In pre-industrial Sweden (and other parts of northwestern Europe) retirement arrangements were used by peasants to keep their property intact and to transfer it to one of the children while the other children were compensated with, for example, movable property or plots of land. In this article we study the frequency and form of this strategy in pre-industrial rural Sweden. While the literature on retirement arrangements mainly concentrates on the functionality of this system, the focus of this study is on what happened to the institution of peasant retirement in the nineteenth century when an active land market developed and the relative price of land rose. In this study, we use two different sources of land transmission: poll-tax registers, indicating the management of farms, and records of land certificates, showing changes in ownership. The results clearly show that peasant retirement remained an important strategy of intergenerational land transmission at least until the mid-nineteenth century, but the way it was carried out changed profoundly from being mainly an intra-family affair to being channelled through the market.

In this article the ages at marriage and remarriage of Tansoˇng men and women are examined through an analysis of census registers (hojoˇk) from between 1678 and 1789. It was discovered that the average age of Tansoˇng women at first marriage was 17.5, and that most women married between the ages of 15 and 20, much earlier than women in Europe in this period and slightly earlier than those in Japan, but at similar ages to Chinese women. Husbands were on average around 18 when they married. Roughly half of widowers remarried, with remarriage more likely for those of lower and middle status than for upper-status widowers. Many middle- and low-status widowers had probably also married widows despite the fact that there was a legal prohibition on the remarriage of widows.

It has been claimed that in the late eighteenth century sixty per cent of couples in the Welsh village of Llansantffraid Glyn Ceiriog married by jumping over a broomstick, and a number of commentators have inferred that informal marriage was widespread in this period. Yet an examination of the primary and secondary sources shows that both the initial claim and subsequent speculations are based on ‘Chinese whispers’ rather than evidence. This casts a new light on the way in which people reacted to the 1753 Marriage Act, and illustrates how myths may be created through uncritical reliance on secondary sources.

The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

This contribution investigates how religion retarded the Dutch fertility transition by looking at how denominations were associated with the timing of first births (starting), the length of birth intervals (spacing), and the timing of last births (stopping). First, we apply a simple descriptive model of starting, spacing, and stopping to life-course data from the province of Utrecht. Then, we apply multivariate regression to assess the independent effects of religious denominations, net of socio-economic status, on stopping behaviour. The results indicate that liberal Protestants were more prone to adopt stopping behaviour than orthodox Protestants and Catholics.

In this article I discuss the dilemma between coercion and respect for civil liberties that characterized policies for the prevention of venereal diseases during the nineteenth century. Placing Danish legislation in an international perspective, the gradual change from control of prostitution to the so-called Scandinavian Sonderweg is analysed. Special emphasis is given to parliamentary discussions on the law of 1906, with a view to disentangling the survival of traditional attitudes to sexual morality from burgeoning conceptions of universal welfare policies.

This article offers an approach through administrative and cultural history to the problems associated with gathering and processing data for the Spanish national census of 1920, and by implication for earlier Spanish censuses. It focuses on the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, making use of correspondence between the central statistical office in Madrid, the provincial jefe de estadística and the localities, and of reports on three problematic towns within the province. The issues that emerge regarding ‘undercounting’, the definition of administrative boundaries and the classification of demographic characteristics are set in the wider context of census-taking practices and problems elsewhere in Spain and in other cultures.