Mortgage markets in developing economies, both past and present, are often confined to social networks between private individuals. The inadequate registration of ownership of and encumbrances on borrowers’ real estate has been offered as a reason for this, but it is questionable whether such registration provides either a simple or a complete explanation. This paper analyses mortgage markets between 1300 and 1800 in the Low Countries, where such registration was organised well, and England, where such registration was poorly organised. These historical cases show that registration was important for the emergence of broad mortgage markets but in the historical context successful markets took considerable time to appear. The rise of such markets also required changes in the mortgage laws and often depended on intermediaries for matching borrowers and lenders.

The phenomenon of ‘missing women’ has existed throughout the twentieth century in China. Using data from five censuses, with appropriate adjustments, we estimate the numbers and percentage of missing women from the period 1900–2000. The analysis is broken down into historically important periods, and the consequences of missing women, particularly that of China's ‘bare branches’, are explored. Implications for Chinese society are then discussed.

Studies of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain focus either on establishing aggregate measures or on individual case studies. These do not allow for a comparative analysis of the way that the composition of wealth was influenced by age and gender. This article explores the importance of these factors using both a case-study approach and a more comprehensive analysis of wealth left at death for a sample of 1,444 individuals. By establishing the age at death for 1,274 of these individuals, together with evidence from a series of death duty records, it is possible to determine the composition of assets by age and gender. For both men and women, shares became more important over the life course. Real estate was more important for men of all ages compared to women, for whom safe investments in government securities assumed greater significance with age. These findings confirm that both age and gender influenced the amount and composition of wealth and demonstrate that these factors need to be taken into account in any model that seeks to make generalizations about the pattern of wealth-holding in the population at large. Emphasizing these demand-side factors provides a different perspective on the rise of Britain as a ‘nation of investors’.

The struggle against death is one of the main themes in human history. Mortality as it declined in recent times, became a central factor behind population growth. In this context, childhood mortality was the key, not only because deaths at these young ages often constituted more than half of all deaths, but also because any decrease in it brought about fundamental changes in the age structure and the size of the population and in fertility.

This article deals with an important aspect of public health policy in the two leading industrializing countries of Europe. Both had a substantial number of large towns in this period, despite the fact that German industrialization had only just begun in 1859. It is a companion piece to a comparative study of vaccination policy published in 1998, and is intended to be complemented by a study of the impact of bacteriology on public health. It is for that reason that little attention is paid to bacteriology here. The first study dealt with the concept of medical police; it was about modes of compulsion. This one is about the provision of a sanitary infrastructure of central water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment. It deals not so much with the ordering of people as with the making of things.

Leaving home and entering service was a key transition in early modern England. This article presents evidence on the age of apprenticeship in London. Using a new sample of 22,156 apprentices bound between 1575 and 1810, we find that apprentices became younger (from 17.4 to 14.7 years) and more homogeneous in age, irrespective of background. We examine the effect of region of origin, parental occupation, Company entered and paternal mortality on age of entry. The fall in apprentices' ages has significant implications for our understanding of the labour supply, training structures, experiences of apprenticeship and family economy in this period.

This article focuses on local agency in two near-famines in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Flanders. Our comparative analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845–1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and a formal way. The main thesis is that the impact of hunger crises in peasant societies is directly related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more-or-less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis has always had local roots.

A decade ago, in a review of the field Roger Schofield and David Reher observed that ‘the basic demographic parameters of mortality decline are still far from clear’. And in spite of admirable analyses of mortality by authors ranging from Eilert Sundt in 1855 to Julie A. Backer and Michael Drake in the 1960s and Sølvi Sogner and Ståle Dyrvik in the 1970s, this observation also generally applies to Norway. Some of the lack of clarity is due to the limitations of the death data themselves, some to the orientation of researchers. For example, although almost every biography of a Norwegian town has its section on births and deaths, the study of urban mortality as a whole has not attracted much attention, perhaps because the situation seems self-evident. Towns were (and still often are) unhealthier places to live in than the countryside. Referring to the years 1831–1850, Sundt posited the laconic axiom that ‘Dødelighenden i byerne pleier være større end i landdistrikterne.’ From this starting observation, which was of course true at the time, I want to examine urban mortality in Norway in the context of state-wide mortality trends from the mid- nineteenth century to 1920. Ultimately I intend to study mortality on the individual/family level in the western coastal towns of Bergen and Haugesund during this period, using machine-readable nominative sources, censuses, and parish registers. However, to put these intended microhistorical investigations in perspective, I have delved into published statistics on mortality in Norwegian towns in general and in Kristiania (now Oslo) and Bergen in particular. These data are plentiful and readily available but they are not always in a form suitable for systematic analysis over a long term; they must be collated, organized, and to some extent massaged. In the investigative tradition of exploratory data analysis I am looking for patterns in the data and meanings in the patterns. A number of questions guide the description and analysis. How big was the urban–rural differential and how did it change over time? What were its components; or rather, who paid the ‘urban penalty’? The answers show that urban mortality was an important factor in the mortality transition in late-nineteenth-century Norway.

This article examines spousal cooperation in the early modern Dutch food markets. It shows that although husband and wife business partnerships were very common in market-based retailing, great differences existed in the way spouses worked together. Most urban retail trades were guild-organized and the guilds therefore had a significant influence on the family economy. Guild policy was, however, very flexible and responded to local economic circumstances. It appears that the size and the organization of the markets were crucial in shaping the roles of the men and women who held stalls. Processes of commercialization generally benefited independent female entrepreneurship over the more traditional husband and wife partnerships.

This article reviews the history of factor markets in pre-colonial West Africa, both during and after the Atlantic slave trade. The forms and volume of these markets strongly reflected the natural and technological environment, and a horizontally and vertically uneven distribution of coercive and purchasing power. The general abundance of land and absence of economies of scale in production militated against contracting for land and free labour. Hence the most widespread and large-scale factor market was in slaves. Capital and credit were transacted mostly within networks of trust and/or on the security of human pawns. With considerable social costs, variously reinforced and restricted by states, pawning and (especially) the intra-West-African slave trade channelled labour into the production of commodities for sale, contributing to the nineteenth-century growth of certain coastal and interior economies. It was only in the latter era that land rights began to be commercialized. This was not a response to a general shift in factor ratios, but rather to demand for specific kinds of land in specific places, stimulated by the growth of export markets for agricultural commodities.

This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent ‘Eastern European family pattern’. This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by Richard Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's original observation of non-negligible spatial variation within the supposedly homogeneous North-Western European marriage and family pattern is used here as a starting point to show the true diversity of familial organisation in Eastern Europe, which had been placed at the other end of the spectrum of what was long believed to be a dichotomous division in European family systems. The diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development in historical Eastern Europe presented in this literature should finally free us from a simplistic view of the continent's familial history, and especially from the perspective implied by the notion of a ‘dividing line’.

The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour input, but also strong regional differences. These differences appear not to be connected to urbanization or to the rise of one or another sector in the rural economy, but to the regional social and institutional framework in which the economy developed.