Rural law courts are sometimes believed to have contributed to juridical fragmentation, which led to coordination failures and, hence, to high transaction costs. We present a case study of the village law court of Mijnsheerenland, and pay particular attention to the question of whether non-residents expected villagers to have a ‘home court’ advantage. Our analysis of default risk premiums demanded by participants in various exchanges does not indicate this was the case. We argue that this was caused by one of the peculiarities of the juridical system of Holland, which was fragmented but nevertheless uniform because of the dominance of public courts under central control of the ruler.

Reasons are given for doubting the currently fashionable thesis that economic growth and industrialisation in the case of England derived from establishing secure property rights after 1688. Customary and public rights remained at risk. Ancient arrangements often persisted far into Victorian times. Detailed evidence is presented of survivals and of illiquid features in the land market. Evidence is also given of endemic disputes over enclosure and tithes. Unlike some European countries, England failed to establish a land registry. Limited transactions probably reflected unwillingness to risk litigation. That unsatisfactory property rights did not, however, stifle growth is tribute to the underlying power of the market.

This study utilises several sources of male occupational data to track the decline of the Norwich worsted industry, c. 1700–1820. The data show that the industry began to fall away during the second half of the eighteenth century, if not sooner, and earlier than has been previously realised. The transfer of the industry to the north of England began before the introduction of steam-powered spinning or weaving. Market competition, notably from Lancashire printed fustians and cottons, and the loss of export trade through war, were the likely causal factors.

This article charts the vicissitudes of an economic experiment that aimed to eradicate distress in early-nineteenth-century Ireland. The London Committee for Irish Relief was formed in 1822 and was the first large-scale, charitable response in Britain to famine conditions in Ireland. The Committee believed that poverty was the cause rather than the effect of ‘the Irish problem’ and tried to initiate change by providing the poor with financial resources. Despite some initial successes, allegations over misappropriation of funds created a climate of distrust about the Committee's policies. These allegations mounted over the decade, and when Ireland once again faced extreme distress, in 1831, they caused a rift in London's charitable circles, producing two organizations: the Irish Distress Committee, which argued that poverty was the causal factor, and the Western Committee for Irish Relief, which identified Catholicism as the source of Ireland's problems. This division reflected a more general loss of confidence in plans to solve Ireland's endemic poverty through the promotion of economic activity. These events coincided with hardening attitudes towards Catholics and the poor throughout the British Isles and played an important role in the development of policies on Irish relief in the nineteenth century.

This article presents two models of Polish peasant budgets. The first is a theoretical budget of a medieval peasant family and the second is a similar model for the early modern period, confirming some of the characteristic features of the transitional period in the Polish economy in this period. Variables taken into account in the construction of the budgets include the average size of a peasant farm, its productivity, the distribution of crops, family size, rents and taxes paid to the state, Church and feudal lords. The two factors that appear to have had the greatest impact on peasant budgets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the decrease in farm size and the sharp rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century. As a result, although comparison of the two models indicates a decrease in the level of commercialization of the average Polish peasant farm, the financial resources of Polish peasants actually grew.

This article deals with the changing patterns of transmission of land and houses in pre-industrial rural Bohemia. By linking different sources, such as land registers, census-like lists and a family reconstitution, this study focuses on both the demographic and the economic factors that influenced peasant transmission strategies as well as on the consequences of changing transmission patterns for access to land-ownership in the local society. The results of this study show that patterns of land transmission changed profoundly after about 1720. Between 1651 and 1720 many houses with or without land were sold to non-kin as well as to kin although in both cases a customary and not a market price was paid. Imperfect market mechanisms are also indicated by the frequency of exchanges of houses between families. After around 1720 transmissions of property from father to son progressively became the dominant pattern. The chances of women (both widows and daughters and their husbands) to become property-holders diminished and it became extremely difficult for persons not born into house-owning families to acquire any houses or land.

