European accounts of the Hindu practice of sati, or widowburning, in India appear at least as early as Diodorus in 317 BC, and become, after the Portuguese landfall in India at the end of the fifteenth century, customary in European travelogues. My article centres on the ‘mimetic circulation’ of an infamous anecdote in several early modern European narratives of sati. This story defines widowburning as a social response to the ‘custom’ of Indian women poisoning their husbands. The travellers' persistent reliance on the poison tale mediates in the contact between Europeans and Indians, for the story functions as a powerful rhetorical device in European accounts of India. The question then becomes ‘What are the cultural ramifications of the insistent recurrence of the poison legend in the context of Indian widowburning in so many diverse European travelogues?’ And, if European representational practices are always self-reflexive and ‘can never be detached from European projection’, what does the use of this anecdote tell us about the early modern Europeans themselves? Finally, in the context of the travellers' origins, what role does the nexus between women and poisoning uncovered both in the legend and in early modern Europe play in the larger discursive apparatuses of future colonial enterprise?

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.

In the European society of the Ancien Régime lifestyle was an effective pointer to the social class to which a family and its members belonged. Social hierarchies were reflected in patterns of consumption: the upper classes had a definite need for ostentation, since lavish spending made their position at the top of the social scale manifest. Clothing had a decisive function in this connection: clothes were undoubtedly the most visible marks of high living, embodying a whole series of status signals – the quality of the cloth, the richness of the accessories, the colours – clearly identifying the social rank of the wearer. Yet a number of recent studies on pre-industrial consumerism have shown that in England – chiefly, but not alone among European societies – a taste and feeling for consumer goods caught on among other social classes besides the upper. It follows that the correspondence between clothing – or more broadly, a consumer pattern – on the one hand, and rank, on the other, is not something one can apply mechanically. The web of connections between dress and social hierarchy in early modern Europe was highly complex and varied, as the ensuing remarks briefly suggest.

John Hajnal's classic essay published in 1965 on European marriage patterns contrasted western with eastern Europe in terms of age at marriage and proportion never-married. In a more recent article, ‘Two kinds of pre-industrial household formation system’, which is indeed a development from his 1965 essay, the life-cycle is taken into explicit consideration by use of the concept of household formation. In addition, he makes some geographical alterations to his previous argument: the ‘West’ is narrowly defined to cover ‘north-west’ European countries, whereas the ‘East’ now extends beyond the eastern European boundaries to Asian countries such as China and India.

To this formulation there can be two kinds of response from scholars specializing in the Far East, especially traditional Japan. One is concerned with the lack of full discussion of a stem family system in Hajnal's article. He suggests that while some versions of this system are ‘compatible with the general north-west European household formation rules’ and some others are not, ‘[n]o kind of stem family system can be classified as a joint household system’; but unfortunately, no detailed stem family household formation rules are specified, nor is there any discussion of Japan's family system, which has been regarded as a typical example of the stem type.

Clothing was paramount in early modern Europe. It accounted for a significant proportion of household expenditure at many different levels of society, and attracted much comment. Just as contemporaries described, often in minute detail, the garments worn by their compatriots, so foreign visitors to cities and courts devoted considerable attention to the appearance of the people they encountered. Such close observation was motivated by a serious purpose since clothing was thought to offer a kind of window on individuals and societies alike. The instructive qualities attributed to clothing may help to explain why so many costume books were printed during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they also shed light on the inclusion of exotic garments in the collections of curiosities which similarly characterize the period.

Historians constantly seek new windows into the past, and one which has proved particularly fruitful of late is litigation for verbal injury. For early modern North America Peter N. Moogk thinks that court hearings for defamation are ‘likely to disclose the mental climate of a society’, while Mary Beth Norton thinks that from such suits ‘we can identify the types of behaviour a society most abhors’. The gendered nature of insults has been a core theme of Laura Gowing's work, and must form a component of any consideration of the subject. This article looks at defamation cases in two commissary courts – in Edinburgh and Argyll – between 1750 and 1800 in order to see what they reveal about Scottish society at that time.

