In this article, I compare women's work opportunities in Bilbao, in northern Castile, and Antwerp, in the Low Countries, from 1400 to 1560. I argue that the different organisation of work in the two towns had a great influence on women's economic opportunities. Whereas women in Antwerp often worked alongside other members of their household because of the town's dominant craft guilds, Bilbao's informal trades were open to women on their own, independent of their husband or another male relative. As a result, women in Bilbao are more visible in the sources and were able to exert more influence on the town council.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines generational continuity and kinship patterns in Willingham (England) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and in Kami-shiojiri (Japan) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Willingham few families continued to survive in a given locality for more than a couple of generations in the male line. Yet at the same time local testators left bequests to a wide range of kin in their wills, indicating that, despite the mobility of the population, kinship ties remained important and were acknowledged. For Kami-shiojiri, the almost continuous series of Shumon Aratame-cho (religious faith registers) reveals a gradual change towards smaller and simpler household structures (Ie). In addition, occasional abrupt increases in the numbers of households and in the numbers of messuages (dwelling units) imply that the community as a whole and/or the local overlord did sometimes intervene to reconstruct sections of the village economy and the use of household labour. Households in Kami-shiojiri were larger and more complex than those in England and the population was much more stable, with the mobility rate about half that reported for England. The extent of variation in inheritance patterns within both populations is also discussed, showing that some families persisted for several generations in Willingham and that in Kami-shiojiri more than a third of cases of change of headship of the household, involved a successor who was not the eldest son of the previous head.

I. THE CREATION OF MODERN DEMOGRAPHIC STATISTICS

The existence of a specialized administrative organization depends on the political, economic, and social development of a country, and is indispensable for the availability of modern statistics. As more than one author has pointed out, quantitative assessments of its population reflect a government's capacity to rule. The first Spanish attempts to obtain such quantitative knowledge are found in the so-called Relaciones ordered by Philip II in the second half of the sixteenth century; they described both European and American territories of the Crown. These early attempts, however, lacked continuity.