This article investigates the antecedents, experience and consequences of service in the lives of rural-born Dutch women within the urbanizing and industrializing context of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The decision to enter service was often taken by the girl's parents against the background of a distress-ridden household. From the latter part of the nineteenth century, the migration fields of servants widened, with women more often serving in middle-class households in the growing large cities. The consequences of out-migration to these urban and more diverse labour and marriage markets, and for some women also the educational work setting of urban service itself, were that larger proportions of women contracted advantageous marriages and settled outside their rural region of birth.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War a variety of commentators in England expressed concern that men returning from the war had become so brutalized and inured to violence that their behaviour would continue to be violent at home. But, while the stage was set for a ‘moral panic’ with the brutalized veteran as the new folk devil, no such panic materialized. This essay makes a detailed study of two contrasting newspapers to assess how violent crime was assessed and interpreted after the war. It notes an increase in the use of the concept of the ‘unwritten law’ (the traditional ‘right’ claimed by many men to chastise a disrespectful wife or a man who despoiled or dishonoured a wife) in the courts and the press, probably as an element in re-establishing pre-war gender roles. It also describes how the idea of shell-shock was deployed as a defence in criminal cases, something that probably contributed to a popular recognition that men might suffer mental breakdowns as easily as women. In conclusion, it suggests some of the factors that may have inhibited the press in identifying the violent veteran as a new folk devil.

The most important determinant of Ottoman economic institutions and their evolution in the early modern era needs to be sought in the Empire's social structure and political economy. Merchants and producers were never in a position to influence the state elites and to push for institutional changes that would favour the growth of the private sector. As a result, many of the key institutions of the Ottoman order, including the state ownership of land and the urban guilds, remained intact until the nineteenth century. In contrast, institutions related to state borrowing changed significantly. This difference in the political power of different groups explains – better than geography or resource endowments, Islam or culture – the striking divergence in the trajectory of different factor markets.

In pre-industrial Sweden (and other parts of northwestern Europe) retirement arrangements were used by peasants to keep their property intact and to transfer it to one of the children while the other children were compensated with, for example, movable property or plots of land. In this article we study the frequency and form of this strategy in pre-industrial rural Sweden. While the literature on retirement arrangements mainly concentrates on the functionality of this system, the focus of this study is on what happened to the institution of peasant retirement in the nineteenth century when an active land market developed and the relative price of land rose. In this study, we use two different sources of land transmission: poll-tax registers, indicating the management of farms, and records of land certificates, showing changes in ownership. The results clearly show that peasant retirement remained an important strategy of intergenerational land transmission at least until the mid-nineteenth century, but the way it was carried out changed profoundly from being mainly an intra-family affair to being channelled through the market.

For most people in pre-industrial Sweden, the occupation of being a servant was not a lifetime job but a temporary one at which they tried their hand for a limited period during their lives. The Western European marriage pattern with its late age at marriage meant that most individuals spent about 10–15 years preparing for adulthood: saving up, being trained and seeking a partner for life. During this phase of their lives they worked as servants, changed employer frequently and therefore migrated.

Until the late eighteenth century the social structure in the Swedish countryside was quite homogeneous. The nobility possessed large estates which formed an important source of employment. These were, however, few in number, and the dominant social groups were peasants, freeholders (skattebönder) and tenants on crown or noble land (kronobönder, frälsebönder), as well as servants in peasant households or on the estates. There were, of course, people with other occupations, but they did not constitute large social groups. Thus, servants formed a special social category, but, as I mentioned, very few people belonged to the category for life. Let us contrast this homogeneous picture with the diversified social structure in the late nineteenth century.

Sovereign ownership of mines and taxation were fundamental principles governing the mining economy of the territories of the Castilian crown during the medieval period. Ownership of mines meant that mineral wealth, discovered or undiscovered, belonged to the crown estate. Only the sovereign could grant mining rights to ‘private’ persons and impose mineral taxation. Particularly during the last three centuries of the Reconquista (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), these principles were used to unify the situation in those territories falling under the sway of a sovereign with expansionist ambitions. Increasing globalisation of the metal trade in the thirteenth century and the formation of capital markets in Europe firmly put the Castilian crown in competition with other economic agents aiming to win a monopoly in metallic wealth. Castile's mining laws aspired to solve the ensuing tension by attracting merchant capital to the mines, aiming to absorb the comparative advantages of mining capital. In a protracted process, the mineral laws of the sixteenth century were a testimony to the decisive influence of the sovereign in the history of mining.

Economic historians and development economists have exploited links between nutrition, health status and physical stature to argue that evidence about height can be used to supplement conventional economic indices of well-being. Evidence on stature may be available for time periods when conventional economic indices are not. It may also exist for sections of populations for which only aggregate income data is available, and so expose variations in living standards within populations: indeed this may be its most important contribution. Moreover height is an aggregate function of many aspects of well-being, including real income, work intensity and the disease environment. Unlike real income data it can reflect net environmental factors such as arduous employment at an early age that is not fully offset by inputs of food and health care.

This article exploits these potentially useful attributes of the anthropometric approach to explore a neglected aspect of inequality in early industrial Britain and to try to capture evidence of the net effect of relative deprivation through cross-sectional analyses of heights. Children in families headed by women comprise the subsample on which we focus. Considerable qualitative and some quantitative evidence exists to suggest that children in such families were relatively deprived. Female-headed households were impoverished by the relatively low earning power of women, which was only partially offset by poor relief. But oppressive poverty was not alone in making these children's lives hard. Evidence suggests that they comprised a disproportionate share of child workers in the mines and manufactories of early industrial Britain. They were put to work early and at jobs which involved long hours and although their efforts augmented family incomes, given the poverty within which such families remained it is unlikely that the children's claim on resources was sufficiently boosted to offset the energy required by their employment.

None of the recent studies stimulated by debates on the causes of the ‘demographic transition’ since the mid-nineteenth century has yet explained the anomaly that, while all other indices of mortality declined, rates of infant mortality were static or even rising in the last decades of the century. This case study of Preston shows that an explosive growth in the population of horses in expanding towns was probably responsible for sustaining, or even enhancing, levels of infant mortality due to enteric diseases spread by flies which bred in horse manure.