Fashion, like luxury, has been largely conceived in terms of the elite experience. Indeed, the European fashion cycle was noted first among the aristocracy where the fashion system celebrated novelty over tradition, highlighting the individual aesthetic even as it consolidated the group identity of exquisitely garbed nobles. The counterpoints to the mutability of style were the legal constraints designed to curb the fashion impulse, bridling the sartorial ambitions of non-elites. Sumptuary legislation aimed to enforce luxury codes. The right to extravagant inessentials, which distinguished those of noble blood, was forbidden to lesser beings; however, fashion was a contested concept whose influence permeated first the middling and then even the labouring ranks. In this article I will examine the competing forces at work within England as the dress of the common people was transformed over the long eighteenth century. Although sumptuary legislation came to an end in England in 1604, government and moralists continued to claim the right to restrain material expression within the lower ranks, but without success. I will assess the challenge to a unitary hegemonic elite fashion, and explore the creation and significance of the multiple expressions in dress within the varied social ranks of England.

This article examines, on the basis of landholding patterns, the relationship between the peasant family economy and its family life cycle in the latter half of the Tokugawa era (1603–1867). The analysis is focused on the life-cycle patterns of the stem family. In such a system, the continuation of the family and its assets assumed prime importance while hired labour did not provide a substantial proportion of the workforce on the farm. In fact, the stem family was officially recognized as the lawful family form by the Meiji government, but even in earlier periods the stem family system provided the dominant form. Among the samurai it was always the required form. Among the peasantry, by the early eighteenth century the stem family was the predominant family system.

The family system observed here differs in structure from that found in western-European family systems. Even when developmental aspects of European households are discussed, it is the relationship between the simple, nuclear family forms and their economic and social correlates – especially poverty, inheritance and landholdings – that is analysed. How Japanese stem family households operated with respect to landholding and other variables is the main theme of this article. The data come from an agrarian and considerably backward area of north-east Japan where harvest failures were not infrequent even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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.

On 8 Brumaire, year II (29 October 1793), the Convention decreed that freedom of dress was a basic human right: ‘Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories of his sex that he finds pleasing.’ This was an odd decree in many ways. It decreed as a right something we take for granted, the freedom to wear what we choose, and it was passed during the Terror, when individual rights were routinely curtailed. It also contradicted itself, for if its first article guaranteed freedom of dress, its second stated that all previous laws on dress remained in force, and these included one which impinged on individual freedom: the requirement that all French citizens wear a red, white and blue cockade in public.

Well before the onset of industrialization, Edo was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of one million or more by the beginning of the eighteenth century. For next 150 years, until just before Edo changed its name to Tokyo in 1868, it is believed that Edo maintained this population level of one million, with about a half of the population being samurai and their families. In 1872, having seen a massive exodus of ex-shogunal retainers and their families, triggered by the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the social and political uncertainties that followed, Tokyo's population stood at just 580,000, close to half the previous size. In addition, it is believed, the city's administrative functions were rapidly deteriorating. The population began to recover from about 1880 and exceeded the one-million mark in the 1890s. In other words, as many as half a million people migrated to Tokyo during this twenty-year period. In 1908 when a population survey was taken, the total population was then 1,626,000, and the number of people, particularly males, in each of the age groups 15–19, 20–24 and 25–29 was greater than the number in the 5–9 or the 10–14 group. There is a marked contrast with the situation in the late 1860s when the 20–24 group was smaller than the 10–14 or the 15–19 group. This survey suggests that many of the migrants who arrived at Tokyo in the period of growth were male, young and, probably, unmarried.

