This article evaluates the presence of Muslim communities in the Kingdom of Navarre in the late Middle Ages. Following the Christian Reconquest of the Navarrese bank of the Ebro in 1119, a sizeable Muslim community remained in Christian territory until 1516. This article focuses on the fifteenth century, a period for which religious coexistence in the smallest of the Iberian Christian kingdoms is in need of further contextualisation. An analysis of existing scholarship and new archival evidence throws light on the economic activities of the Muslims in Tudela as well as on their relationship with the Navarrese monarchy, their collective identity, their legal systems and their relationships not only with their Christian and Jewish neighbours, but also with other Iberian Muslim communities including those of Al Andalus, or Moorish Iberia.

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.

This article focuses on local agency in two near-famines in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Flanders. Our comparative analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845–1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and a formal way. The main thesis is that the impact of hunger crises in peasant societies is directly related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more-or-less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis has always had local roots.

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.

Notwithstanding its relevance, social mobility has not been at the forefront of the agenda for historians of the Middle Ages. The first part of this paper deals with the reasons for this lack of interest, highlighting the role of historical models such as the French ‘feudal revolution’, the neo-Malthusian interpretations, the English commercialisation model and the great narrative of Italian medieval merchants. The second part assesses the extent to which this lack of interest has been challenged by conceptions of social space and social mobility developed in recent decades by sociologists and anthropologists. Therefore, it is really important to indicate the gaps in our understanding, and to clarify research questions, technical problems and methods. The paper examines the constitutive elements of social identities, the plurality of social ladders, and the channels of social mobility. It touches upon the performative role of learned representations, and upon the constraints imposed upon human agency by family practices and genre. It underlines the importance of studying the mobility inside social groups, and argues that we must distinguish between two different types of medieval social mobility: autogenous social mobility, and endogenous or conflictual social mobility.

This article explores the role of kinship in the Swedish tobacco industry of 1898, making use of rich data that cover the entire industry and include both men and women. The focus is on the role of families in labour recruitment, which is often claimed to have been important. In this case, however, it was not the norm to have a father in the same industry. Occupational following was clearly a gendered phenomenon. To follow in the footsteps of fathers was more common among young men than among other groups of workers, and occupational following was associated with higher earnings for male but not for female workers.

A survey of working-class women's activity as savers offers a new insight into their economic activity, opening questions about the sources inside and outside the family of the money saved by single and married women. It is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family. A study of investment patterns within two savings banks, one in Huddersfield and one in Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that working-class women may have been more active as savers than has been reported by earlier studies.

This article explores how the reputations and agency of middling and plebeian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were affected by what they wore. Compared with provincial England, markets for women's clothes in the capital were more diverse and accessible. Ambiguous moral judgments were made of women based on their dress, but many sought to acquire good, fashionable attire as the right clothes would improve their options in terms of courtship, sociability and employment, as well as facilitating their ability to negotiate the metropolitan environment and providing them with a ready store of capital. Clothes were thus contested commodities which helped define the limits of the possible for women in early modern London.

Based on the processing of statistical data concerning population and the major cultural infrastructures in the Italian regions from 1863 on, this article aims to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the ‘Mezzogiorno’ have had not only lesser incomes than those of the inhabitants of the Central and Northern regions, but also smaller chances to make use of Italy's cultural assets, considered in a broad sense. In the long run these disadvantages have strengthened the already high social disparities between the Centre, North and South of Italy and help to explain the roots of the dualism between the two parts of the country.

The central argument of this article is that current historical research into early modern retail growth and practices has focused too narrowly on the retail of durables (perhaps with the exception of colonial groceries) and on retailers' guilds. The role of food-producing and/or food-retailing guilds hitherto has received less attention. Research into retail practices has not connected to an older (but still lively) research tradition in which the consumption of basic foodstuffs received the bulk of attention. We argue that if selling bread is approached as a ‘system of provision’, competing retail circuits and the different ways in which subsequent subsistence crises affected each of those circuits offer an additional explanation (next to well-documented changes in demand) for the inclusion of other basic provisions, colonial groceries, clothing, and even durables in the assortment of traditional food-producing and food-retailing guild masters, in this case the Leuven bakers.

This article examines the many ways that stolen goods were sold and circulated in late eighteenth-century Bristol. It argues that while historians have been correct to identify the contemporary importance of second-hand markets and the ‘informal economy’ to the sale of stolen property, some of the ways that stolen goods markets have been described and conceptualised are not fully supported by the evidence from Bristol. This raises questions about the extent to which models of crime based on London can be applied to cities in provincial England. The article also examines the influence that timing, appearance and location had on the way that stolen goods were sold.

While previous studies showed a drop in residential segregation over time, calculated dissimilarity and isolation indices for 1941 show a halt in the decreasing segregation among Jews in Amsterdam. Furthermore, persons of Jewish origin who had left Judaism appear to have lived mainly in different districts from those who belonged to Jewish congregations, indicating that district of residence can serve as a reflection of the assimilation process. Moreover, analyses of life histories of about 700 Jewish persons show that being born outside the Jewish neighbourhood increased the likelihood that an individual would leave Judaism, while living outside the Jewish neighbourhood during adolescence increased the likelihood of marrying a Gentile; these results refine our understanding of the impact of residential segregation.

This paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

This article examines the arguments used in the Netherlands to admit or exclude asylum seekers during the Cold War era. There is consensus that gaining asylum in the 1960s was not that difficult – especially when compared with current practices – because Cold War migrants were ‘the enemies of our enemy’. By analysing 36 detailed individual case files, this article questions the oft-sung mantra of an unproblematic asylum procedure for these ‘anti-communists’ in the Netherlands. We will see that the restrictive Dutch authorities frequently changed their anti-asylum decisions as a result of interventions from the outside. Outsiders' pleas, underpinned by a variety of arguments, often resulted in admission, but rarely in the attainment of refugee status.