If the household head had important functions in his household and in the community, his disappearance could have major consequences for his family and members of the community. In agricultural communities in early modern Japan, where the village was organized and run by the heads of the households, and where small-scale family/household farming required the integration of family members under the leadership of the household heads, the death of the household head was a major concern for both family members and the community at large. In two Northeastern villages in Japan, for example, it has been shown that the death of the household head actually increased the probability that female members of the household would also die, even after controlling for other household and individual factors. This increased mortality was occasioned by economic stress resulting from the loss of a core labour component of the household, from psychological stress occasioned by the loss of a family member, and finally from the loss of power by the household which operated within the stem family system.

Our focus in this article is on the age at achieving the headship of a household, and to whom the headship of the household might be transferred. Japanese families in pre-industrial times are said to have followed the stem family rule, which was characterized by non-partible inheritance and succession by just one child. In this system, one child continued to live with the parents while his or her siblings all left home at some point. The eldest son was the preferred successor but some regions selected the eldest child, even if that child was a daughter, or the youngest child. Headship in this family system involved a number of specific responsibilities: to represent the family in the village organization, to sign contracts and negotiate agreements, to manage the family's labour force and finances, and to practise the religious rites of the family. The survival of the family line indicated by the continuation of household names and properties (and businesses) depended, therefore, upon obtaining and training capable heirs. Thus focusing on the transfer of headship provides a clue to the kind of strategies which were followed by peasants.

What explains the gender division of labour in preindustrial economies? Although men and women frequently do different types of labour in any given society, men's and women's tasks vary considerably across different societies. In some societies, women engaged in trade and agriculture (in parts of Africa, for example); though these were men's duties in others (in parts of Europe, for example). At the same time, European historians discovered that women often engaged in tasks, such as agricultural labour and commerce, that were often assumed to be the domain of men, again suggesting a wide variation in the gender division of labour. Understanding the division of labour in preindustrial economies is important, because these historical cases often serve as implicit or explicit referents for understanding how much – or how little – has changed in contemporary societies.

A number of excellent works, such as those by Barbara Hanawalt and Martha Howell, have explored women's roles in the economy. However, often missing from treatments that focus on women's history is an analysis of the gender division of labour, that is, an explicit comparison of men's and women's activities. Undoubtedly, such a comparison is hampered by the difficulties of finding documentary sources that provide the appropriate type of evidence.

This article takes up this task in a particular way, by examining single-person households, composed of either males or females in fifteenth-century rural Tuscany. This empirical evidence is useful for several reasons. First, from an analytical perspective, it makes it possible to compare explicitly the activities of men and women who are in an identical position, that is, living alone. Second, as I discuss below, the documentary record from this period makes it possible to provide the evidence for this comparison. Third, this evidence provides historical information on a relatively under-researched group, rural widows and widowers. For example, there is generally more information available for Florentine women than for female rural inhabitants. Furthermore, little research explicitly compares men's and women's tasks to examine the gender division of labour. Although Piccinni and Mazzi and Raveggi provide much information about women's duties and activities in rural Tuscany, their work does not directly address the gender division of labour. While the archival evidence presented below cannot explain the division of labour at all points in individuals' life courses, it does provide explicitly comparative information about men and women.

The article explores the roles of household compositional factors and socio-economic status on widowhood and remarriage. By using micro-level data from a nineteenth-century Italian community for the period 1819–1859, we found evidence of the very predominant role of household structure in the decision to remarry for both widows and widowers. In particular, the interplay between the presence of a supportive family network and the presence of coresiding children from previous marriages stood out as the key factors. The presence of children aged 12 and under promoted the search for a new bride for widowers, whilst the presence of children of any age, especially young ones, decreased the chances of remarriage for widows.

On 8 Brumaire, year II (29 October 1793), the Convention decreed that freedom of dress was a basic human right: ‘Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories of his sex that he finds pleasing.’ This was an odd decree in many ways. It decreed as a right something we take for granted, the freedom to wear what we choose, and it was passed during the Terror, when individual rights were routinely curtailed. It also contradicted itself, for if its first article guaranteed freedom of dress, its second stated that all previous laws on dress remained in force, and these included one which impinged on individual freedom: the requirement that all French citizens wear a red, white and blue cockade in public.