In his article ‘Premarital sexual permissiveness and illegitimacy in the Nordic Countries’, Richard F. Tomasson discusses high illegitimacy rates in preindustrial Iceland. He points out that during the nineteenth century children born out of wedlock were proportionally more numerous in Iceland than in other European countries. In Tomasson's view high illegitimacy rates in Iceland were due to liberal attitudes towards premarital sex – attitudes that were deeply rooted in traditional Nordic society. In his words, ‘The Ancient Scandinavians accorded women higher status, and along with this went liberal attitudes toward premarital sex relations, illegitimacy, and divorce. Such attitudes often appear to be a concomitant of a high degree of equality between the sexes.’

It is the aim of this article to examine the economy and demography of an industrial coal-mining community during the second third of the nineteenth century. There is already a considerable body of work by historical demographers, from E. A. Wrigley to M. Haines, who have studied industrial districts, particularly from an aggregated perspective. Their work has been mostly concerned with stressing the peculiarities of specific populations in comparison with those of other districts. Fewer attempts have, however, been made to assess the degree of variance within industrial populations. Tilleur, a small town in east Belgium on the left bank of the Meuse, offers an opportunity to make such an assessment for the years between 1846 and 1880.

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.

What explains the gender division of labour in preindustrial economies? Although men and women frequently do different types of labour in any given society, men's and women's tasks vary considerably across different societies. In some societies, women engaged in trade and agriculture (in parts of Africa, for example); though these were men's duties in others (in parts of Europe, for example). At the same time, European historians discovered that women often engaged in tasks, such as agricultural labour and commerce, that were often assumed to be the domain of men, again suggesting a wide variation in the gender division of labour. Understanding the division of labour in preindustrial economies is important, because these historical cases often serve as implicit or explicit referents for understanding how much – or how little – has changed in contemporary societies.

A number of excellent works, such as those by Barbara Hanawalt and Martha Howell, have explored women's roles in the economy. However, often missing from treatments that focus on women's history is an analysis of the gender division of labour, that is, an explicit comparison of men's and women's activities. Undoubtedly, such a comparison is hampered by the difficulties of finding documentary sources that provide the appropriate type of evidence.

This article takes up this task in a particular way, by examining single-person households, composed of either males or females in fifteenth-century rural Tuscany. This empirical evidence is useful for several reasons. First, from an analytical perspective, it makes it possible to compare explicitly the activities of men and women who are in an identical position, that is, living alone. Second, as I discuss below, the documentary record from this period makes it possible to provide the evidence for this comparison. Third, this evidence provides historical information on a relatively under-researched group, rural widows and widowers. For example, there is generally more information available for Florentine women than for female rural inhabitants. Furthermore, little research explicitly compares men's and women's tasks to examine the gender division of labour. Although Piccinni and Mazzi and Raveggi provide much information about women's duties and activities in rural Tuscany, their work does not directly address the gender division of labour. While the archival evidence presented below cannot explain the division of labour at all points in individuals' life courses, it does provide explicitly comparative information about men and women.

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.

Until late in the nineteenth century a considerable proportion of Dutch children had lost one or both parents by the time they reached adulthood. This was a consequence of low life expectancy, the high age at which reproduction started (partly due to late marriage) and high fertility within marriage. For the Netherlands in the period 1850 to 1900, the proportion of persons aged 20 or less who had lost one of their parents is estimated between 8 and 11 per cent; another 1 to 2 per cent had lost both parents. Despite the fact that orphanhood was a very common phenomenon in earlier centuries, little is known about how orphans in the past fared materially and psychologically, and our knowledge about the consequences of orphanhood, in particular full orphanhood, for the child is restricted. Only a general impression from diaries, letters, autobiographers and similar sources can be obtained. It is very difficult to acquire information on orphans – especially those outside institutions – from the customary demographic sources. Information on the effects of institutional care for orphans and their ‘institutional careers’ is also very limited, mainly as a result of the lack of good, individual-level data indicating the age, occupation or family background of inmates at the time of their admission or exit.