L'auteur examine ici une forme de contrat d'exploitation agricole, le contrat Colonia, très largement utilisé dans l'île de Madère depuis son introduction vers 1750 jusqu'à son abolition en 1967. Elle note que l'instauration du Code Civil de 1867, de caractère libéral, a introduit de nouvelles formes de traitement de ces contrats. Le propriétaire perdait le contrôle de ses droits d'exploitation. Le fait que les règles auxquelles devait obéir la négociation de ces contrats aient changé explique en partie leur moindre usage après 1867, mais c'est dans les insuffisances que manifestait antérieurement ce type de contrat qu'il faut aller chercher la raison profonde de ce changement.

L'intention ici est d'examiner, à partir des contrats stipulant les conditions de leur retraite de la vie active qu'ont passé des veuves scandinaves, quel était le niveau économique et la qualité de vie dont elles avaient pu bénéficier dans le passé. Etudier ces contrats nous révèle aussi les différents modes de transfert de génération à génération, dans ces pays, du foncier et de l'autorité liée au chef de ménage ainsi que l’évolution de ces modalités dans le temps. Ces contrats rentrèrent plus dans le détail une fois passé le début du 18ème siècle, mais il ne faut pas y voir un signe de tension entre ceux ou celles qui se retiraient et leurs successeurs; il s'agit plutôt d'une stratégie familiale destinée à protéger les intérêts des frères ou sœurs plus jeunes de l'héritier/e, ou encore ceux des parents âgés, surtout dans le cas où la propriété pourrait être acquise par d'autres que des parents. Que ces contrats aient été passés par un couple ou par une veuve, ils garantissaient en général un niveau de vie satisfaisant une fois cessée la vie active. Les veuves se voyaient attribuer une chambre personnelle correctement chauffée, des provisions de bouche plus généreuses que celles dont disposaient nombre de familles, des vêtements, tout en gardant le droit de continuer à travailler, par exemple à traire ou à tisser, mais sans avoir à exécuter des tâches pénibles.

Grâce aux progrès des études de démographie historique, il a été peu à peu reconnu que le taux de fécondité des familles de la Chine historique est resté fort modéré par rapport aux taux élevés connus en d'autres lieux. Mais ce qui est encore objet de débat, c'est de savoir si les Chinois avaient ou non pratiqué intentionnellement un contrôle de la taille de leurs familles. Dans cet article, l'auteur évoque d'abord, succinctement, l’état actuel de la recherche concernant les modèles de fécondité dans la Chine historique. Puis il donne d'autres éléments de preuve montrant des gens du passé limitant la taille de leur famille avant d'examiner l'impact qu'ont pu avoir les croyances traditionnelles sur le comportement en matière de fécondité familiale. Enfin il fait le point des théories et suggestions antinatalistes soutenues par les responsables officiels et les intellectuels chinois tout au long de l'histoire du pays. Ces éléments nous permettront d'apprécier nombre de suggestions qui ont pu être faites concernant la culture et le comportement traditionnels chinois en matière de reproduction. D'une manière générale, l'auteur conteste l'idée selon laquelle les stratégies de reproduction humaine se proposeraient d'augmenter au maximum le nombre des descendants survivants, ainsi que le postulat selon lequel la demande d'enfants (ou fils) aurait toujours été élevé dans la Chine historique.

Thanks to the progress that has been made in the study of population history, it has been gradually accepted that fertility in historical China was only moderate in comparison with the recorded high fertility. However, scholars still disagree on whether the Chinese could have intentionally controlled their family size. This article first summarizes recent findings about fertility patterns in historical China. Then the author provides further evidence of people limiting their family size in the past, before discussing the impact of traditional beliefs on people's fertility behaviour and summarizing the antinatalist ideas and suggestions put forwarded by Chinese officials and intellectuals over China's long history. This evidence is then used to comment on a number of suggestions that have been made about China's traditional reproductive behaviour and culture. The article challenges the views that people's reproductive strategies aimed in the past to maximize the number of surviving offspring and that the demand for children (or sons) was always high in historical China.

