The author makes the argument that the presence of a murder law during the Roman monarchy and the absence of such a law during the republic reflects the difference in the nature of authority in these two political institutions. The centralized authority of the monarchy demanded a control over the right to kill. An act of homicide practised by another infringed upon the king's authority and so a murder law was promulgated. When the Romans expelled their kings, authority devolved onto individual patres and this decentralized leadership under the republic meant that the act of homicide was no longer a matter of concern for the state.

This article studies the role performed by local jurisdictional courts in private credit relations in medieval Catalonia. These courts and their officers were subject to the control of local feudal lords. The courts acted as a guarantor of credit contracts agreed before them in the form of ‘court obligations’, and also carried out procedures related to the enforcement of outstanding debts: prorogations; seizures and auction of goods; and imprisonment. The study focuses on the plain of the Lower Ter, on the northeast Catalan coast. It concludes that although the jurisdictional framework provided by the courts involved a number of different great lords, including the king himself, the juridical mechanisms and collaboration between different courts functioned well enough to sustain a dynamic, complex and widespread credit system.

This article evaluates the presence of Muslim communities in the Kingdom of Navarre in the late Middle Ages. Following the Christian Reconquest of the Navarrese bank of the Ebro in 1119, a sizeable Muslim community remained in Christian territory until 1516. This article focuses on the fifteenth century, a period for which religious coexistence in the smallest of the Iberian Christian kingdoms is in need of further contextualisation. An analysis of existing scholarship and new archival evidence throws light on the economic activities of the Muslims in Tudela as well as on their relationship with the Navarrese monarchy, their collective identity, their legal systems and their relationships not only with their Christian and Jewish neighbours, but also with other Iberian Muslim communities including those of Al Andalus, or Moorish Iberia.

This article examines the impact of the Continental Blockade upon a local fishing and agricultural economy in the Mediterranean by focusing on the illicit trades that flourished on Stromboli. The island became a strategic location for smuggling between the warring kingdoms of British allied Naples and French ruled Sicily. This paper argues that the Blockade allowed Stromboli to join the network of maritime traffic that had been dominated by the two biggest islands in the archipelago. Although equally integrated into agriculture and fishing, women participated in the fraudulent sale of prize goods but were excluded from large-scale smuggling operations.

Before the Second World War, Osaka was called the Manchester of the East, because its industries, such as cotton spinning and metal work, played such an important role in the national economy. Osaka had also been a primary commercial centre of the country since the seventeenth century. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Osaka was the centre of Japanese capitalism, and it was during the Taisho era, 1912–1926, that Osaka was most prosperous. In those days there was unceasing immigration to Osaka, particularly into the urban area, in order to find employment. The migrants came primarily from rural areas, plus an increasing number from Korea. Under such circumstances, acute social problems emerged, in particular slums, unemployment and poverty.

During the Taisho period, the Osaka authorities were not unaware of the problem of poverty. First, the local authorities began to recognize the necessity of a municipal social policy and so they reorganized the administration in order to attack poverty. With this reorganization, a new department was formed to deal with all aspects of the social welfare of the inhabitants. Secondly, they actively carried out and published social surveys of urban poverty. From the information thus obtained, a relief system was established, consisting, for example, of social work and public assistance. Thirdly, urban officials accepted the responsibility of coping with urban poverty and actually made efforts to tackle it. They tried to define the meaning of poverty and the attitude of the local authorities towards poverty changed completely from that which had obtained in any previous period. It was in this era that the actual living and working conditions of the urban poor became apparent to the authorities and practical measures were taken to ameliorate poverty. For these reasons, Osaka provides us with an interesting case study.

The focus of this article is on the relationship between poverty and family formation in Osaka, including not only the circumstances of the urban poor but also the factors influencing the attitudes of the local authorities, who recognized the importance of the relationship between urban poverty and family formation, and the nature of the relief system they organized. Before going into detail concerning Osaka's poverty problems between 1912 and 1926, however, it is necessary to examine the set of circumstances which, one might argue, were critical in prompting Osaka to launch a social work programme.

