How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

Early modern Europe was predominantly rural and agriculture was the most common form of production. Yet women’s contribution to agricultural work is relatively neglected in studies of women’s work and remains an area of discussion and disagreement among historians. This chapter sets out to tackle misconceptions around women’s agricultural work. It does so first by critically examining the main areas for debate; secondly by offering a survey of women’s work in different parts of Europe; and finally through two detailed case studies (of Norway and south-west England). The case studies not only highlight women’s contribution to agricultural work in detail but also suggest a range of research approaches to uncovering women’s work. We find that women’s work in agriculture was often substantial and was varied and adaptable. For instance, in coastal Norway and some mountainous regions women did the majority of agricultural work because men were absent working elsewhere; in eastern Europe women’s labour was as important as men’s; in south-west England women contributed about a third of labour required in agriculture; while in some economies, such as central Spain in the eighteenth-century, women were largely absent from agricultural work because they could earn more from rural textile production.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Chapter 7 describes the generative, or bottom-up, forces that were part of urban life. These are organized in terms of households, crafts and occupations, neighborhoods, and quality of life.

This chapter uses the familial epitaphs of Roman Hieradoumia to reconstruct typical household forms in the region. The methodological problems of inferring family structure from patterns of funerary commemoration are discussed in detail. Typical ages of men and women at first marriage can – with caution – be extrapolated from changes in commemorative practices over the human life cycle; the relative prevalence of close-kin marriage is difficult to judge. Quantitative analysis of patterns of commemorative groups (presence or absence of pre-marital kin; prominence of the father’s brother among commemorators of unmarried persons) very strongly indicates that patrilocal residence after marriage was standard in Roman Hieradoumia. As a result, the typical household forms in the region seem to have been ‘patriarchal’ family households (several married sons co-residing with their father) and frérèche households (several married brothers residing together), a pattern which may also be reflected in the region’s typical inheritance practices.

Throughout Hieradoumia, we find many hundreds of instances of people commemorating and being commemorated by their foster-children (threptoi), foster-parents (threpsantes), and foster-siblings (syntrophoi). The ‘rearing’ of non-natal children was so ubiquitous in Roman Hieradoumia that fosterage appears to have been a standard familial strategy for circulating children temporarily or permanently between households, rather than necessarily a response to orphanhood or extreme familial dysfunction. Foster-children could be of either higher or lower social status than their foster-parents; in a few cases, there is reason to think that children were reared by close relatives (particularly the natal parents’ siblings). It is argued that one of the social functions of fosterage was to cement ties or alliances between family groups; the word synteknos may be a technical term for the relationship between natal parent and foster-parent. Sentimental relations between foster-kin were often very close, and we often find foster-kin assimilated to natal kin.

This chapter focuses on the interactions that took place in the homes of the leading families of the late Republic, with particular emphasis on those that continued, albeit in changed form, at the imperial court. In exploring this theme, priority is given to written and archaeological evidence from the late Republic and early Augustan era, rather than later evidence, which may be suspected of anachronism. Topics covered include the personnel of the aristocratic household, the social rituals that took place there, the role of the household as a node of patronage, and the development of Republican houses as physical spaces. The chapter also argues that the rise of the great dynasts of the late Republic provoked anxieties similar to those that existed in the court culture of the Principate regarding the asymmetrical relationship between emperor and courtiers, and the outsized power of particular freedmen.

Households were dynamic economic units organized for their collective well-being. The nature of this dynamic organization is discussed and illustrated using information on household diversification in 16th-century Central Mexico and the role of Indian households in trans-Asian textile exchange. Finally, the house model of society is discussed as a template for organizing formal institutions in early complex societies.

Chapter 9 depicts pastoral livelihood strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. The altered savannah landscape with its far flung network of boreholes and its peculiar vegetation structure (mopane bush and annual species dominating over perennial species) is used by an enormous regional herd. Also the human population increases due to better health provisions and settlement patterns changed. Degradation of rangelands and attempts of herders to access new pastures, a demise of communal control over grazing lands, and subsequent attempts to recapture the commons are hallmarks of this period.

Chapter 7 explores what happened after the marriage was agreed. It looks first at the planning of the wedding festivities: the buying of a dress and the preparation of the wedding meal. The second section of the chapter, explores relationships between husbands and wives and the different ways in which patriarchy was expressed. To what extent did husbands exercise their authority under the laws of church and state to control their wife’s behaviour?What evidence is there that husbands were aware of their status as heads of household and anxious to enforce it? It is impossible to generalise about the implications for marital relations of large numbers of children but large, crowded households are, nonetheless, a constant throughout the period covered by the volume.There can be no generalising either about intimate relationships between married couples.Emotions shaped such relationships as clearly as economics and status did.Emotions might be expressed in words, in letters, but within an intimate life they find expression also in gesture, touch, in looks and in the more practical realms of support and care to be found in intimate relationship.

This chapter examines the social fabric of Jeddah by focusing on the urban social institutions that provided the basis of interaction and integration. These are considered by starting at the level of family and household. Quarter and professional associations and their venues, notably coffeeshops, are another important field of urban interaction. They also included regular religious ceremonies and the gatherings of Sufi orders. In the early twentieth century, cultural associations evolved. In this context, the educational and journalistic fields are examined. Finally, sports, particularly football, became an important integrating factor. The chapter thus engages the inclusive, as well as exclusive, aspects of the multicultural urban society of Jeddah.