Au dix-huitième siècle, le journal était devenu le plus important des moyens de diffusion imprimée de l'information concernant le crime et des enquêtes criminelles. Donnant à connaître des milliers de crimes et d'actions en justice, la presse dépassait de loin tout ce qu'à l'époque d'autres sources imprimées pouvaient apporter. Principal canal d'accès écrit aux circonstances des actions criminelles et à l'information en général à ce sujet, il n'est guère douteux que les journaux aient exercé une influence sur la façon dont leurs lecteurs allaient percevoir crime et justice et sur leurs attitudes à cet égard. Dans cet article, l'auteur procède à une analyse quantitative et qualitative de la rubrique criminelle d'un journal de province, The Kentish Post, or Canterbury Newsletter. L'étude révèle que ce journal s'est construit autour d'un schéma éditorial faisant du crime un des thèmes les plus importants à traiter. Cependant les rédacteurs du journal avaient à élaborer un texte selon la norme, alors qu'ils devaient traiter un nombre d'affaires criminelles sans commune mesure avec ce qui avait précédé. Cette nécessité éditoriale a eu pour résultat un discours sur la nature, les causes et les conséquences du crime très différent de celui que tenaient les pamphlétaires – le pamphlet ayant été, jusqu'à l'apparition des journaux, le lieu privilégié, plus familier aux historiens, de ce qui s'écrivait sur le crime.

Wiederverheiratung war im vorindustriellen Schweden weit verbreitet, besonders unter Männern, auch wenn im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts die Zahl der Wiederverheiratungen zurückging. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert Wiederverheiratungen im südlichen Schweden zwischen 1766 und 1894. Die Daten stammen aus Familienrekonstitutionen für fünf ländliche Gemeinden im südlichen Schweden, die es ermöglichen, einzelne Witwen und Witwer vom Todesjahr des Ehepartners an zu verfolgen. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der Frage nach dem Einfluss bestimmter Merkmale wie der Zusammensetzung des Hauhalts, der Nahrungsmittelpreise und des historischen Zeitpunkts auf die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Wiederverheiratung einer Witwe oder eines Witwers. Für einige Variablen war der Effekt ziemlich klar. So hatte z.B. das Alter der oder des Betroffenen einen negativen Effekt auf die Wiederverheiratung, und die Wahrscheinlichkeit zur Wiederverheiratung nahm im 19. Jahrhundert generell ab. Der Einfluss anderer Variablen dagegen war nicht so eindeutig. Der sozialökonomische Status korrespondierte mit allen Variablen, insbesondere mit dem Geschlecht, den Nahrungsmittelpreise und der Präsenz minderjähriger oder erwachsener Kinder im Haushalt.

Die räumliche Ballung von Einwanderern wird gemeinhin als Integrationsmaßstab angesehen, wobei dieser Auffassung die Annahme zugrunde liegt, dass Ballungsgebiete mit Gemeinschaften gleichgesetzt werden können. Indem wir uns Ballungsgebiete über einen langen Zeitraum (ein ganzes Jahrhundert) und auf der Ebene individueller Einwanderer ansehen, können wir zeigen, dass in den meisten Ballungsgebieten eine örtliche, aber keine besitzmäßige Kontinuität herrschte. Unter Einwanderern gab es einen hohen Grad an Mobilität, so dass wenig Zeit blieb, irgendeine Form von Zusammenhalt zu entwickeln. Ballungsgebiete können daher nicht mit Gemeinschaften gleichgesetzt werden, und Integration lässt sich nicht dadurch messen, dass man allein auf die Ballungsgebiete schaut.

This article examines generational continuity and kinship patterns in Willingham (England) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and in Kami-shiojiri (Japan) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Willingham few families continued to survive in a given locality for more than a couple of generations in the male line. Yet at the same time local testators left bequests to a wide range of kin in their wills, indicating that, despite the mobility of the population, kinship ties remained important and were acknowledged. For Kami-shiojiri, the almost continuous series of Shumon Aratame-cho (religious faith registers) reveals a gradual change towards smaller and simpler household structures (Ie). In addition, occasional abrupt increases in the numbers of households and in the numbers of messuages (dwelling units) imply that the community as a whole and/or the local overlord did sometimes intervene to reconstruct sections of the village economy and the use of household labour. Households in Kami-shiojiri were larger and more complex than those in England and the population was much more stable, with the mobility rate about half that reported for England. The extent of variation in inheritance patterns within both populations is also discussed, showing that some families persisted for several generations in Willingham and that in Kami-shiojiri more than a third of cases of change of headship of the household, involved a successor who was not the eldest son of the previous head.

