European accounts of the Hindu practice of sati, or widowburning, in India appear at least as early as Diodorus in 317 BC, and become, after the Portuguese landfall in India at the end of the fifteenth century, customary in European travelogues. My article centres on the ‘mimetic circulation’ of an infamous anecdote in several early modern European narratives of sati. This story defines widowburning as a social response to the ‘custom’ of Indian women poisoning their husbands. The travellers' persistent reliance on the poison tale mediates in the contact between Europeans and Indians, for the story functions as a powerful rhetorical device in European accounts of India. The question then becomes ‘What are the cultural ramifications of the insistent recurrence of the poison legend in the context of Indian widowburning in so many diverse European travelogues?’ And, if European representational practices are always self-reflexive and ‘can never be detached from European projection’, what does the use of this anecdote tell us about the early modern Europeans themselves? Finally, in the context of the travellers' origins, what role does the nexus between women and poisoning uncovered both in the legend and in early modern Europe play in the larger discursive apparatuses of future colonial enterprise?

Historians constantly seek new windows into the past, and one which has proved particularly fruitful of late is litigation for verbal injury. For early modern North America Peter N. Moogk thinks that court hearings for defamation are ‘likely to disclose the mental climate of a society’, while Mary Beth Norton thinks that from such suits ‘we can identify the types of behaviour a society most abhors’. The gendered nature of insults has been a core theme of Laura Gowing's work, and must form a component of any consideration of the subject. This article looks at defamation cases in two commissary courts – in Edinburgh and Argyll – between 1750 and 1800 in order to see what they reveal about Scottish society at that time.

The struggle against death is one of the main themes in human history. Mortality as it declined in recent times, became a central factor behind population growth. In this context, childhood mortality was the key, not only because deaths at these young ages often constituted more than half of all deaths, but also because any decrease in it brought about fundamental changes in the age structure and the size of the population and in fertility.

This article deals with an important aspect of public health policy in the two leading industrializing countries of Europe. Both had a substantial number of large towns in this period, despite the fact that German industrialization had only just begun in 1859. It is a companion piece to a comparative study of vaccination policy published in 1998, and is intended to be complemented by a study of the impact of bacteriology on public health. It is for that reason that little attention is paid to bacteriology here. The first study dealt with the concept of medical police; it was about modes of compulsion. This one is about the provision of a sanitary infrastructure of central water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment. It deals not so much with the ordering of people as with the making of things.

It is the aim of this article to examine the economy and demography of an industrial coal-mining community during the second third of the nineteenth century. There is already a considerable body of work by historical demographers, from E. A. Wrigley to M. Haines, who have studied industrial districts, particularly from an aggregated perspective. Their work has been mostly concerned with stressing the peculiarities of specific populations in comparison with those of other districts. Fewer attempts have, however, been made to assess the degree of variance within industrial populations. Tilleur, a small town in east Belgium on the left bank of the Meuse, offers an opportunity to make such an assessment for the years between 1846 and 1880.

A decade ago, in a review of the field Roger Schofield and David Reher observed that ‘the basic demographic parameters of mortality decline are still far from clear’. And in spite of admirable analyses of mortality by authors ranging from Eilert Sundt in 1855 to Julie A. Backer and Michael Drake in the 1960s and Sølvi Sogner and Ståle Dyrvik in the 1970s, this observation also generally applies to Norway. Some of the lack of clarity is due to the limitations of the death data themselves, some to the orientation of researchers. For example, although almost every biography of a Norwegian town has its section on births and deaths, the study of urban mortality as a whole has not attracted much attention, perhaps because the situation seems self-evident. Towns were (and still often are) unhealthier places to live in than the countryside. Referring to the years 1831–1850, Sundt posited the laconic axiom that ‘Dødelighenden i byerne pleier være større end i landdistrikterne.’ From this starting observation, which was of course true at the time, I want to examine urban mortality in Norway in the context of state-wide mortality trends from the mid- nineteenth century to 1920. Ultimately I intend to study mortality on the individual/family level in the western coastal towns of Bergen and Haugesund during this period, using machine-readable nominative sources, censuses, and parish registers. However, to put these intended microhistorical investigations in perspective, I have delved into published statistics on mortality in Norwegian towns in general and in Kristiania (now Oslo) and Bergen in particular. These data are plentiful and readily available but they are not always in a form suitable for systematic analysis over a long term; they must be collated, organized, and to some extent massaged. In the investigative tradition of exploratory data analysis I am looking for patterns in the data and meanings in the patterns. A number of questions guide the description and analysis. How big was the urban–rural differential and how did it change over time? What were its components; or rather, who paid the ‘urban penalty’? The answers show that urban mortality was an important factor in the mortality transition in late-nineteenth-century Norway.