Grâce aux progrès des études de démographie historique, il a été peu à peu reconnu que le taux de fécondité des familles de la Chine historique est resté fort modéré par rapport aux taux élevés connus en d'autres lieux. Mais ce qui est encore objet de débat, c'est de savoir si les Chinois avaient ou non pratiqué intentionnellement un contrôle de la taille de leurs familles. Dans cet article, l'auteur évoque d'abord, succinctement, l’état actuel de la recherche concernant les modèles de fécondité dans la Chine historique. Puis il donne d'autres éléments de preuve montrant des gens du passé limitant la taille de leur famille avant d'examiner l'impact qu'ont pu avoir les croyances traditionnelles sur le comportement en matière de fécondité familiale. Enfin il fait le point des théories et suggestions antinatalistes soutenues par les responsables officiels et les intellectuels chinois tout au long de l'histoire du pays. Ces éléments nous permettront d'apprécier nombre de suggestions qui ont pu être faites concernant la culture et le comportement traditionnels chinois en matière de reproduction. D'une manière générale, l'auteur conteste l'idée selon laquelle les stratégies de reproduction humaine se proposeraient d'augmenter au maximum le nombre des descendants survivants, ainsi que le postulat selon lequel la demande d'enfants (ou fils) aurait toujours été élevé dans la Chine historique.

Thanks to the progress that has been made in the study of population history, it has been gradually accepted that fertility in historical China was only moderate in comparison with the recorded high fertility. However, scholars still disagree on whether the Chinese could have intentionally controlled their family size. This article first summarizes recent findings about fertility patterns in historical China. Then the author provides further evidence of people limiting their family size in the past, before discussing the impact of traditional beliefs on people's fertility behaviour and summarizing the antinatalist ideas and suggestions put forwarded by Chinese officials and intellectuals over China's long history. This evidence is then used to comment on a number of suggestions that have been made about China's traditional reproductive behaviour and culture. The article challenges the views that people's reproductive strategies aimed in the past to maximize the number of surviving offspring and that the demand for children (or sons) was always high in historical China.

The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour input, but also strong regional differences. These differences appear not to be connected to urbanization or to the rise of one or another sector in the rural economy, but to the regional social and institutional framework in which the economy developed.

This article looks at marriage in Catalonia during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period of rapid economic and social change, using a case study of a proto-industrial community. Differences in age at marriage are related to data on occupations, wealth and age rank in order to consider as many of the factors influencing marriage decisions as possible. Economic factors were one obvious constraint upon marriage, but another was the particular system of impartible inheritance practised in Catalonia. This article shows that, while inheritance continued to affect marriage choices to a considerable extent, the rapid transformation of the economy was breaking down the traditional constraints upon marriage.

In this article implications of season of birth for child health in Spain during the demographic transition are explored. Making use of the Aranjuez data base, the authors look at the seasonality of births and its heterogeneities, finding a nearly universal prevalence of late spring and early summer conceptions that is most evident with last-born children. Levels and causes of childhood mortality are strongly related to the season of birth, with those born between April and October showing lower likelihood of survival. These findings can be explained by the way infant feeding, age and season intersect. These results have implications for the relative efficiency of different demographic regimes.

This article analyses the structure of and changes to the income-earning activities of Russian urban households from 1985 to 2000. An intensive diversification of income sources is observed, which indicates an engagement with every available (and individually acceptable) opportunity for paid employment, and also an intensive engagement in different types of household work. However, the growth in real income since 1999 has induced households to abandon specific types of income-earning activities, the first casualty being subsidiary agriculture, and the second labour-intensive, time-consuming types of household work. Another important change took place in gender specialization in domestic labour: though women still worked substantially more in the household than men, at the end of the period under consideration, there are signs that this gender gap has been partially bridged.

This article analyses the labour activities of urban households in Russia during the period from 1965 to 1986. Labour strategies were oriented towards domestic labour and participation in subsidiary agriculture in order to compensate for the persistent shortage of food, consumer goods and services. In spite of the highest women's employment in world history, such a situation helped to preserve the traditional pattern of labour-sharing at home between family members and led to significant gender differences in the time spent on domestic labour. Towards the end of the period, the time spent by women on domestic work was shortened by the advent of home appliances, rather than by any redistribution of tasks between genders.