Population developments in the western European countryside not only show strong fluctuations during the later Middle Ages, but they also exhibit sharp regional differences. By investigating and comparing developments in three parts of the Low Countries this study tries to shed more light on the causes underlying these regional diversities. In this connection, particular attention will be paid to differences in the social distribution of landownership. Examination of the data at regional level indicates that property structures were indeed an important factor in late-medieval population trends. Later sections of the article investigate the various factors which shaped the interrelationships between population growth, density and property structures, thus contributing to a clearer comprehension of the different demographic histories of the three regions and a better understanding of regional diversities in late-medieval population developments in general.

Over half of all victims of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) were children. Many of these deaths took place in the union workhouses: institutions of government poor relief which for many were the last resort in a desperate struggle to survive famine-induced conditions such as starvation and infectious disease. Archaeological excavations of a mass burial ground dating to 1847–1851 at the former workhouse in Kilkenny City have provided the opportunity to undertake a detailed interdisciplinary exploration of non-adult mortality in an Irish workhouse during the height of the Famine.

In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent – access to property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes, the ‘best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according to statistics, is being in the labour market’.

Labour markets have almost always had gender disparities, with women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's disadvantaged position.

The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

Ever since research on the Hanse began in the nineteenth century, there have been repeated efforts to redefine the boundaries and the core of the phenomenon. Views of the Hanse have evolved, and it has been seen by turns as a profoundly German league of towns, and as a network or organisation of towns and traders that was present in commercial centres and harbours from Novgorod to Portugal, and from Norway to Italy. In more general discussions on the institutional development of commerce in Europe, many of them influenced by the New Institutional Economics, the Hanse has even appeared as a mega-guild. The revival of the field of institutional economics and the history of commerce in pre-modern Europe has recently spawned a reappraisal of Hanseatic sources. The present article contributes to this debate by arguing that from the perspective of conflict management, the late medieval and early modern Hanse was an institution. There were several institutional mechanisms, such as a strong preference for mediation and arbitration in conflicts between individuals, as well as a mediation strategy for internal conflicts between towns. All of these mechanisms combined in a multifaceted institution of conflict management, which represented the added value of Hanse membership for traders, and for their towns.

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.

Typologies of marriage patterns in early modern Europe have been formulated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. However, demographic and anthropological studies have noticed that marriage patterns in the Balkan area have exhibited such great variability that it is difficult to classify them in any of the categories proposed by Laslett. This article examines the marriage patterns in Greece and some of her island populations in the time-span of the twentieth century. Although the marriage patterns examined do not conform to any pre-defined typology, it seems that up to the first half of the twentieth century the pattern of mainland Greece constituted an intermediate case between the West and the East European marriage patterns but that that on the islands was totally different. The marriage patterns on the Ionian Islands had more features in common with the West European pattern, while the marriage pattern of the Cyclades reveals certain characteristics (but not all) of the Mediterranean pattern.

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the English was ‘individualistic’, Habbakuk to explore the strategies by which the English aristocracy maintained its supremacy and Mingay and others to settle the debate about the effect of enclosure on the small landowner. The early modern land market has rarely, if ever, been seen as worthy of discussion in its own right.

Even after the unification of Germany in 1871, political power continued to be fragmented. The Bismarckian constitution was superimposed on a collection of previously independent states: it acknowledged their continued existence as historical regions, granted them their own constitutions, state parliaments, and extensive legislative and executive powers. At a regional level, different perceptions of the appropriate role of the state continued to exist, with Prussian centralism contrasting with the laissez-faire amateurism of Bremen and Hamburg. The creation of centralized Reich (German Empire) agencies, such as the Imperial Health Office, failed to guarantee an effective implementation of German Empire decrees, and the administrative structure of individual states remained diverse. Indeed despite increasing pressure to create a uniform nation state and standardized administrative procedures, there were still 25 separate states in 1914. In relation to the structure of medical services and the formulation of medical policy, a significant degree of regional variation persisted into the twentieth century.

This article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

Studies of modern famines have found disproportionately high mortality amongst adult men. The most commonly suggested root of this ‘female mortality advantage’ is biological, and it seems to be strongest when starvation is the main cause of death. The present study is the first to investigate the phenomenon in an early-modern society. Looking at the famines of 1597 and 1623 in northwest England, it finds some evidence for a female mortality advantage in 1623, but that this was concentrated in the first 12 months of the crisis (after the 1622 harvest). The female advantage was also much greater in north Lancashire and Westmorland than it was in the wealthier western Lancashire plain. Together this supports the idea that there was actual starvation during the 1623 crisis, at least in these areas at these times. There are, however, some reasons to suppose that the most mortal phase of the crisis, around the winter of 1623–1624, took place at a time when food was becoming more widely available, and hence should be attributed to diseases that followed the famine.