This article offers an approach through administrative and cultural history to the problems associated with gathering and processing data for the Spanish national census of 1920, and by implication for earlier Spanish censuses. It focuses on the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, making use of correspondence between the central statistical office in Madrid, the provincial jefe de estadística and the localities, and of reports on three problematic towns within the province. The issues that emerge regarding ‘undercounting’, the definition of administrative boundaries and the classification of demographic characteristics are set in the wider context of census-taking practices and problems elsewhere in Spain and in other cultures.

The central argument of this article is that current historical research into early modern retail growth and practices has focused too narrowly on the retail of durables (perhaps with the exception of colonial groceries) and on retailers' guilds. The role of food-producing and/or food-retailing guilds hitherto has received less attention. Research into retail practices has not connected to an older (but still lively) research tradition in which the consumption of basic foodstuffs received the bulk of attention. We argue that if selling bread is approached as a ‘system of provision’, competing retail circuits and the different ways in which subsequent subsistence crises affected each of those circuits offer an additional explanation (next to well-documented changes in demand) for the inclusion of other basic provisions, colonial groceries, clothing, and even durables in the assortment of traditional food-producing and food-retailing guild masters, in this case the Leuven bakers.

Until the nineteenth -century tortilla production was carried out by women through rudimentary methods. New technology for corn milling spread during the 1910s, coinciding with the Mexican Revolution. The analysis of nixtamal corn mills and tortilla shops in Mexico City in 1924 shows that the mechanisation of milling led to masculinisation and an increase in the gender wage gap. However, since tortilla-making remained unmechanised, it allowed hundreds of women to establish tortilla shops that mostly hired women. Their entrepreneurship can be considered a survival strategy of women confronting a technological change in an era of political, social and economic turmoils.

Focusing on the shipping sector, this article discusses the influence of labour migrants from rural areas on economic development in Copenhagen and Stockholm during the long eighteenth century. During this period, the two cities developed in markedly different ways; Copenhagen flourished while Stockholm stagnated, and the qualitative and quantitative contribution of migrants was essential in facilitating these differences. Both capitals were maritime hubs that relied on a constant influx of mariners who originated from the two cities’ rural hinterlands. By examining different characteristics of the migrant mariners and the improvements of mariners’ human capital across the eighteenth century, this article emphasises the importance of the shipping sector as well as labour migration in the socio-economic development of Copenhagen and Stockholm.

The following four articles arise from a one-day conference on ‘Sharecropping in History’, organized by Benedita Câmara and held at the University of Madeira on 8 October 2004. The papers gathered here, though revised, reflect the variety of approach evident in their first presentations at the meeting. A fifth paper, by Kyle Kauffman, on ‘Monopsony land tenure and sharecropping in Dutch South Africa, 1652–1795’ (which was not presented for publication here) also suggested that same variety, not only in terms of the inevitable spatial and temporal range but also in terms of approach. That said, a number of discrete themes emerged from the meeting, with ‘sharecropping’ a central concept, tantalizingly clear and yet fiercely resistant to close categorization, offering a number of avenues for exploration. The majority of these approaches were conditioned by, and set out to test, some of the more prevalant assumptions of economic history and economic theory with regard to sharecropping.

In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.

The introduction of rewards for the conviction of serious criminals fundamentally transformed English criminal justice. The prospect of rewards totalling up to £140 encouraged additional prosecutions, more full (as opposed to partial) guilty verdicts, and more death sentences. In the process, in a series of largely unintended consequences, two fundamental pillars of early-modern justice were undermined: reliance on the public to prosecute, and the death penalty to deter crime. Policing agents began to play a much more important role in apprehending criminals, while the high level of executions contributed to growing doubts about the efficacy of capital punishment.

This article is a study of single mothers in Lyon in the nineteenth century, including what happened to them after they gave birth to an illegitimate child. Unmarried mothers have been the subject of much previous research on different countries but such studies often begin with the last days of the pregnancy and stop a few days after the delivery. Our aim is to look at the life course of single mothers before pregnancy and after delivery. In Lyon, at the time the second French city in terms of population, we studied 2,000 unwed mothers, some of them multiparous, noting their extensive geographical mobility and the frequency of their moves within the city.

Mortuaries were death duties owed to parish priests. The early sixteenth century was a pivotal moment in their long history. In 1529, an act of parliament significantly altered these dues. This article explores mortuary practices in the preceding decades. It examines what mortuaries were, who gave them, and what purpose they served. The importance of local custom is emphasised. The article reconsiders the modern view that mortuary dues were generally disliked. A more complex attitude explains both why mortuaries were reformed and why they would survive for centuries thereafter. Mortuary dues exemplify the symbiotic relationship between law and custom.

This article addresses a 250-year episode of human colonisation, community growth and subsequent decline on the small Greek island of Antikythera (ad 1770 to present), focusing on rich documentary sources from four decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. In particular, a series of nominal censuses and accompanying agricultural statistics can be combined with intensive landscape archaeological survey evidence to explore evidence for changing nineteenth-century households, household economies, and how these are manifest across an entire physical landscape. We also contextualise this well-recorded, most recent historical episode within the island's deeper population history stretching back at least seven millennia.

This article examines the arguments used in the Netherlands to admit or exclude asylum seekers during the Cold War era. There is consensus that gaining asylum in the 1960s was not that difficult – especially when compared with current practices – because Cold War migrants were ‘the enemies of our enemy’. By analysing 36 detailed individual case files, this article questions the oft-sung mantra of an unproblematic asylum procedure for these ‘anti-communists’ in the Netherlands. We will see that the restrictive Dutch authorities frequently changed their anti-asylum decisions as a result of interventions from the outside. Outsiders' pleas, underpinned by a variety of arguments, often resulted in admission, but rarely in the attainment of refugee status.