The large-scale abandonment of infants in the European past has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Its staggering dimensions in many countries of Europe, as recently as the nineteenth century, have prompted some uncomfortable rethinking about family life and parent–child (and especially mother–child) relations in the past. Studies of abandonment have contributed to our understanding not only of gender ideology and gender relations, but also of the roles played by state and Church in regulating sexuality and family life.

Yet research on abandoned children to date has had a limited focus. The great bulk of the literature looks at the process of abandonment itself, the terrifyingly high mortality of the foundlings in infancy, and the process by which foundling homes placed their wards in rural foster homes. Perhaps because of the notoriously high mortality of the abandoned babies – though also no doubt due to the greater difficulty of generating suitable data from the archives – little attention has been paid to those foundlings who survived childhood. Typical is the admission found in the major study of foundling homes in Portugal: ‘The fate of the few foundlings who reached adulthood is unknown.’

Yet through the nineteenth century – which provides our focus here – large numbers of foundlings did reach adulthood, and a variety of public authorities were very much concerned about just what kinds of adults they became. Even in determining the placement of infants with wetnurses, foundling home authorities considered the long-term implications for their future as adults. The widespread aversion to placing abandoned infants with wetnurses in the cities was linked to both a belief that the city was corrupt and was likely to produce less wholesome adults than a rural upbringing and to a concern that concentrating a large number of propertyless, family-less foundlings in the city might well create an adult population that would pose a threat to public order.

‘Vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have recently become hot topics in historiography. The main focus is on systemic vulnerability: the reasons why certain societies were better able to overcome crisis. In this article I want to address another type of vulnerability – inspired by the insights of Wisner and Blaikie: social vulnerability, and the differentiated impact of crisis on different social groups. Based on a unique corpus of sources – the grain censuses drafted during the grain crisis of 1556/57 – and a reconstruction of household budgets, I will reconstruct vulnerable groups, the root causes behind their vulnerability, and their coping mechanisms. By doing this I will show how systemic resilience could go hand-in-hand with vulnerable people, thus adding more depth to a growing research strand.

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.

This paper aims to show the relevance that institutions governing common-pool resources (CPRs) play in peasant resilience. It outlines nine variables for resilience taken from socio-economic and ecological anthropological theories focusing on subsistence and minimax strategies and used for the comparative historical analysis of African case studies. These include drylands (Morocco, Ghana), semi-arid areas (Sierra Leone, Malawi, Tanzania) and wetlands (Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia). The variables could be found under pre-colonial common property but were no longer operating during colonial and postcolonial institutional change from common to state property and privatisation via land grabbing, leading to commons and resilience grabbing.

This article examines the history of immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The newly available electronic version of the Census (I-CeM) allows all business proprietors in each Census year to be identified, and provides birthplace information that allows entrepreneurs from different countries to be compared to each other and to business proprietors born in the United Kingdom. Immigrant populations had higher rates of business proprietorship than the English and Welsh-born population. This article argues that this was caused by labour market structure and demography rather than cultural differences between English- and foreign-born business proprietors.

In a quest to establish the principles behind various migration currents, a great body of research has shown that there is keen interest in the differentials in socio-economic conditions between the places of origin of migrants and their destinations, with special focus laid on wage rates, employment opportunities and availability of information. Although useful in explaining some of the elements involved in the migration process, this conventional approach based on the functional analysis of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors often fails to give adequate attention to the peculiar historical contexts in which individual migration events have occurred. Recent advances in research into the inter-parochial migration of the labouring poor in rural England under the laws of settlement have clearly illustrated how inappropriate the conventional approach can be. From surviving settlement material such as examinations, certificates and removal orders, historians have successfully identified distinctive features of pauper migration and of the settlement material from the migration has been traced. (For those unfamiliar with the laws of settlement, some basic terms are explained in the Appendix.)

