Exogenous intervention in land ownership began with few court judgments prior to the weighty Land Code in 1858; but it was especially this law which officially overturned the status quo by permitting registration of cultivated land in the names of non-cultivators. This changed the rules of the game for the peasantry in Palestine. Informally, yet practically, peasants had been the de facto owners of almost all cultivated lands in Palestine for generations. Following the landmark intervention of 1858, non-peasants seized the opportunity to acquire economic assets. They purchased and confiscated peasant lands or manipulated registration of peasant lands into their own names, and the peasants often became their tenants. The additional purchase of lands by Zionist settlers in latter years, compounded by rural demographic growth, intensified this pressure. By 1930, three-quarters of Arab peasants in Palestine cultivated lands they no longer formally owned, while others were pushed to migrate to cities.

This article investigates how the new welfare bureaucracy impacted on the epistolary relationship between paupers and those who administered it locally and nationally. In particular, it traces the changes in those relationships between the earliest years of the new regime and its maturity in the 1870s. It explores the ways that paupers responded to the New Poor Law, and how they negotiated the structural and sentimental shifts that took place over that period. In particular, it looks in detail at the new uses to which the epistolary relationship was put by outdoor paupers, their advocates and workhouse inmates.

This study examines the policies applied to French immigrants in Aragon between 1635 and 1697, a period of economic decline and constant conflict between Spain and France. The commercial and tax measures imposed by the Spanish monarchy on French immigrants to support the war effort were opposed and constrained by Aragonese institutions, such as the Diputación or the Corte del Justicia de Aragón. After a period of debate the Aragonese Parliament developed an autonomous policy towards the end of the seventeenth century. In the interests of the Aragonese economy and elites, restrictions on migrants were lowered and revised, until they focused mainly on merchants. This legislation allowed immigrant flows to continue, but it could not counteract the decline of economic opportunities for the French in Aragon.

This article focuses on a little scrutinised aspect of the regulation of markets for food in the central middle ages, using a case study, the town of Liège, in addition to other examples from the southern Low Countries. It aims to demonstrate how regulations concerning the timing of the marketing of foodstuffs operated in order to guarantee privileged access to some categories of urban inhabitants. This institutional management of time in the market was a function of a specific balance of power which in turn shaped economic, social and political outcomes.

Many crafts in premodern Europe depended on migratory journeymen. Little is known about these workers, or how craft guilds and urban authorities affected their movement. By employing novel data on thousands of journeymen from different crafts and cities in Holland, we provide the first systematic overview of journeymen migration and settlement patterns in The Dutch Republic. We find that migration and settlement patterns differed significantly by occupational sector, marital status, and skill level. The stance of urban authorities towards migrants significantly affected settlement patterns as well. This interrelation of group-level characteristics, craft guilds, and urban regulation demonstrates the significance of examining these elements in tandem.

Recent studies of male occupations have used Anglican baptisms as a source. However, in areas where nonconformity was strong, a significant proportion of baptisms were missing from parish registers: in Wales, around a quarter of births were to Nonconformist fathers in the years 1813–1820. This study analyses whether there were significant differences between the occupations of Anglican and nonconformist fathers based on a 14 per cent sample of Welsh baptisms. Revised estimates suggest that Anglican data underestimate employment in mining and industry. These estimates are used to give an overview of the Welsh economy c.1817.

Drawing evidence from the proceedings of the Antwerp hoogere Vierschaer (the local criminal court), the article challenges some key features from Jan de Vries’ hypothesis of the Industrious Revolution. Mesmerised by an endless variety of fashionable and exotic consumer goods, eighteenth-century people would have slashed their leisure time in a variety of ways. Labour input would have been forced up on a daily, weekly and annual base. However, time-budget analysis of Antwerp labour rhythms evidences a much more complex picture, which does not really hint at an industrious revolution but rather reveals invariable industriousness.