We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.

This article considers how the capitalist practices and organisation of hand papermaking framed the coming of mechanised paper production during the Age of Revolutions. The lived experience of making paper by hand had been as tightly wrapped as the synchronised toil of its workers and the trade's wage system. Neither the ’industrial Enlightenment’ nor an ‘industrious revolution’ had transformed paper production. Instead, the papermaking machine drew on and unravelled a durable web of skilled toil, custom, compensation, worktime, and shopfloor relationships. In doing so, the inventor of this device, Nicolas-Louis Robert, imagined that it would offer the manufacturers unfettered sway over their shops; indeed, he privileged this purpose above efficiency and productivity. That mastery remained incomplete, however, as paper producers still required men who had mastered the trade's tacit knowledge about such matters as pulp, finish, and the proper weather for production.

Since the publication of the seminal book of essays Household and family in past time in 1972, much research on the history of the family has concentrated on the situation in western and eastern Europe, and relied almost exclusively on census-type documents. It is, for example, established that whereas mean household size was small, the mean age at first marriage fairly high and neo-localism (the formation of an independent household on marriage) dominant in western Europe, almost the opposite applied in eastern Europe. Yet these findings do not preclude the possibility of discovering regions where in statistical terms the mean household size was not large and the proportion of complex households not particularly high, but where the neo-local mode of household formation was not the norm. Such a region could have a preference for joint families (two or more married sons co-residing with their father) with a low-fertility demographic regime, or stem families (one co-residing married son) with that of intermediate to low fertility.

Traditional Japan is an example of just such a stem-family society. There the household, not the individual, was perceived as the basic social and legal unit of society. This unit was called ie and its headship, authority and property were expected to be handed down from the father to a particular son, enabling the household to follow alternating stages of ‘simple’, ‘multiple’ and ‘extended’ forms over the developmental cycle, more or less in accordance with the predictions of Lutz Berkner. As articles in the section of Laslett and Wall's Household and family on Japan have already shown, the mean household size in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan was not higher than that in England, but the mean age at marriage was lower than in the English population. Moreover, household formation and succession rules under the Japanese ie system were not compatible with the simple family mode.

This article offers an approach through administrative and cultural history to the problems associated with gathering and processing data for the Spanish national census of 1920, and by implication for earlier Spanish censuses. It focuses on the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, making use of correspondence between the central statistical office in Madrid, the provincial jefe de estadística and the localities, and of reports on three problematic towns within the province. The issues that emerge regarding ‘undercounting’, the definition of administrative boundaries and the classification of demographic characteristics are set in the wider context of census-taking practices and problems elsewhere in Spain and in other cultures.

This article addresses a 250-year episode of human colonisation, community growth and subsequent decline on the small Greek island of Antikythera (ad 1770 to present), focusing on rich documentary sources from four decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. In particular, a series of nominal censuses and accompanying agricultural statistics can be combined with intensive landscape archaeological survey evidence to explore evidence for changing nineteenth-century households, household economies, and how these are manifest across an entire physical landscape. We also contextualise this well-recorded, most recent historical episode within the island's deeper population history stretching back at least seven millennia.

Galicia is a region located in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, where, historically, illegitimacy was often high compared with levels elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, Galicia's coastal and inland areas have always differed greatly in terms of farming structure, population growth, migration patterns, family types and inheritance systems. The aim of this article is to establish to what extent the trends in and levels of illegitimacy between 1570 and 1899 were influenced by these different historical contexts. It also offers an in-depth examination of unmarried mothers, showing that the trend towards bearing more than one illegitimate child rose over time. Ultimately, the article argues that illegitimacy is best studied at a local or regional level, rather than at the macro level that historians have often employed elsewhere in Europe.

Few studies have dealt with the issue of people living alone in pretransitional rural populations. Alone by choice or circumstances, usually poor and sometimes stigmatised, solitaries often had a hard life. This article analyses the characteristics and life-histories of people living alone in two rural villages in nineteenth-century Italy with the aim of understanding whether and how solitaries managed to find a way out from solitude. The results show that solitaries got married, joined another household, and especially emigrated more than the rest of the population, which is a strong indication of their willingness to break out of solitariness. The individuation of the demographic profile associated with such specific behaviours, namely being male, young, and widowed, allowed us also to draw some hypotheses on the role of availability and quality of social connections on the chances to escape from a solitary condition, as well as on the characteristics of migratory flows of solitaries from the countryside to the cities.

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.

This article is a study of single mothers in Lyon in the nineteenth century, including what happened to them after they gave birth to an illegitimate child. Unmarried mothers have been the subject of much previous research on different countries but such studies often begin with the last days of the pregnancy and stop a few days after the delivery. Our aim is to look at the life course of single mothers before pregnancy and after delivery. In Lyon, at the time the second French city in terms of population, we studied 2,000 unwed mothers, some of them multiparous, noting their extensive geographical mobility and the frequency of their moves within the city.

Focusing on the shipping sector, this article discusses the influence of labour migrants from rural areas on economic development in Copenhagen and Stockholm during the long eighteenth century. During this period, the two cities developed in markedly different ways; Copenhagen flourished while Stockholm stagnated, and the qualitative and quantitative contribution of migrants was essential in facilitating these differences. Both capitals were maritime hubs that relied on a constant influx of mariners who originated from the two cities’ rural hinterlands. By examining different characteristics of the migrant mariners and the improvements of mariners’ human capital across the eighteenth century, this article emphasises the importance of the shipping sector as well as labour migration in the socio-economic development of Copenhagen and Stockholm.

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.

The acceptance of mapmaking in medieval and early modern Europe was neither a uniform nor a linear process. Comparing two neighbouring regions in the Low Countries, we explain the varying appetite for maps and mapmaking first by unravelling how people dealt with space before the introduction of modern mapmaking and, second, by identifying the actors that actively promoted its adoption. In regions where local elites had already been considering space as a commodity with a preference for clear-cut, geometric forms before the introduction of mapmaking, the latter was enthusiastically accepted and rapidly became instrumental in propagating this ‘modern’ concept of space. Other regions did not develop this appetite for mapmaking and continued to prefer different and more negotiable representations of space.