Problems of poverty are exacerbated by uncertainty.1 This uncertainty means that one role of an income-assistance system is insurance, which in the modern world has often taken the form of government welfare or unemployment insurance. However, various private methods have also been important. The episode known as the Lancashire cotton famine reveals this institutional diversity in a region with a dominant geographically concentrated industry. A cyclical downturn in the cotton textile industry coincided with the Union blockade of Southern ports during the American Civil War, bringing four years of distress to the towns in the cotton manufacturing district concentrated in Lancashire. The unanticipated and unprecedented depth and duration of this shock unveiled both the responses of preexisting income assistance institutions and the institutional change that occurred to spread income losses after the cotton famine struck.

The southern textile mill village has received little empirical attention. I summarize the results of ongoing research using the records of the Courtenay Mill of Newry, South Carolina. There is evidence that stable family life was rewarded, mill housing was used to create dependence, and locally recruited workers recieved less pay than those from other areas. I conclude with a discussion of the possible causes of the local operative earnings differential and indicate other areas for future research.

In 1636 the Kingdom of Castile implemented a royal monopoly that made the manufacture, sale, and distribution of tobacco the exclusive, though alienable, prerogative of the Crown. This new device—politically palatable because it was not levied on a “necessity of life,” and fiscally attractive because tobacco seemed to enjoy inelastic and ever-expanding demand—soon extended to the other kingdoms in Spain and throughout Europe. So it is not surprising that most of the nine essays in this collection concern how the renta de tabaco, as the royal monopoly was known by the eighteenth century, affected the behavior of consumers, suppliers, investors, and royal officials in Spain and beyond.

In the southern Russian coal and steel region between 1874 and 1900, labor policy was outlined by the Russian managers of predominantly foreign firms through the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. This policy was shaped by chronic labor shortage, by the strained relations between industry and local government, and by managers' sensitivity to their position as spokesmen for foreign interests. The posture southern managers developed was that of welfare capitalism. Considerable expenditure on wages and welfare, however, did not establish labor peace.