setting forth the possible benefits – and costs – of family reconstitution. He had also made an unexpected discovery: that there may well have been family limitation in England (as the title of his article proclaimed) or, more specifically, in Colyton in the period from 1647 to 1719.

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.

In many early modern towns of the southern Low Countries, beguinages gave adult single women of all ages the possibility to lead a religious life of contemplation in a secure setting, retaining rights to their property and not having to take permanent vows. This paper re-examines the family networks of these women by means of a micro-study of the wills left by beguines who lived in the Great Beguinage of St Catherine in sixteenth-century Mechelen, a middle-sized city in the Low Countries. By doing so, this research seeks to add nuance to a historiography that has tended to consider beguinages as artificial families, presumably during a period associated with the increasing dominance of the nuclear family and the unravelling ties of extended family.

In this article we analyse the changes in the age of voting and eligibility for office in Sweden during the twentieth century. We scrutinise arguments, actors, and contexts. Age proved to be an important yardstick for political citizenship and a source of political conflicts of importance for the development of democratic institutions which is largely neglected in earlier research on universal suffrage. Democratisation processes not only have led to the inclusion of new groups of citizens, but also exclusions. Our study demonstrates the importance of shifting understanding of young people, family formation, demographic shifts, intergenerational power balances and constitutional dilemmas.