Most of the literature on sharecropping deals with the reasons for the adoption of an allegedly irrational contract. Empirical testing of theoretical hypotheses is comparatively under-developed and the data on the worldwide diffusion of sharecropping are very scarce. This article argues that sharecropping is much less common than is sometimes assumed and that its share of total land has been decreasing. These ‘stylized facts’ are the ‘real’ puzzle that economic historians and theorists should try to explain.

I examine wealth-holding and the share of household wealth owned by women married in the years surrounding the 1870 Married Women's Property Act. The Act, which gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control personal property, serves as a natural experiment to examine the extent to which individuals respond to the law. I link wealth-holding data to census information and find that, as a result of the Act, women married after 1870 shifted their wealth-holding away from real property to personal property. Moreover, women married after the Act owned a larger share of household wealth than women married before the Act.

This article surveys the literature on charity in the Dutch Republic, while also presenting the principles of our social science history approach to understanding charity in past societies. We specify a threefold theory on giving in the past, looking at characteristics of donors, characteristics of charitable causes, and at the giving structure at large. We discuss the research design we employ to test this theory on Dutch charity in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Giving in the Golden Age, or GIGA, project.

Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was providing genuinely beneficial poor relief.

Remarriage was common in Sweden in pre-industrial times, especially among men, although over the nineteenth century the number of remarriages declined. This article analyses remarriages in southern Sweden between 1766 and 1894. Data are derived from family reconstitutions in five rural parishes in southern Sweden, which makes it possible to follow individual widows and widowers from the year of the death of the spouse. The focus here is on the influence of individual characteristics, household composition, food prices and time period on an individual widow's or widower's probability of remarriage. For some variables the effect was quite general, for example the negative effect on remarriage of the individual's age and the decrease in the likelihood of remarriage in the nineteenth century. The influence of other variables was not this straightforward. Socioeconomic status interacted with all variables, especially gender, food prices and the presence of minor or adult children in the household.

From the High Middle Ages on, the coastal wetlands of the North Sea area have been intensively reclaimed and settled. In order to enable intensive agricultural production in these areas, a complex drainage and flood control system was gradually installed, one that demanded a permanent investment of huge amounts of capital and labour. As the maintenance of the water control system was vital for the coastal agro-system, the long-term evolution of investments is an important, yet rarely used, indicator of the economic, social and environmental fortunes of the coastlands. Based on new and very early serial data on water control funding in late medieval Flanders, this article argues that long-term fluctuations in the funding of drainage and flood control were first and foremost related to structural changes within the coastal economy, where an overall decline of investment levels ran parallel to the fourteenth-century crisis of the peasant smallholding economy in this region. Exogenous pressures on the other hand, such as storm surges, only provoked a short-term disruption of investments.

This article examines the institution of retirement on some estates in Scania, the southernmost part of Sweden, in the nineteenth century. It is obvious that tenant farmers on the estates were practising the same retirement system as was customary among freeholders, that is they were entering into retirement contracts with their offspring or with a non-relative, making over the farm in exchange for board and lodging for the rest of their lives. The retirement age was about 60 for men and somewhat less for women. In this respect there was no difference between tenant farmers and freeholders. However, due to differences in property conditions and land tenure, there were other differences between these groups. Freeholders were usually able to ensure for themselves considerably better pension rights than could estate tenants. Furthermore, there are clear indications that estate owners, in certain cases, opposed early retirement or intervened in the selection of new tenant farmers as well as in the level of the pension. Possibly as a result, it was more common among estate tenants to agree a retirement contract with a non-relative than it was among freeholders.

In this study an attempt is made to examine the influence of kinship on a series of individual transitions and behaviours that mark the life course (marriage, leaving home, out-migration and mortality). Moving beyond a ‘traditional’ view, in which kinship is restricted to the cohabitation group, the study tests both the effects of the household and of the family beyond the household in order to observe their independent, opposite, or complementary actions. All these issues must be considered within the more general context of the ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’: should family links beyond the unit of cohabitation be taken into account? How far can family support isolated people?

