This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent ‘Eastern European family pattern’. This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by Richard Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's original observation of non-negligible spatial variation within the supposedly homogeneous North-Western European marriage and family pattern is used here as a starting point to show the true diversity of familial organisation in Eastern Europe, which had been placed at the other end of the spectrum of what was long believed to be a dichotomous division in European family systems. The diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development in historical Eastern Europe presented in this literature should finally free us from a simplistic view of the continent's familial history, and especially from the perspective implied by the notion of a ‘dividing line’.

This paper explores the problems that hampered the effective functioning of charitable activities for the English poor during the later medieval years and sixteenth century and examines how the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 addressed those issues. It considers four types of challenges stemming from individual negligence or greed as well as the systemic legal obstacles that underlay them. The solutions provided by the Elizabethan Poor Laws placed charitable projects on a more solid legal and administrative footing, facilitating their expansion in the following centuries.

This article examines how civic tensions and the rise to prominence of a new class of businessmen contributed to the evolution of police courts in Scottish towns, c.1800 to 1833. It argues that men of property intertwined civic imperatives with their own moral and economic interests in order to effect reform and defend their position, status and influence. It also contends that police courts were important institutions in reflecting and exposing the divisions and shared interests that existed among ‘public men’ and the private interests they sought to promote and safeguard. In doing so, the article highlights social hierarchies – both between men of property and different classes – as an important force in shaping the development and institutional workings of police courts.

The history of town gas is unique in the development of public services in urban areas. Indeed, gas was the subject of the first network infrastructure set up in cities. In Spain, its history is discontinuous because the networks were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. The purpose of this paper is to retrace the steps of the development of the gas network in a region where the Spanish gas companies took the form of early modern businesses. They contributed significantly to the dynamism of local financial markets, both in terms of enterprise configuration, technology dissemination and innovative management. However, the development of the gas industry remained subject to local conditions of supply and demand, to conflicts with local government and suffered from competition from electricity.

In response to the call for more investigation on ‘institutional dynamism’, this article examines the role of power and accidents in causing institutional changes, employing the theoretical perspective of historical institutionalism. The impact of two ‘accidents’ (epidemics) on the institutional setting of a hospital in Hong Kong under different power contexts (changes of political sovereignty) is analysed as a case study. The finding is that power matters more than accidents. This is not to deny the importance of accidents. Accidents matter because they produce windows of opportunity for institutional changes to take place. Through political manoeuvres powerful actors may decide which accidents should cause change.