This article examines the historical origins of the notion of “ideal” body weight by tracing the evolution of the gender-specific height and weight table in the United States from 1836 to 1943. Fewer than 200 years ago, weight was not regarded as an important health issue. At the turn of the twentieth century, low body weight, not overweight, was the leading concern of medical practitioners. With the rise of actuarial science, weight became a criterion insurance companies used to assess risk. Used originally as a tool to facilitate the standardization of the medical selection process throughout the life insurance industry, these tables later operationalized the notion of ideal weight and became recommended guidelines for body weights. The height and weight table was transformed from a “tool of the trade” into a means of practicing social regulation.

This article uses the national sample of the 1901 census of Canada to compare the earnings of live-in domestic servants with the earnings of women in other occupations and to examine the ethnoreligious backgrounds of domestic servants. The hypothesis that domestic service offered relative material advantages, when room and board are taken into account, is rejected. The hypothesis that female domestic servants came from a narrow range of specific ethnoreligious backgrounds is also rejected. The changing backgrounds and expectations of female domestic servants in the early twentieth century exacerbated class tensions in the service sector, helping ensure that domestic service remained an occupation of short duration and high turnover. The conclusion is that domestic service did not simply decline; rather, a work process was transformed. Demographic changes combined with changes in family and individual strategies to limit the supply of labor. When efforts to increase labor supply failed, bourgeois employers attempted to replace labor with new household technology; the wage-paid occupation of the domestic servant declined and was replaced by that of the unpaid housewife.

The wealth of probated decedents from late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Ontario is analyzed for evidence of the impact of religious affiliation on the level of wealth and rate of wealth accumulation. After controlling for age, birthplace, occupation, gender, urbanization, and other factors, the results suggest that relative to Anglicans, the wealth of Methodists and Roman Catholics was significantly lower. Moreover, when religious denomination and birthplace are interacted, Canadian-born Anglicans emerge as the dominant wealth group, while the English-born of any denomination and Methodists of any birthplace seem to fare the worst. When wealthage profiles are examined by denomination, Baptists have the steepest profiles, followed by Anglicans and Presbyterians. The data do support the hypothesis that religious affiliation, particularly when interacted with birthplace, has an impact on wealth, though the exact nature of the mechanism is unclear.

In recent debates over the utility of colonial and postcolonial theory for understanding the Irish past, Stephen Howe has suggested that Ireland be conceived as a seedbed for “hybrid forms” of colonialism. This essay presents a way to operationalize that suggestion by taking advantage of variants on classic central-place theory that have been proposed by students of developing countries. The analysis exploits the relatively rich demographic, administrative, and commercial data available for Ireland on the eve of the famine, a period in which the utility of a conventional colonial model is especially germane to major interpretive issues. The authors use various visualization techniques to explore these data and suggest ways of framing further research and interpretation in both Irish history and the study of other societies whose pasts have included colonial relationships.