It is the aim of this article to examine the economy and demography of an industrial coal-mining community during the second third of the nineteenth century. There is already a considerable body of work by historical demographers, from E. A. Wrigley to M. Haines, who have studied industrial districts, particularly from an aggregated perspective. Their work has been mostly concerned with stressing the peculiarities of specific populations in comparison with those of other districts. Fewer attempts have, however, been made to assess the degree of variance within industrial populations. Tilleur, a small town in east Belgium on the left bank of the Meuse, offers an opportunity to make such an assessment for the years between 1846 and 1880.

In 1776, in the parish of Puddletown, Dorset, Sarah Dibben, an elderly, impoverished widow, was examined as to her place of settlement by the local justice of the peace to determine whether the parish should pay for her poor relief. At the same time, the JP interviewed her son, Melchizedeck, with whom Sarah had been living, to shed further light on Sarah's situation. Melchizedeck told the justice that because Sarah was his mother he ‘thought it his Duty to assist her if he could without injuring his family’. However, he was at the marginal level of poverty himself, ‘having nothing but what he can earn to support his family’. As a consequence of these examinations, Sarah was removed to the neighbouring parish of Piddlehinton, where she had borne her children over forty years earlier.

The case of Sarah Dibben's settlement highlights the main issues surrounding provisions for the elderly in eighteenth-century England. (Here, the elderly are defined as those aged 60 and above.) The provisions of the poor law of 1601 meant that both the local community and the family had a legal obligation to support the aged. This law stated that ‘the aged and decrepit’ of every parish were to be supported by a tax, collected from all those who held property in the parish. At the same time, the law dictated:

The father and grandfather, mother and grandmother, and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other person not able to work, being of sufficient ability, shall at their own charges, relieve and maintain every such poor person, in that manner, and according to that rate, as by the justices in sessions shall be assessed: on pain of 20s. a month. [I will be referring to this clause as the family-support section of the poor laws.]

The article sheds fresh light on socio-legal change in the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century by focusing on the legal culture that emerged in the newly established Nizamiye court system. It is argued that a characteristic Nizamiye discourse that emphasized procedure mirrored the syncretic nature of this judicial system. This syncretism was a typical outcome of legal borrowing, encompassing both indigenous and foreign legal traditions. In addition, the article points to the possible impact of the new legal culture on judicial strategies employed by litigants. The accentuation of procedure opened up new litigation opportunities for the wealthier classes while disadvantaging and alienating the lower strata of society. Yet Ottoman law also provided some legal solutions for the lower orders.

On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents in demographic and epidemiological research. Demographers and epidemiologists would like to use long-run series of causes of death to examine the effects of social and economic conditions, the availability of health care, and specific risk factors on mortality. Many important questions (such as the effects of early health experiences on old-age morbidity and mortality) are best studied with data on changes over long periods of time. However, it is very difficult to construct a consistent series of deaths by cause over time because advances in medical theory and practice have led to significant changes in the classification of diseases. For example, it is unclear whether the prevalence of heart disease was increasing, decreasing, or constant before 1940, because heart disease was often classified under other categories.

The essays in this special number of Continuity and Change offer a range of insights on the historical circumstances in which cause-of-death registration emerged. They help us to see the ways in which medical theory, medical practitioners, and their increasingly influential professional organizations shaped the conceptualization of reporting of causes of death. Günter Risse's ‘Causes of death as a historical problem’ serves as an overview of the problems that social historians of medicine find underlying any continuous history of mortality experience. Above all, he argues, medical historians react as historians, wary of Whiggish confidence in state records without attention to the ideologies governing their creation.

This article studies the effects of marriage partner choice on occupational attainment and mobility in five rural parishes in southern Sweden between about 1815 and 1894. It uses an individual-level database containing information on a large number of marriages and the occupational origin of the marrying couple, regardless of whether they were born in the parish or not. Occupations are coded in HISCO and classified using HISCLASS. The results indicate the presence of occupational homogamy in this rural society. The social origin of the partner also mattered a great deal for subsequent occupational attainment and mobility, both upwards and downwards.