First of all, the settlement material is not, strictly speaking, direct evidence of actual migration. Examinations may have been used just for information-gathering purposes, and removal orders could be issued to cajole the immigrants' parish of settlement into producing certificates or agreeing to non-resident relief. What the settlement documents show is, therefore, not so much actual mobility as inter-parochial tensions over the cost of employment and poor relief. Secondly, those who moved to other parishes under the laws of settlement hardly achieved equality with the native parishioners. Many parishes had strict village regulations giving priority to the parishioners in the allocation of work in the harvest fields, in the chances of partaking in gleaning, in access to local charity and in the exercise of various common rights. Thirdly, these migrants were particularly vulnerable to changes in the social and economic conditions of the parishes in which they resided. The parishes of residence were inclined to force non-parishioners to return to their parishes of settlement when there was no further need of their labour or when they became less useful due to decrepitude, injury or other circumstances. Migration through the process of the laws of settlement was not permanent in many cases, and return migration was usually forced rather than voluntary. Finally, it was not uncommon for a conflict of interests to develop between pauper migrants, parish officers and magistrates. Over such issues as employment, poor-relief expenditure and the social cohesiveness of local communities, they often had different interests as waged labourers and peasant workers, as tenant farmers and other ratepayers and as landowners, respectively.

These features highlight the point that the functional explanation, which rests on the notion of the autonomy of the parishes of origin and destination as decision-making units, can be seriously misleading. A more important issue is whether the framework of pauper settlement hindered ‘free’ labour circulation and, if so, to what extent, in what way and in whose interest it did so. These are crucial questions for understanding not only the structure of the English labour market but also the political contours of rural society between different classes, and for further evaluating the overall role of the laws of settlement for the industrial and urban growth of the time. Focusing on the critical period 1751–1834, this article seeks to answer the questions through a careful reconsideration of the Oxfordshire settlement material.

This paper analyses the consequences of urban environmental degradation on the well-being of Spanish miners. It is based on analyses of differences in mortality and height. The first part of the paper examines new hypotheses regarding the urban penalty. We take into consideration existing works in economic theory that address market failures when analysing the higher urban death rate. We explain the reduction in height using the model recently created by Floud, Fogel, Harris and Hong for British cities. The second part of the paper presents information demonstrating that the urban areas in the two largest mining areas in Spain (Bilbao and the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range) experienced a higher death rate relative to rural areas as a consequence of market failures derived from what we term an ‘anarchic urbanisation’.

The conflict between work and taking care of infants can be solved in many ways. Less than 100 years ago, one of the solutions was the wet-nursing system. This system came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century. Previous research has connected the cessation to decreasing demand. Here it is argued that to understand the wet-nursing system and to explain its coming to an end, the labour market for women has to be considered. It is necessary to study the supply side of the system: to discover why women became wet-nurses.

This study examines the role of women in headship and succession in early modern Kyoto using the population registers of two Kyoto neighbourhoods of differing economic status and the private documents of a family business. The private documents allow an examination of the processes and reasons behind inheritance decisions. I find that women could inherit when sons were absent, incapable or unwilling, and heiresses were used to recruit capable outsiders into the bloodline. More than these roles, women played an active part in making and carrying out inheritance decisions even when the heir was male, as well as providing alternatives to the usual succession rules.

The replacement of rents in kind by payments in money is considered by many historians as a marker of the commercialization of the economy and thus of its modernization. The case of medieval Normandy does not confirm this development, however: the sources testify to a common use of money since the end of the eleventh century, but also to the persistence until the fifteenth century of payment in kind, including in the field of credit. The article examines the case of the Caen region, for which there is abundant evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of annuities purchased with money from peasants in exchange for annual repayments in grain. This system allowed a significant transfer of monetary value to the countryside, while guaranteeing the supply of urban markets and welfare institutions. Although these contracts were usually secured by pledges on plots of land, they did not lead to the expropriation of peasants, but rather promoted the growth of credit markets in the countryside.