The characterisation of medieval childbirth as profoundly dangerous is both long-standing and poorly supported by quantitative data. This article, based on a database tracking the reproductive lives of 102 late medieval aristocratic Englishwomen, allows not only for an evaluation of this trope but also an analysis of risk factors, including maternal youth and short birth intervals. Supplemented with evidence from medieval medical tracts and osteoarchaeological data related to pubertal development and nutrition, this study demonstrates that reproduction was hardly the main driver of mortality among elite women.

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the ‘dead’ season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.

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.

Records of proof-of-age hearings from 1246 to 1430 which mention land transfer are analysed by techniques aimed at overcoming the legal conventionality of the texts and the widespread plagiarism of the records of previous hearings. References are examined decade by decade, initially in terms of the numbers of testimonies mentioning land and, most importantly, in terms of their changing syntax, vocabulary and choice of detail. This approach gives clues to the state of the land market itself and to the mentalities of those involved. Particular attention is paid to the effects on the market of the economic and demographic shocks of the fourteenth century.

Drawing evidence from the proceedings of the Antwerp hoogere Vierschaer (the local criminal court), the article challenges some key features from Jan de Vries’ hypothesis of the Industrious Revolution. Mesmerised by an endless variety of fashionable and exotic consumer goods, eighteenth-century people would have slashed their leisure time in a variety of ways. Labour input would have been forced up on a daily, weekly and annual base. However, time-budget analysis of Antwerp labour rhythms evidences a much more complex picture, which does not really hint at an industrious revolution but rather reveals invariable industriousness.

This article focuses on the role played by local mobility in processes of confession and community building, taking the Catholic population in seventeenth-century Palestine as a case study. Works on the Reformation in Europe have acknowledged a connection between the strengthening of confessional identities and geographical mobility. Through the analysis of the parish records of Bethlehem, the article reveals some characteristics of seventeenth-century Catholic mobility in Palestine and shows how this mobility was bound up with the consolidation of a tiny Catholic minority and the establishment of a sacramental network. From a larger perspective, this research suggests that mobility plays an important role in the development and consolidation of small communities in a context of competing religion. From a methodological point of view, it also shows the importance of microanalysis in understanding the geographical mobility associated with religious practices and allegiances.

Trade in the early modern Atlantic grew a great deal. While acknowledging that this growth had important economic, social and cultural consequences, scholars have yet to fully explain its causes. This paper argues that formal religious institutions were key. Based on records from colonial Philadelphia, it shows how the Quaker meeting created a legal forum to resolve commercial disputes. The meeting enforced its verdicts by gathering and disseminating information about disputes locally and across the Atlantic world through the Society of Friends’ formal organisation of meetings. Thereby, it re-enforced reputation mechanisms, facilitating the expansion of Philadelphia's trade.

The aim of this article is to analyse how female working conditions and remunerations were affected by the structural and economic crises that impacted Lyon's silk industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. It concentrates, at a micro level, on different circumstances in which sources allow us to see women and their families coping with economic uncertainty: small-scale wage conflicts with their employers, clandestine work and illicit activities. This essay studies how women's work was a real issue in power conflicts and a tool for household adaptive strategies during periods of crisis.

The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men's life stories to compare girls’ and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment and this constrained the ways in which they could earn a living and live their lives. Fathers as breadwinners merited respect and often affection, but it was mothers with whom girls identified.

This article compares the impact of the economic crisis of 1787–1832, including the war and the loss of colonial markets, on the silk industry in Barcelona and Manresa, the two main centres of silk production in eighteenth-century Catalonia. In particular, it explores how families adopted different strategies in adapting to the crisis. Some moved into different sectors, including the emerging cotton industry, sometimes accompanied by geographical mobility. Others innovated by manufacturing specialised products, such as ribbons and handkerchiefs, often taking advantage of technological innovations in the textile industry. The article also offers some reflections on the role of women in these adaptative strategies, as far as the limited evidence allows.

The privatisation of communal assets tends to be presented as an irreversible linear movement that was driven from above. Based on a case study (Navarre, nineteenth century), this article seeks to give greater prominence to local players and their response to changing circumstances. The process thus appears less linear and compact by revealing certain anomalies, such as the reversibility of certain sales or the alienation of partial ownership rights that were compatible with the preservation of rights of use in favour of local councils and households, as an example of institutional bricolage. Against a backdrop of war and municipal bankruptcy, the privatisation of collective lands between 1808 and 1860 followed various paths, each one benefitting different social classes. Borrowers, outside investors and wealthy individuals accumulated large estates, but there was also a chance for peasants and local people to become property owners. The recovery of part of these lands on the back of social conflicts from 1884 onwards confirms that privatisation was not a fait accompli.

This article addresses how long tenant farmers in the Russian Baltic Provinces of Estland and Livland managed to occupy the farms and whether they transferred them within the family in the early phase of agricultural transformation (1841–1889). It contributes to the long-standing debate over the relative power of manorial lords and tenants in the (East Elbian) manorial system. Looking at individual-level data on the changes in tenantship on more than 1,000 farmsteads across 5 parishes, the article demonstrates the relative instability of tenant holdings and lack of independence in land transfers on noble manors.

Until the nineteenth -century tortilla production was carried out by women through rudimentary methods. New technology for corn milling spread during the 1910s, coinciding with the Mexican Revolution. The analysis of nixtamal corn mills and tortilla shops in Mexico City in 1924 shows that the mechanisation of milling led to masculinisation and an increase in the gender wage gap. However, since tortilla-making remained unmechanised, it allowed hundreds of women to establish tortilla shops that mostly hired women. Their entrepreneurship can be considered a survival strategy of women confronting a technological change in an era of political, social and economic turmoils.

While Norway in the 1930s had relatively liberal policies with regard to access to contraceptives, and an increasing number of legal abortions were carried out, the regime that was installed after occupation in 1940 reined them in, fuelled not only by Nazi ideology but by what new the regime saw as a most threatening population decrease. With reference to population policies in other West-European countries, this article compares Norwegian population policies under occupation with that of the 1930s, discusses if the policy towards all groups were the same, and the extent to which the new policies contributed to increasing birth rates in occupied Norway.

This article traces the careers of 12 Palestinian Arab lawyers who practised law during the last years of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), and who became Israeli citizens after 1948. The State of Israel made efforts to limit the professional practice of Palestinian lawyers and to supervise them. Yet, despite the pressures, most of them continued their legal practice and became active in the Israeli public sphere. We show that the Palestinian lawyers’ struggle to maintain their practice in Israel was used to assert autonomy for the legal profession, and concurrently, it was perceived as a touchstone for minority civil rights in the state.