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.

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?

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.

Historians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

This article firstly advances a methodological critique of Hans-Joachim Voth's influential study of labour input during the English industrial revolution, arguing that Voth's ingenious and potentially widely applicable method of inferring time-use from court testimony has flaws such that at least the absolute figures yielded are likely unreliable. Secondly, with the method's deficiencies in mind, this article applies a version of it to the Old Bailey court records in order to examine change in women's working time in London between the 1750s and 1830. Results include that women in London did not observe Saint Monday even in the 1750s, and that the time that women in London spent in paid work increased only slightly between the 1750s and 1830.

This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

The author makes the argument that the presence of a murder law during the Roman monarchy and the absence of such a law during the republic reflects the difference in the nature of authority in these two political institutions. The centralized authority of the monarchy demanded a control over the right to kill. An act of homicide practised by another infringed upon the king's authority and so a murder law was promulgated. When the Romans expelled their kings, authority devolved onto individual patres and this decentralized leadership under the republic meant that the act of homicide was no longer a matter of concern for the state.

This article studies the role performed by local jurisdictional courts in private credit relations in medieval Catalonia. These courts and their officers were subject to the control of local feudal lords. The courts acted as a guarantor of credit contracts agreed before them in the form of ‘court obligations’, and also carried out procedures related to the enforcement of outstanding debts: prorogations; seizures and auction of goods; and imprisonment. The study focuses on the plain of the Lower Ter, on the northeast Catalan coast. It concludes that although the jurisdictional framework provided by the courts involved a number of different great lords, including the king himself, the juridical mechanisms and collaboration between different courts functioned well enough to sustain a dynamic, complex and widespread credit system.

The privatisation of communal assets tends to be presented as an irreversible linear movement that was driven from above. Based on a case study (Navarre, nineteenth century), this article seeks to give greater prominence to local players and their response to changing circumstances. The process thus appears less linear and compact by revealing certain anomalies, such as the reversibility of certain sales or the alienation of partial ownership rights that were compatible with the preservation of rights of use in favour of local councils and households, as an example of institutional bricolage. Against a backdrop of war and municipal bankruptcy, the privatisation of collective lands between 1808 and 1860 followed various paths, each one benefitting different social classes. Borrowers, outside investors and wealthy individuals accumulated large estates, but there was also a chance for peasants and local people to become property owners. The recovery of part of these lands on the back of social conflicts from 1884 onwards confirms that privatisation was not a fait accompli.

This article examines the impact of the Continental Blockade upon a local fishing and agricultural economy in the Mediterranean by focusing on the illicit trades that flourished on Stromboli. The island became a strategic location for smuggling between the warring kingdoms of British allied Naples and French ruled Sicily. This paper argues that the Blockade allowed Stromboli to join the network of maritime traffic that had been dominated by the two biggest islands in the archipelago. Although equally integrated into agriculture and fishing, women participated in the fraudulent sale of prize goods but were excluded from large-scale smuggling operations.

Before the Second World War, Osaka was called the Manchester of the East, because its industries, such as cotton spinning and metal work, played such an important role in the national economy. Osaka had also been a primary commercial centre of the country since the seventeenth century. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Osaka was the centre of Japanese capitalism, and it was during the Taisho era, 1912–1926, that Osaka was most prosperous. In those days there was unceasing immigration to Osaka, particularly into the urban area, in order to find employment. The migrants came primarily from rural areas, plus an increasing number from Korea. Under such circumstances, acute social problems emerged, in particular slums, unemployment and poverty.

During the Taisho period, the Osaka authorities were not unaware of the problem of poverty. First, the local authorities began to recognize the necessity of a municipal social policy and so they reorganized the administration in order to attack poverty. With this reorganization, a new department was formed to deal with all aspects of the social welfare of the inhabitants. Secondly, they actively carried out and published social surveys of urban poverty. From the information thus obtained, a relief system was established, consisting, for example, of social work and public assistance. Thirdly, urban officials accepted the responsibility of coping with urban poverty and actually made efforts to tackle it. They tried to define the meaning of poverty and the attitude of the local authorities towards poverty changed completely from that which had obtained in any previous period. It was in this era that the actual living and working conditions of the urban poor became apparent to the authorities and practical measures were taken to ameliorate poverty. For these reasons, Osaka provides us with an interesting case study.

The focus of this article is on the relationship between poverty and family formation in Osaka, including not only the circumstances of the urban poor but also the factors influencing the attitudes of the local authorities, who recognized the importance of the relationship between urban poverty and family formation, and the nature of the relief system they organized. Before going into detail concerning Osaka's poverty problems between 1912 and 1926, however, it is necessary to examine the set of circumstances which, one might argue, were critical in prompting Osaka to launch a social work programme.

This article evaluates the presence of Muslim communities in the Kingdom of Navarre in the late Middle Ages. Following the Christian Reconquest of the Navarrese bank of the Ebro in 1119, a sizeable Muslim community remained in Christian territory until 1516. This article focuses on the fifteenth century, a period for which religious coexistence in the smallest of the Iberian Christian kingdoms is in need of further contextualisation. An analysis of existing scholarship and new archival evidence throws light on the economic activities of the Muslims in Tudela as well as on their relationship with the Navarrese monarchy, their collective identity, their legal systems and their relationships not only with their Christian and Jewish neighbours, but also with other Iberian Muslim communities including those of Al Andalus, or Moorish Iberia.

We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.