While previous studies showed a drop in residential segregation over time, calculated dissimilarity and isolation indices for 1941 show a halt in the decreasing segregation among Jews in Amsterdam. Furthermore, persons of Jewish origin who had left Judaism appear to have lived mainly in different districts from those who belonged to Jewish congregations, indicating that district of residence can serve as a reflection of the assimilation process. Moreover, analyses of life histories of about 700 Jewish persons show that being born outside the Jewish neighbourhood increased the likelihood that an individual would leave Judaism, while living outside the Jewish neighbourhood during adolescence increased the likelihood of marrying a Gentile; these results refine our understanding of the impact of residential segregation.

This article explores marital fertility on the Aegean island of Paros based on family-reconstitution data from one main town and one village on the island, namely Naoussa and Kostos. By probing the reproductive behaviour of couples who married between 1894 and 1953 it was found that fertility was still ‘natural’ on the island at the beginning of the twentieth century, while a substantial fertility decline made itself visible only in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The way the population switched from natural to controlled fertility is also explored, as well as the contribution of different socio-economic groups to fertility transition. In the end, an effort is made to place the examined population in a wider European and national context.

Theoretical debates about the efficiency of sharecropping discuss risk-sharing in relation to farmers' wealth and credit, as one explanatory factor. This perspective is explored here in the southern Portuguese province of Alentejo, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Three points are made: (1) leasing and sharecropping coexisted on the same land; (2) there was no unequivocal relationship between risk sharing, on the one hand, and the contractual mode of tenancy (fixed-rent or sharecropping), on the other; and (3) relating risk-sharing, defined as a continuous variable, with social differentiation of demand for tenancies provides a rationale for a hypothetical long-term shift in contracts, from medieval sharecropping to fixed-rent tenancies with sharecrop subletting in the nineteenth century.

This article examines encounters of women with the criminal justice system in Wales during the century before the Courts of Great Sessions were abolished in 1830. Drawing on evidence from cases of sexual assault and homicide, it argues that women who killed were rarely convicted or punished harshly. A gendered discretion of sorts also acted against rape victims, as trials never resulted in conviction. Using violence as a lens, the paper reveals a distinctively Welsh approach to criminal justice, and offers quantitative evidence on which further comparative studies of the history of law and crime in England and Wales may be based.

While Norway in the 1930s had relatively liberal policies with regard to access to contraceptives, and an increasing number of legal abortions were carried out, the regime that was installed after occupation in 1940 reined them in, fuelled not only by Nazi ideology but by what new the regime saw as a most threatening population decrease. With reference to population policies in other West-European countries, this article compares Norwegian population policies under occupation with that of the 1930s, discusses if the policy towards all groups were the same, and the extent to which the new policies contributed to increasing birth rates in occupied Norway.

This article analyses the labour activities of urban households in Russia during the period from 1965 to 1986. Labour strategies were oriented towards domestic labour and participation in subsidiary agriculture in order to compensate for the persistent shortage of food, consumer goods and services. In spite of the highest women's employment in world history, such a situation helped to preserve the traditional pattern of labour-sharing at home between family members and led to significant gender differences in the time spent on domestic labour. Towards the end of the period, the time spent by women on domestic work was shortened by the advent of home appliances, rather than by any redistribution of tasks between genders.

In this article the author examines a form of agricultural contract known as the colonia contract, which was widespread throughout the island of Madeira from 1750 and which was abolished in 1967. She argues that the publication of the liberal Civil Code of 1867 changed the rules concerning the operation of this contract. The landlord lost control of his economic property rights over the land. The change in the rules governing this type of contract partially explains the reduction in its use but the impact of the change is attributed to inefficiencies that already existed in the contract.

This article studies the commemoration and ceremonial culture surrounding the inauguration of new waterworks in British municipalities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyses how new waterworks could be seen as a symbol of a progressive civic government, and how the commemoration of their opening could be used to enhance a city's image. The article also studies the ways in which ideas concerning the purity of new water supplies were constructed. An examination is made of how ceremonial culture and publications reflected the particular politics of waterworks in individual localities, and how such commemoration could serve as a vehicle for the promotion of civic unity.

Trials held in Anatolia around the mid-nineteenth century suggest that labour migrants became ‘the usual suspects’ in felony cases. Since the 1980s, a significant body of work on migration has emerged. Uncovering the voices of individual migrants has been a major endeavour of these studies. By following a legal case concerning one labour immigrant, and applying the methods of microhistory, this article aims to show how a socio-legal reading of migration is useful in reconstructing the history of immigrants, especially in the nineteenth century, when migration became a legal issue. Second, the article aims to demonstrate the potential of diaspora theory for analysing and explaining the experience of labour immigrants from the Balkans and the Aegean Islands during the nineteenth century, among them the protagonist of this paper.

The present ageing of the population in western countries, and the related problems this development poses for contemporary social policy, provide especially compelling reasons for historians to think about old age in the past. A fundamental question is whether solitariness, or residential isolation, in this phase of the life-cycle is an inherent product of industrialization and urbanization or whether past societies confronted similar problems.

Despite the growth in studies of the history of the family over recent years – studies which have considered family structure, family demography, household strategies, kinship networks, and the like – a great gap in the literature remains regarding the role and status of family members in different phases of the life-cycle in Spain, particularly with respect to age and sex. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an absence of information on old age and our elders' life-styles in the past, or on the extent to which the aged led lives of poverty and marginalization.

This article attempts to tackle some of the issues relating to the elderly in a particular place, Bilbao, and in a historical period, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This article explores aspects of employment on the Durham Priory estates in the years 1494–1519. From a perspective of prices and wages, this period belongs at the tail end of a Golden Age for labour. Employment opportunities for the priory workforce should, therefore, have been relatively plentiful and remuneratively rewarding. However, as an analysis of the priory's accounts reveals, whilst wage rates remained stable, the waged employment offered was irregular and piecemeal for all but a small, predominantly skilled elite, with the majority of the workforce enjoying little in the way of fixed employment patterns or identifiable career structures.

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. The findings include rare evidence about rates of stillbirth and maternal mortality, and suggest some adjustments to the assumptions made for conducting parish reconstitutions.

This study argues that women's ownership of land – an important component of their status – changed little, if at all, after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. Using rentals and obit data from court rolls, a new formula for measuring female inheritance is devised which shows that daughters received even less of their expected due during the plague years. While high death rates might predict that brotherless daughters would be more likely to inherit land, inheritance practices shifted so that women continued to hold much the same total area as before. The article considers several reasons for this continuity, concluding that women found it especially hard to compete in an era of acute labour shortage.

The feudal colonisation of the Island of Majorca, traditionally considered part of the Spanish ‘Reconquista’, must be included in the greater process of European feudal expansion. The island was inhabited by people living in a Muslim society, not a feudal one. The conquest by Catalan lords meant the imposition of a new feudal class structure and a new use of natural resources on the conquered land. We summarise the composition and evolution of the three main components of this top-down imposed feudalism: the Muslim populations conquered and enslaved, the Catalan settlers and the entirely new agricultural landscape they created.