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.

The aim of this article is to explore the economic status and the quality of life of widows in the Nordic past, based on the evidence contained in retirement contracts. Analysis of these contracts also shows the ways in which, and when, land and the authority invested in the headship of the household were transferred between generations in the Nordic countryside. After the early eighteenth century, retirement contracts became more detailed but these should be viewed not as a sign of tension between the retirees and their successors but as a family insurance strategy designed to protect the interests of younger siblings of the heir and his or her old parents, particularly if there was a danger of the property being acquired by a non-relative. Both the retirement contracts made by couples and those made by a widow alone generally guaranteed them an adequate standard of living in retirement. Widows were assured of an adequately heated room of their own, more generous provision of food than was available to many families, clothing and the right to continue to work, for example at spinning and milking, but to be excused heavy labour. However, when the land was to be retained by the family, in many cases there was no intention of establishing a separate household.

The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour input, but also strong regional differences. These differences appear not to be connected to urbanization or to the rise of one or another sector in the rural economy, but to the regional social and institutional framework in which the economy developed.

This article presents the results of the family reconstitution carried out in three villages in the Spanish province of Navarre, covering a period from the late seventeenth century to 1994. This set of data from over 300 years comprises one of the longest family reconstitution projects in Spain, and means that the present study is based on a major database consisting of over 110,000 entries which can be used to explore various aspects of the demography. In this study I present the evolution of several indicators of fertility, all of which are aspects that can help us to reflect on a phenomenon that has long been known, but which is still not fully understood: the demographic transition. The microfocus of family reconstitution has enabled us to question numerous assumptions about the time when the fall in the birth rate began, the irrational or unconscious nature of reproduction in the pretransitional phase and the strategies employed by couples to have smaller families.

In this article the author examines a form of agricultural contract known as the colonia contract, which was widespread throughout the island of Madeira from 1750 and which was abolished in 1967. She argues that the publication of the liberal Civil Code of 1867 changed the rules concerning the operation of this contract. The landlord lost control of his economic property rights over the land. The change in the rules governing this type of contract partially explains the reduction in its use but the impact of the change is attributed to inefficiencies that already existed in the contract.

This article charts the vicissitudes of an economic experiment that aimed to eradicate distress in early-nineteenth-century Ireland. The London Committee for Irish Relief was formed in 1822 and was the first large-scale, charitable response in Britain to famine conditions in Ireland. The Committee believed that poverty was the cause rather than the effect of ‘the Irish problem’ and tried to initiate change by providing the poor with financial resources. Despite some initial successes, allegations over misappropriation of funds created a climate of distrust about the Committee's policies. These allegations mounted over the decade, and when Ireland once again faced extreme distress, in 1831, they caused a rift in London's charitable circles, producing two organizations: the Irish Distress Committee, which argued that poverty was the causal factor, and the Western Committee for Irish Relief, which identified Catholicism as the source of Ireland's problems. This division reflected a more general loss of confidence in plans to solve Ireland's endemic poverty through the promotion of economic activity. These events coincided with hardening attitudes towards Catholics and the poor throughout the British Isles and played an important role in the development of policies on Irish relief in the nineteenth century.

Historians of sharecropping in France have usually emphasized its negative effects on growth and on the workers' welfare. However, from about 1840 the regions of central and western France, regions where sharecroppers were especially numerous, were also areas that saw great improvements and the specialization in commercial livestock. As the author shows, landowners from these areas used sharecropping contracts in order both to seize the opportunities given by the potential scale economies in livestock rearing and to take advantage of family labour at a time of increasing wages. After presenting some basic data regarding sharecropping contracts, the second section is intended to describe the improvements in livestock farming in the area under sharecropping after 1840 and the contribution of landowners. Section III offers an explanation of why landowners preferred sharecropping to fixed-rent contracts. Three causes in particular are identified: (i) a lack of physical and human capital sufficient to allow potential farmers to engage in large scale farming; (ii) the contribution of landlord managerial expertise; and (iii) the fact that the complexity of mixed farming required a quality of work that would have been too expensive with wage labour. In a final section the ways in which the success of sharecropping minimized transaction costs are discussed.

