The Horta of Valencia is a large irrigated area managed by eight communities of landowners. Traditionally, it was considered that these communities were composed of peasants, that they were self-managed and self-governed, and that they had remained immutable over time. However, the historical evidence shows that this is not true for pre-modern times. This article examines a possible Islamic origin of these institutions, the rupture caused by the Christian conquest of Valencia in the thirteenth century, the structure of the communities, and the social diversity of their members within the framework of feudalism. We conclude that irrigation communities cannot be used as examples of institutional continuity or of self-regulated and autonomous social organisations.

The settlement of structural commercial conflicts of interest cannot be exclusively subsumed under the heading of dispute resolution. Even when a particular conflict opposing specific individuals or groups of interests could be settled, the broader underlying conflicts of interest would subsist and re-emerge. Both commercial and institutional or political actors would therefore rely on various techniques of conflict management, a process imposing restraint on the opposing parties while allowing sufficient leeway for business to be continued. Both conflict resolution and conflict management were devices of public and corporate governance, and therefore, following the late medieval tradition, instruments more or less based on established patterns of legal or quasi-legal models legitimised by accepted or conventional parameters of ‘justice’.

Combining family history and the analysis of political elites, this article explores the development of the urban elite of Turin (Piedmont) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, through an analysis of the transformations in the kinships forming the ruling class, with particular regard to their structures and strategies for social and economic reproduction. The deep changes that affected this group and eventually led to its extinction and replacement by a new elite are addressed. It is argued that, alongside institutional rearrangements determined by the Dukes of Savoy, the inheritance strategies pursued by the kinships in order to preserve their economic and political role played a crucial part in their demise.

The port of Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England was transformed in the seventeenth century by the rapid expansion of its coal trade, which demanded an influx of industrial transport workers known as ‘keelmen’. This article assesses wages, perks and the seasonal distribution of income for this growing group of workers, estimating that their real income rose until about 1680, before tailing off again. They were comparatively well paid, but their work was inconsistent and seasonal. The number of days' work available was crucial to welfare in Newcastle, as were a series of formal and informal measures intended to relieve winter poverty and maintain a year-round workforce. Combining quantitative and qualitative evidence, this article offers a north-eastern industrial perspective on English living standards debates that still tend to be dominated by south-eastern building and agricultural labourers.

Recent historiography argues that the legal autonomy of municipal governments created the necessary conditions for successful commercial transactions and economic growth in certain parts of Europe in the later Middle Ages, and that these features attracted foreign merchants. This article uses empirical data from England, Flanders and Normandy to test the following questions: were there significant differences in rules, laws and institutions between one place and another in late medieval western Europe? Were the Portuguese merchants drawn to markets that hypothetically had more effective institutions? The findings demonstrate that legal institutions and conflict management were very similar across western Europe, and that there is no evidence that the Portuguese opted for trading in a certain market because of its effective institutions. Moreover, the article claims that the merchants seemed to prioritise protection and privilege while trading abroad, and it highlights the role of commercial diplomacy in conflict management.

This article revalorises women's protest and popular political ideas in history. A case study focusing on three cities of the Low Countries shows that not only men, but also women were involved when it came to spreading subversive ideas, undermining the authority of urban governors, and mobilising discontent. The analysis of fifteenth-century records of repression from Antwerp, Mechelen and Leuven demonstrates that both male and female commoners permanently strove to change the governmental practices in town by using contentious speech.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, thousands of Londoners (and people from the rest of England) married clandestinely at the Fleet Prison. More weddings were celebrated there than any other location in England. This article will examine quantitatively who was marrying there, detailing their premarital status, origin and occupation. It will show that Londoners who married at the Fleet were broadly representative of London's population topography and occupational structure. The article also examines the non-Londoners who married at the Fleet, and shows that by c. 1750 the Fleet was hosting at least 10 per cent of all marriages in England.

This article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by Dr John Haygarth, it is possible to produce age-specific estimates of the extent to which adults of each sex had been treated for the pox by age 35. These estimates can be produced both for the resident population of Chester city and comparatively for the rural region immediately surrounding Chester. These are the first estimates of the prevalence of this important disease produced for the eighteenth century and they can be compared with similar figures for England and Wales c. 1911–1912.

This article addresses the management of maritime plunder and conflict in the waters of England and France in the fourteenth century. It argues that during this century a fundamental change occurred. Around 1300, maritime conflict was handled by recourse to the strictly civil law merchant and law maritime, or by Marcher law. However by the 1350s and 1360s the kings of England and France, moved by contemporary political events and theories of sovereignty at sea, created courts of Admiralty that challenged the previous systems’ jurisdiction. These initiatives eventually paved the way for the criminalisation of private maritime conflict.

Based on the verb-oriented method and a unique collection of observations from court records, this article shows that both men and women did almost all categories of work in early modern Sweden. On the level of concrete tasks, however, there was both difference and similarity between the genders. Marital status exerted a strong influence on women's sustenance activities, creating a clear distinction between unmarried and ever-married women. These patterns were probably the effect of a labour legislation that forced young people without independent means to offer their bodies and time to masters and mistresses.

Profound changes in output and productivity characterised eighteenth-century agriculture, both in regions of large-scale capitalist farming and smallholding cultivation. Aggregate, macro-level studies offer valuable insights, but often prove unable to explain yield increases. Therefore, this article proposes a social approach to agricultural production through a micro-level analysis of fertilisation strategies, taking the smallholding economy of inland Flanders as a starting point. The household perspective demonstrates that a green ‘fertiliser’ revolution with increasing levels of fertilising intensity and off-farm nutrient inputs was instigated from below on both small and large holdings as a response to the broader economic and societal situation.

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.

This article analyses the mechanisms of conflict resolution in apprenticeship contracts using a large database of disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that the guild court under investigation (the Padua Woollen Guild court) did not enforce training contracts, but rather sought to improve on incomplete contracts by adding clauses, thereby helping individuals renegotiate and redefine the contractual arrangements into which they had decided to enter. However, power relations within the court operated largely in favour of employers, both merchants and master craftsmen. The article concludes that alternative contract enforcement systems, such as municipal or state courts, were probably better suited than corporative systems for resolving disputes surrounding apprenticeship.

In 1974, Portugal's Carnation Revolution, initiated by the military, received huge popular support. Army officers, mostly of the rank of captain, started the Revolution, but then the politicians took over. While it was largely a ‘top down’ revolution, at the local government level ordinary people assumed control. In this article we consider those who made up the local elites before the Revolution, during the transition period that followed, and thereafter. We compare the local elites in Portugal during Salazar's dictatorship with those under the Democratic regime, using a database of 6,000 entries containing details of 3,102 mayors and deputy mayors and 402 civil governors who held office between 1936 and 2013. Our main conclusions are that during the transition period the elite who had ruled under Salazar were almost completely replaced. A new group, from different professions and social backgrounds, took up the reins of local government. The Revolution produced a population willing to participate in the new order and take on roles within local government, but they did not always retain their seats after the first democratic elections.

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.