This article examines households containing lodgers in the Carpathian Basin during the eighteenth century, using the status animarum, lists of inhabitants made by the Roman Catholic Church. The author argues that lodgers had special demographic and household characteristics. Evidence is provided to show that the majority of lodger households consisted of both families fragmented by family catastrophe and young couples at the beginning of their life-career. It is further argued that it would be worthwhile to extend the work on lodgers with comparative analyses, particularly because such work would shed light on this stratum of society, which is so often missing from micro-level demographic histories.

In spite of Mexico's numerous efforts at liberal land reform and privatization in the nineteenth century, Totimehuacán (Puebla) maintained significant continuity in land-holding on a family basis. This undermines confidence in the pauperization hypothesis, the view that privatization necessarily dispossessed the indigenous peasantry. Mechanisms of social control and dispute resolution did change, and particular groups such as women and children lost an important defence in property matters. The effect of legislative changes was protracted, however, and mediated by the customary role of patronym groups, an issue which most other studies have ignored. The article concludes that the impact of property reform on women cannot be understood apart from customary, local forms of social organization.

This article approaches the medieval law of theft from a ‘functional’ perspective. It seeks, that is, to consider the rules of law principally in relation to the social circumstances which give rise to them and upon which they, in turn, have an impact. Concentrating primarily upon material from England and Wales, the essay considers general issues of definition, jurisdiction and proof in the law of the middle ages before concentrating specifically upon the rules respecting theft. The ideas of manifest and non-manifest theft are explored in an attempt to discover why the law distinguished between them. Potential difficulties concerning the bringing of theft actions and the defences which might be offered to them are also examined and related to the practical world in which perpetrators and victims of theft found themselves. Finally, the possible tension between the satisfaction of the demands of the individual victim and the wider desire to maintain public order is investigated.

The following articles by myself and by Andrei Markevich are the first in a series of four analysing income-earning strategies of urban households in twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union. The articles deal with a similar set of issues for four subsequent periods. In this issue of Continuity and Change my article covers the early Soviet period from the revolution of 1917 to the start of the Second World War and Andrei Markevich focuses on the war, the post-war Stalin period and the Khruschev years, taking his analysis into the latter half of the 1960s. In the next issue, Victoria Tyazhelnikova will examine the Brezhnev period and Sergei Afontsev the years of reform under Gorbachev and in post-Soviet Russia.

The history of town gas is unique in the development of public services in urban areas. Indeed, gas was the subject of the first network infrastructure set up in cities. In Spain, its history is discontinuous because the networks were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. The purpose of this paper is to retrace the steps of the development of the gas network in a region where the Spanish gas companies took the form of early modern businesses. They contributed significantly to the dynamism of local financial markets, both in terms of enterprise configuration, technology dissemination and innovative management. However, the development of the gas industry remained subject to local conditions of supply and demand, to conflicts with local government and suffered from competition from electricity.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the income and expenditure of a stem family household from Bastelica, Corsica, based on information collected in 1867 and 1887 according to the scheme recommended by Frédéric Le Play. The budget indicates the work undertaken by each member of the family and which economic activities were most valuable to the family in terms of the income they generated and the level of profit. The primary resource of the family was its members, as the family used almost no non-family labour. The composition of the household, and the distribution of its members in terms of age and sex, were therefore critical for its economic well-being. Members of the family contributed their labour according to their sex, age and place within the household. Males were better paid than females but each son received more than his father and the daughters were better paid than their mother. Apart from the father, the less well paid the family member, the longer the time they were at work. In addition, the two highly paid sons were unemployed for more than half of the year. This provided a reserve of labour in the event of a rise in the ratio of consumers to workers within the family. The economy of the family was based on the exploitation of its patrimony and on animal husbandry. Food constituted the largest single item of expenditure but the diet of this family did not provide the 2,800 calories of the average diet in France between 1855 and 1874.

Several studies assume that Calvinist Christianity severely undermined or even persecuted the practice of polyandry in the Sri Lankan areas under Dutch control. We analyze Dutch colonial policy and Church activities toward polyandry by combining ecclesiastical and legal sources. Moreover, we use the Dutch colonial administration of the Sinhalese population to estimate the prevalence of polyandry. We conclude that polyandry was far from extinct by the end of the Dutch period and we argue that the colonial government was simply not knowledgeable, interested and effective enough to persecute the practice in the rural areas under its control.

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?

Combining family history and the analysis of political elites, this article explores the development of the urban elite of Turin (Piedmont) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, through an analysis of the transformations in the kinships forming the ruling class, with particular regard to their structures and strategies for social and economic reproduction. The deep changes that affected this group and eventually led to its extinction and replacement by a new elite are addressed. It is argued that, alongside institutional rearrangements determined by the Dukes of Savoy, the inheritance strategies pursued by the kinships in order to preserve their economic and political role played a crucial part in their demise.

This article deals with changes in the management of industrial labour in Catalonia between 1830 and 1925. In the absence of state welfare, families developed a number of strategies to try and secure an adequate standard of living. During the nineteenth century labour markets were informal, and working contracts implicit. However, with the advent of scientific organization of labour in the 1920s, hourly wage agreements began to be recorded. The application of cooperative game theory illuminates the processes by which households in this era managed to generate income. Both kin- and non-kin-related networks were used to improve the living standards of the household. Strategies of co-residence initially developed by migrants were later imitated by locally born inhabitants. Initially the living standards of migrants were thus higher than those of natives.

Juries enabled the participation in local governance of those outside national and regional elites in early modern England. Yet their social range is disputed. We investigate coroners’ inquest juries in a range of communities and compare a sample of 148 juries in eleven counties, featuring 2024 jurors, with tax and muster records. These show that while the rural and urban middling sorts were disproportionately represented, the rich and poor were by no means excluded. As militarily able household heads, many jurors matched the wider demands of ‘respectable masculinity’, and this may be reflected in some of the verdicts they reached.