From the latter half of the nineteenth century, mixed farming in the Alpine regions of Switzerland underwent a gradual process of specialisation. Cereal crops were phased out in favour of feed crops, livestock, viticulture and fruit farming. This article analyses the way in which the land market was affected by this increasingly specialised primary sector and asks whether this market became more efficient as a result of reduced transaction costs. Surveys have shown that the land market remained bound by the inertia inherent in the nature of landed property in the Alpine area. The connection between agricultural diversification and the land market appears to have been only partial and this suggests that the modernisation of farming did not so much alter the main balance of the market itself, as boost the circulation of plots more directly associated with the process of specialisation.

Since the publication of the seminal book of essays Household and family in past time in 1972, much research on the history of the family has concentrated on the situation in western and eastern Europe, and relied almost exclusively on census-type documents. It is, for example, established that whereas mean household size was small, the mean age at first marriage fairly high and neo-localism (the formation of an independent household on marriage) dominant in western Europe, almost the opposite applied in eastern Europe. Yet these findings do not preclude the possibility of discovering regions where in statistical terms the mean household size was not large and the proportion of complex households not particularly high, but where the neo-local mode of household formation was not the norm. Such a region could have a preference for joint families (two or more married sons co-residing with their father) with a low-fertility demographic regime, or stem families (one co-residing married son) with that of intermediate to low fertility.

Traditional Japan is an example of just such a stem-family society. There the household, not the individual, was perceived as the basic social and legal unit of society. This unit was called ie and its headship, authority and property were expected to be handed down from the father to a particular son, enabling the household to follow alternating stages of ‘simple’, ‘multiple’ and ‘extended’ forms over the developmental cycle, more or less in accordance with the predictions of Lutz Berkner. As articles in the section of Laslett and Wall's Household and family on Japan have already shown, the mean household size in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan was not higher than that in England, but the mean age at marriage was lower than in the English population. Moreover, household formation and succession rules under the Japanese ie system were not compatible with the simple family mode.

This article considers how the capitalist practices and organisation of hand papermaking framed the coming of mechanised paper production during the Age of Revolutions. The lived experience of making paper by hand had been as tightly wrapped as the synchronised toil of its workers and the trade's wage system. Neither the ’industrial Enlightenment’ nor an ‘industrious revolution’ had transformed paper production. Instead, the papermaking machine drew on and unravelled a durable web of skilled toil, custom, compensation, worktime, and shopfloor relationships. In doing so, the inventor of this device, Nicolas-Louis Robert, imagined that it would offer the manufacturers unfettered sway over their shops; indeed, he privileged this purpose above efficiency and productivity. That mastery remained incomplete, however, as paper producers still required men who had mastered the trade's tacit knowledge about such matters as pulp, finish, and the proper weather for production.

This article examines the arguments used in the Netherlands to admit or exclude asylum seekers during the Cold War era. There is consensus that gaining asylum in the 1960s was not that difficult – especially when compared with current practices – because Cold War migrants were ‘the enemies of our enemy’. By analysing 36 detailed individual case files, this article questions the oft-sung mantra of an unproblematic asylum procedure for these ‘anti-communists’ in the Netherlands. We will see that the restrictive Dutch authorities frequently changed their anti-asylum decisions as a result of interventions from the outside. Outsiders' pleas, underpinned by a variety of arguments, often resulted in admission, but rarely in the attainment of refugee status.

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.

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.

Few studies have dealt with the issue of people living alone in pretransitional rural populations. Alone by choice or circumstances, usually poor and sometimes stigmatised, solitaries often had a hard life. This article analyses the characteristics and life-histories of people living alone in two rural villages in nineteenth-century Italy with the aim of understanding whether and how solitaries managed to find a way out from solitude. The results show that solitaries got married, joined another household, and especially emigrated more than the rest of the population, which is a strong indication of their willingness to break out of solitariness. The individuation of the demographic profile associated with such specific behaviours, namely being male, young, and widowed, allowed us also to draw some hypotheses on the role of availability and quality of social connections on the chances to escape from a solitary condition, as well as on the characteristics of migratory flows of solitaries from the countryside to the cities.