In many localities in the Dutch Republic, charitable collections were the single largest source of income for relief institutions for the outdoor poor. This article takes into account both the role of the authorities organising collections and the role of the city-dwellers making charitable donations. It is demonstrated that people from almost all layers of urban society contributed to the collections. By means of thorough planning and exerting social pressure, religious and secular administrators of poor relief tried to maximise Dutch generosity. They presented making charitable donations as a duty of the rich as well as of the less well-off. In the Dutch Republic, not only the elites, but also the middling groups of society, who approximately constituted almost half of the urban population, were of vital importance in financing poor relief.

Historians of sharecropping in France have usually emphasized its negative effects on growth and on the workers' welfare. However, from about 1840 the regions of central and western France, regions where sharecroppers were especially numerous, were also areas that saw great improvements and the specialization in commercial livestock. As the author shows, landowners from these areas used sharecropping contracts in order both to seize the opportunities given by the potential scale economies in livestock rearing and to take advantage of family labour at a time of increasing wages. After presenting some basic data regarding sharecropping contracts, the second section is intended to describe the improvements in livestock farming in the area under sharecropping after 1840 and the contribution of landowners. Section III offers an explanation of why landowners preferred sharecropping to fixed-rent contracts. Three causes in particular are identified: (i) a lack of physical and human capital sufficient to allow potential farmers to engage in large scale farming; (ii) the contribution of landlord managerial expertise; and (iii) the fact that the complexity of mixed farming required a quality of work that would have been too expensive with wage labour. In a final section the ways in which the success of sharecropping minimized transaction costs are discussed.

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and some effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a tentative comparison with the functioning of markets in Flanders and eastern England.

This article discusses family patterns in the vast territories of historical Poland and Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on pre-industrial rural settings, and applies a variety of methodologies to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Three regional family patterns have been distinguished in the historical Polish territories, differing both in terms of household structure and household formation rules and in terms of their marriage patterns. Analysis of the dataset on these spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated the preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the data presented here suggest that the impact of second serfdom on family structure was by no means uniform, and that factors other than purely economic ones may actually have accounted for the diversity of family systems prevailing in historical Poland and Lithuania.

Marriage ceremonies in London were easily available at a wide range of locations before Hardwicke's Marriage Act put a stop to clandestine marriages in 1754. Not constrained to their own parish church, many wed at centres of clandestine marriage such as the Fleet, or in other churches by licence. For particular parish populations, focusing mainly on the suburban majority but with comparisons with the mercantile city centre, this paper considers the relationship between demographic, geographic and social factors (age, residential location, and propensity to engage in premarital sex) and choice of marriage location between 1610 and 1753.

This article analyses the mechanisms of conflict resolution in apprenticeship contracts using a large database of disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that the guild court under investigation (the Padua Woollen Guild court) did not enforce training contracts, but rather sought to improve on incomplete contracts by adding clauses, thereby helping individuals renegotiate and redefine the contractual arrangements into which they had decided to enter. However, power relations within the court operated largely in favour of employers, both merchants and master craftsmen. The article concludes that alternative contract enforcement systems, such as municipal or state courts, were probably better suited than corporative systems for resolving disputes surrounding apprenticeship.

A survey of working-class women's activity as savers offers a new insight into their economic activity, opening questions about the sources inside and outside the family of the money saved by single and married women. It is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family. A study of investment patterns within two savings banks, one in Huddersfield and one in Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that working-class women may have been more active as savers than has been reported by earlier studies.

Although women accused of murdering their newborn infants were tried under the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children throughout the eighteenth century, their treatment changed significantly, at least in London, between the last quarter of the seventeenth century and 1803. This article charts these changes through an analysis of the accounts of trials held at the Old Bailey. These reflect three interwoven and interdependent strands of change: the development of a range of successful defence strategies, changes in courtroom procedures and the increased participation of lawyers, and a greater use of and reliance on medical witnesses and their evidence.

The SOCSIM micro-simulation model is used to investigate how kinship and family patterns in Britain changed as people passed through the ‘First Demographic Transition’, starting in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Second Demographic Transition’, from the 1960s. Certain types of kin, such as former partners, became more common, and others, such as ever-born siblings, less so. An ageing of generational relationships is observed: events that formerly occurred early in life, such as the experience of one's parents' deaths, are being postponed. Patterns of re-partnering are leading to more partial relationships involving step- and supplanted parents, half-siblings, former partners and stepchildren.