One of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing historians of crime and the law is determining what were popular perceptions of criminal behaviour and criminal justice. Each of the articles in this special issue tackles this question by examining the content of British and colonial newspapers that were printed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The choice of this period is significant both for the history of the press, and for that of criminal justice. It was during the eighteenth century that the newspaper became the dominant form of print culture, with readers enjoying an increasing choice of papers that were printed both in London and in the provinces. As literacy rates improved, and because newspaper stories could be read aloud, the audience for newspapers continued to expand. At the same time, the British state attempted new ways of administering criminal justice. The multiplication of the number of offences that carried the death penalty meant that the criminal code gained notoriety as the ‘Bloody Code’, while the Transportation Act of 1718, covering England and Wales, authorized the deportation of English and Welsh criminals to the American colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century London magistrates were experimenting with new methods of urban policing, as fears mounted about how the growing population could be both controlled and protected from crime. Newspapers reported, reflected upon and sometimes debated each of these developments, yet remarkably, it is not until now that historians of crime have analysed in any detail what the content of these newspapers can reveal about contemporary attitudes towards crime and justice.

Spatial concentrations of immigrants are commonly regarded as a measure for integration of migrants into the host society. The underlying assumption is that concentrations can be equated with communities. By looking at concentrations in Utrecht both over a long period of time (a century) and at the level of individual immigrants we show that the concentrations remained in the same locality but showed a high turnover amongst their inhabitants, and thus little time for any form of coherent group to develop. Concentrations can therefore not be equated with communities, and integration cannot be measured by looking at concentrations alone.

In the eighteenth century the newspaper became the most important source for the printed dissemination of criminological stories and information. In bringing together thousands of narratives about crime and justice it far outstripped any other printed source of the period. As the primary literary means of accessing stories and information about crime, it is likely that newspapers influenced their readers' perceptions of and attitudes towards crime and the justice system. This article offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the crime content of one provincial newspaper, The Kentish Post, or Canterbury Newsletter. The study reveals the newspaper to have been constructed to a template, which privileged crime as one of its most important subjects. However, the editorial imperatives of compiling a regular text with an unprecedented number of stories resulted in a discourse of the nature, causes and consequences of crime very different to that expounded in the pamphlet literature, which had been the mainstay of printed discourses about crime before the arrival of newspapers and with which historians are more familiar.

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.

Stories of transported criminals were exchanged in the print culture of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, creating images of the incorrigibility of transported criminals and of the failures of transportation, with many either re-offending in America or returning to do so in England. This discourse also framed images that each side of the Atlantic had of the other. The British learnt that the plantations were a place of slavery, the Americans that the British viewed them as a ‘race of convicts’. This process, involving many layers of discourse in the criminal Atlantic, formed one of the earliest examples of international debates on crime and national identity.

The article explores the roles of household compositional factors and socio-economic status on widowhood and remarriage. By using micro-level data from a nineteenth-century Italian community for the period 1819–1859, we found evidence of the very predominant role of household structure in the decision to remarry for both widows and widowers. In particular, the interplay between the presence of a supportive family network and the presence of coresiding children from previous marriages stood out as the key factors. The presence of children aged 12 and under promoted the search for a new bride for widowers, whilst the presence of children of any age, especially young ones, decreased the chances of remarriage for widows.

This article examines aspects of infant mortality in a discrete part of Kingston upon Thames – the Canbury area – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It highlights the concentration of infant mortality in this area, which was characterized – especially in the 1890s – by an increasingly overcrowded and unhealthy environment, made worse by the proximity of animals to living space. Animal manure attracted flies which, particularly during hot summer months, transmitted disease to infant foodstuffs, especially milk, increasing the incidence of summer diarrhoea. Poor feeding and child-care practices contributed to high levels of infant mortality, a situation acknowledged by Kingston's Medical Officer of Health.