This article looks at marriage in Catalonia during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period of rapid economic and social change, using a case study of a proto-industrial community. Differences in age at marriage are related to data on occupations, wealth and age rank in order to consider as many of the factors influencing marriage decisions as possible. Economic factors were one obvious constraint upon marriage, but another was the particular system of impartible inheritance practised in Catalonia. This article shows that, while inheritance continued to affect marriage choices to a considerable extent, the rapid transformation of the economy was breaking down the traditional constraints upon marriage.

This article makes use of linkage of many different sources – official population censuses, wage books, interviews, the correspondence of many canning companies, notarial records, documents from canning unions – in order to investigate labour market segmentation between 1880 and 1960 in the Spanish fish-canning industry, a sector that employed mainly female labour. I explore some social and economic factors that explain why women were placed in the ‘secondary’ segment of the labour market in the fish-canning sector. The study also considers the earning differentials between men and women and the different types of contracts offered to male and female workers.

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.

In this article implications of season of birth for child health in Spain during the demographic transition are explored. Making use of the Aranjuez data base, the authors look at the seasonality of births and its heterogeneities, finding a nearly universal prevalence of late spring and early summer conceptions that is most evident with last-born children. Levels and causes of childhood mortality are strongly related to the season of birth, with those born between April and October showing lower likelihood of survival. These findings can be explained by the way infant feeding, age and season intersect. These results have implications for the relative efficiency of different demographic regimes.

Theoretical debates about the efficiency of sharecropping discuss risk-sharing in relation to farmers' wealth and credit, as one explanatory factor. This perspective is explored here in the southern Portuguese province of Alentejo, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Three points are made: (1) leasing and sharecropping coexisted on the same land; (2) there was no unequivocal relationship between risk sharing, on the one hand, and the contractual mode of tenancy (fixed-rent or sharecropping), on the other; and (3) relating risk-sharing, defined as a continuous variable, with social differentiation of demand for tenancies provides a rationale for a hypothetical long-term shift in contracts, from medieval sharecropping to fixed-rent tenancies with sharecrop subletting in the nineteenth century.

This article analyses the structure of and changes to the income-earning activities of Russian urban households from 1985 to 2000. An intensive diversification of income sources is observed, which indicates an engagement with every available (and individually acceptable) opportunity for paid employment, and also an intensive engagement in different types of household work. However, the growth in real income since 1999 has induced households to abandon specific types of income-earning activities, the first casualty being subsidiary agriculture, and the second labour-intensive, time-consuming types of household work. Another important change took place in gender specialization in domestic labour: though women still worked substantially more in the household than men, at the end of the period under consideration, there are signs that this gender gap has been partially bridged.

This article argues that naming can reveal personal ideologies, family connections, social interactions and changes in the concerns of the inhabitants of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ethnic and religious differences are indicated by the differing naming practices used by the Gaelic Irish, Old English and New English, Scots and Welsh inhabitants of Ireland. Much can be divined about the symbolism underlying naming practice when the names given to children are compared with those of their parents, godparents, family members and other significant individuals. The associated importance of nicknames and by-names, wordplay about names, and the circumstances under which people might change their names are also considered.

This article analyses the labour activities of urban households in Russia during the period from 1965 to 1986. Labour strategies were oriented towards domestic labour and participation in subsidiary agriculture in order to compensate for the persistent shortage of food, consumer goods and services. In spite of the highest women's employment in world history, such a situation helped to preserve the traditional pattern of labour-sharing at home between family members and led to significant gender differences in the time spent on domestic labour. Towards the end of the period, the time spent by women on domestic work was shortened by the advent of home appliances, rather than by any redistribution of tasks between genders.