The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent – access to property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes, the ‘best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according to statistics, is being in the labour market’.

Labour markets have almost always had gender disparities, with women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's disadvantaged position.

Ever since research on the Hanse began in the nineteenth century, there have been repeated efforts to redefine the boundaries and the core of the phenomenon. Views of the Hanse have evolved, and it has been seen by turns as a profoundly German league of towns, and as a network or organisation of towns and traders that was present in commercial centres and harbours from Novgorod to Portugal, and from Norway to Italy. In more general discussions on the institutional development of commerce in Europe, many of them influenced by the New Institutional Economics, the Hanse has even appeared as a mega-guild. The revival of the field of institutional economics and the history of commerce in pre-modern Europe has recently spawned a reappraisal of Hanseatic sources. The present article contributes to this debate by arguing that from the perspective of conflict management, the late medieval and early modern Hanse was an institution. There were several institutional mechanisms, such as a strong preference for mediation and arbitration in conflicts between individuals, as well as a mediation strategy for internal conflicts between towns. All of these mechanisms combined in a multifaceted institution of conflict management, which represented the added value of Hanse membership for traders, and for their towns.

Notwithstanding its relevance, social mobility has not been at the forefront of the agenda for historians of the Middle Ages. The first part of this paper deals with the reasons for this lack of interest, highlighting the role of historical models such as the French ‘feudal revolution’, the neo-Malthusian interpretations, the English commercialisation model and the great narrative of Italian medieval merchants. The second part assesses the extent to which this lack of interest has been challenged by conceptions of social space and social mobility developed in recent decades by sociologists and anthropologists. Therefore, it is really important to indicate the gaps in our understanding, and to clarify research questions, technical problems and methods. The paper examines the constitutive elements of social identities, the plurality of social ladders, and the channels of social mobility. It touches upon the performative role of learned representations, and upon the constraints imposed upon human agency by family practices and genre. It underlines the importance of studying the mobility inside social groups, and argues that we must distinguish between two different types of medieval social mobility: autogenous social mobility, and endogenous or conflictual social mobility.

Recent research on the development of peasant land markets and transfer patterns for central and east-central Europe concentrated on the early modern period. For the late Middle Ages, rural history still relies on older approaches studying the general development of ‘agrarian structure’ (Agrarverfassung) and peasant ‘inheritance’. This article seeks to establish the basis for a more systematic analysis of the formation and general development of peasant land markets in late medieval central and east-central Europe in a comparative perspective. Apart from changes weakening traditional manorial structures, secure peasant property rights of hereditary tenure developed and prevailed by the later Middle Ages. Possible institutional rigidities of transactions with peasant farmland, whose effects in practice would need further exploration, were undermined by the existence of reserves of land situated outside the measured open fields of peasant farms that could be traded more flexibly. These areas also formed important resources for the establishment of smallholders and cottagers who in turn added to the dynamics of developing peasant land markets. In the final section, the article offers a brief survey of developments during the early modern period and concludes that traditional images of an undermining of peasant property rights and of massive landlord powers due to the rise of ‘demesne lordship’ (Gutsherrschaft) must be seriously questioned, as recent empirical studies highlight enormous regional variation and a dominant pattern of continuity of secure peasant property rights and also indicate considerable land mobility.

Typologies of marriage patterns in early modern Europe have been formulated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. However, demographic and anthropological studies have noticed that marriage patterns in the Balkan area have exhibited such great variability that it is difficult to classify them in any of the categories proposed by Laslett. This article examines the marriage patterns in Greece and some of her island populations in the time-span of the twentieth century. Although the marriage patterns examined do not conform to any pre-defined typology, it seems that up to the first half of the twentieth century the pattern of mainland Greece constituted an intermediate case between the West and the East European marriage patterns but that that on the islands was totally different. The marriage patterns on the Ionian Islands had more features in common with the West European pattern, while the marriage pattern of the Cyclades reveals certain characteristics (but not all) of the Mediterranean pattern.

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern Japanese agricultural villages in the period 1716–1870, this study examines the patterns and covariates of remarriage in a rural community with strong adherence to a stem family organization. Event history analysis is applied separately for males and females, and for two types of previous marriage (uxorilocal and virilocal). Controlling for demographic and economic factors, coresiding parents and children had differential impacts on remarriage for these subgroups. Men and women were tightly bound to the fates of their natal and marital households within the larger context of local economic conditions.

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the English was ‘individualistic’, Habbakuk to explore the strategies by which the English aristocracy maintained its supremacy and Mingay and others to settle the debate about the effect of enclosure on the small landowner. The early modern land market has rarely, if ever, been seen as worthy of discussion in its own right.

This article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

Even after the unification of Germany in 1871, political power continued to be fragmented. The Bismarckian constitution was superimposed on a collection of previously independent states: it acknowledged their continued existence as historical regions, granted them their own constitutions, state parliaments, and extensive legislative and executive powers. At a regional level, different perceptions of the appropriate role of the state continued to exist, with Prussian centralism contrasting with the laissez-faire amateurism of Bremen and Hamburg. The creation of centralized Reich (German Empire) agencies, such as the Imperial Health Office, failed to guarantee an effective implementation of German Empire decrees, and the administrative structure of individual states remained diverse. Indeed despite increasing pressure to create a uniform nation state and standardized administrative procedures, there were still 25 separate states in 1914. In relation to the structure of medical services and the formulation of medical policy, a significant degree of regional variation persisted into the twentieth century.

In this article implications of season of birth for child health in Spain during the demographic transition are explored. Making use of the Aranjuez data base, the authors look at the seasonality of births and its heterogeneities, finding a nearly universal prevalence of late spring and early summer conceptions that is most evident with last-born children. Levels and causes of childhood mortality are strongly related to the season of birth, with those born between April and October showing lower likelihood of survival. These findings can be explained by the way infant feeding, age and season intersect. These results have implications for the relative efficiency of different demographic regimes.