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern Japanese agricultural villages in the period 1716–1870, this study examines the patterns and covariates of remarriage in a rural community with strong adherence to a stem family organization. Event history analysis is applied separately for males and females, and for two types of previous marriage (uxorilocal and virilocal). Controlling for demographic and economic factors, coresiding parents and children had differential impacts on remarriage for these subgroups. Men and women were tightly bound to the fates of their natal and marital households within the larger context of local economic conditions.

As other sources of printed information about crime, such as the Ordinary's Accounts of the lives of executed criminals, lost their audience in the final third of the eighteenth century, newspapers came increasingly to dominate printed discussions of crime. However, no substantial study of the overall nature of newspaper reporting on crime and criminal justice issues has yet been undertaken. By focusing on the London press from the 1780s to the early years of the nineteenth century, this study aims to address a range of questions about the structure of crime and justice reporting, about the selectivity of law and order news and about the types of narratives and discursive structures that can be found at different periods. In particular it highlights the ways in which the multi-vocal, sporadic, brief and sometimes chaotic styles of crime reporting in newspapers created a kaleidoscope of different and often contradictory messages about such issues as the prevalence of violent crime, the effectiveness of policing and penal institutions and the quality of justice meted out by the courts. The printed word had a much less integrative role in relation to law and order issues than historians have sometimes suggested.

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.

This article studies the commemoration and ceremonial culture surrounding the inauguration of new waterworks in British municipalities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyses how new waterworks could be seen as a symbol of a progressive civic government, and how the commemoration of their opening could be used to enhance a city's image. The article also studies the ways in which ideas concerning the purity of new water supplies were constructed. An examination is made of how ceremonial culture and publications reflected the particular politics of waterworks in individual localities, and how such commemoration could serve as a vehicle for the promotion of civic unity.

This article examines the development of formal poor-relief provision across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in rural Germany, through a case study of a district of the Duchy of Württemberg. It presents a detailed picture of practices to support the poor, whether through payments and alms from the poor chest, institutions providing credit, common rights or village and town granaries. In building up a picture of institutional practice, it also presents extensive information on the recipients of relief. It is argued that both the institutional framework and new trends in its development during the period ante-dated the Reformation, and that this society enjoyed a wide and varied capacity to support the poor that bears comparison with the English Old Poor Law. However, in a differing socio-economic context, demand for support remained more limited, and the demographic catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War arrested trends towards increasingly formalized collections, pensions and doles.

This article represents an exercise in microhistory applied to early modern London. Deploying prosopographical methods, it reconstructs the life history of one John Bedford (1601–1667) from his birth in Huntingdon to his death in the West End of London. Much of his adult life was spent in the London parish of St Dionis Backchurch, with an interlude in the Irish town of Londonderry. Bedford fled from Ulster at the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. His unusually detailed will provides the bedrock of this narrative, and his reconstructed life sheds important light on ties between London and Ulster, on debt and credit relations and on the methodological strengths and limitations of community studies that focus on a specific place.

The study documents fluctuations of proto-industrial income, of occupation, debt and presence on land markets across the life course for rural households in a major proto-industrial region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These fluctuations are interpreted on the basis that a major objective of households is to equalize their income across different stages of their development. The permanent income hypothesis is then extended to take into account land purchases and debt-contracting that result from the need to adjust land and capital to fluctuations in the size of the family labour force across the family cycle and from endeavours to improve the family's welfare by increasing the labour to land ratio. The empirical material presented shows marked fluctuations of income from proto-industrial work across the life course and suggests the existence of permanent income-cum-accumulation strategies to cope with these fluctuations.

Focusing upon the interaction between ethnic political elites in Austin, Texas, during the early twentieth century, this study examines (1) the impact of migration upon the dominant white elite's attitudes towards and dealings with the city's subordinate nonwhite ethnies, and (2) the agendas adopted by local African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaders. The article explains why in their efforts to improve conditions for their respective ethnic communities, the African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaderships pursued very different strategies from each other – the former concentrating upon the attainment of more universalist goals, the latter on more multiculturalist ones – and evaluates the effectiveness of these contrasting policies.