The Horta of Valencia is a large irrigated area managed by eight communities of landowners. Traditionally, it was considered that these communities were composed of peasants, that they were self-managed and self-governed, and that they had remained immutable over time. However, the historical evidence shows that this is not true for pre-modern times. This article examines a possible Islamic origin of these institutions, the rupture caused by the Christian conquest of Valencia in the thirteenth century, the structure of the communities, and the social diversity of their members within the framework of feudalism. We conclude that irrigation communities cannot be used as examples of institutional continuity or of self-regulated and autonomous social organisations.

The port of Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England was transformed in the seventeenth century by the rapid expansion of its coal trade, which demanded an influx of industrial transport workers known as ‘keelmen’. This article assesses wages, perks and the seasonal distribution of income for this growing group of workers, estimating that their real income rose until about 1680, before tailing off again. They were comparatively well paid, but their work was inconsistent and seasonal. The number of days' work available was crucial to welfare in Newcastle, as were a series of formal and informal measures intended to relieve winter poverty and maintain a year-round workforce. Combining quantitative and qualitative evidence, this article offers a north-eastern industrial perspective on English living standards debates that still tend to be dominated by south-eastern building and agricultural labourers.

This article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by Dr John Haygarth, it is possible to produce age-specific estimates of the extent to which adults of each sex had been treated for the pox by age 35. These estimates can be produced both for the resident population of Chester city and comparatively for the rural region immediately surrounding Chester. These are the first estimates of the prevalence of this important disease produced for the eighteenth century and they can be compared with similar figures for England and Wales c. 1911–1912.

Based on the verb-oriented method and a unique collection of observations from court records, this article shows that both men and women did almost all categories of work in early modern Sweden. On the level of concrete tasks, however, there was both difference and similarity between the genders. Marital status exerted a strong influence on women's sustenance activities, creating a clear distinction between unmarried and ever-married women. These patterns were probably the effect of a labour legislation that forced young people without independent means to offer their bodies and time to masters and mistresses.

In 1974, Portugal's Carnation Revolution, initiated by the military, received huge popular support. Army officers, mostly of the rank of captain, started the Revolution, but then the politicians took over. While it was largely a ‘top down’ revolution, at the local government level ordinary people assumed control. In this article we consider those who made up the local elites before the Revolution, during the transition period that followed, and thereafter. We compare the local elites in Portugal during Salazar's dictatorship with those under the Democratic regime, using a database of 6,000 entries containing details of 3,102 mayors and deputy mayors and 402 civil governors who held office between 1936 and 2013. Our main conclusions are that during the transition period the elite who had ruled under Salazar were almost completely replaced. A new group, from different professions and social backgrounds, took up the reins of local government. The Revolution produced a population willing to participate in the new order and take on roles within local government, but they did not always retain their seats after the first democratic elections.