The historiography of bankruptcy and insolvency in the early modern era focusses on merchants and banks. The position of landowning noble elites in insolvency procedures has less often been explored. The Lower Austrian Lamberg seigneurial archive contains rich documentation on the insolvency procedures against the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein – one of the largest landowning families in Lower Austria – between 1735 and 1768. Based on this source material, this article presents a case study treating the question of how political and judicial authorities in the Habsburg Empire dealt with insolvent aristocrats. The analysis is contextualized by a detailed reconstruction of the debt and asset structure of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein estate. The most important policy enacted to regulate the debt crisis of the noble landowners was ‘judicial administrations’ during which a judicial official took over the administration of the landed patrimony and other assets. Compared to official norms regarding insolvency procedures, creditors had little say in how the debtors’ property was managed, and measures were taken to partially preserve the debtors’ wealth and social status. The majority of creditors were nobles. Non-noble creditors also acquired bonds on less favourable legal terms and ended up as losers in the debt crisis.

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. It does so through an examination of 195 petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, which sought the cancellation of their indentures on grounds of ‘immoderate correction’. It offers a quantitative overview of the surviving petitions, examining the proportion that featured allegations of violence, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described, and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material considered here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers what implications this might have for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship, and a genre of document – the petition – that provides access to these issues.

In early modern Venice, credit was ubiquitous, with various lenders offering long- and short- term loans. This article traces the structure of the Venetian credit market in the eighteenth century and examines the borrowing opportunities available to the local population, focusing in particular on consumer credit. The research studies how people approached credit in a pre-industrial society, and what factors may have shaped the ways through which they accessed borrowing. More broadly, how did Venetian households cope with uncertainty? Was the local credit market able to offer borrowers multiple, equally viable options? The article explores the interaction between the supply and demand for credit, emphasising the organised nature of the Venetian market. Ultimately, it argues that even loans that appeared to have unfavourable conditions could, in practice, be quite attractive to borrowers.

Historians have agreed that the gender division of labour in rural households was broadly similar across the whole of northern and western Europe during the early modern period. Until recently, however, there has been a lack of detailed data about the historical division of labour within European countries with which to test the validity of such cross-cultural generalizations. New research that has collected evidence of work tasks for early modern Sweden and England now makes it possible to undertake a direct comparison of two European countries. In this article, the gender division of labour in agriculture, craft production and commerce in Sweden and England is compared to demonstrate the complexity of historical gender divisions of labour. It presents a detailed picture of the gender division of labour that not only shows differences between the two countries but also demonstrates flexibility and adaptability in the allocation of work between women and men. As a consequence, we argue that neither broad generalizations nor single causes are adequate explanations for the patterns observed.

In this article, I explain how peasant communities were affected by fire disasters in North Ostrobothnia in northern Finland during the seventeenth century. Unlike previous research mainly based on dendrochronological data aimed at dating these fire disasters’ scope and occurrence, I focus on the socio-economic consequences of wildfires from both a bottom-up and a top-down perspective in order to establish different factors of resilience and vulnerability. Through the analysis of local district court protocols, tax records and Swedish legislation, the article explains how and why fires occurred and what role peasant common-pool institutions and the early modern Swedish state played in this development. The results show how peasant communities were able to bounce back from recurrent events of fire disasters thanks to close cooperation between them and Swedish officials, the reinvigorated medieval relief institution of fire support (Swe. brandstod), and owing to the robustness of the peasants’ common-pool institutions.

Business failure was a key moment of crisis for family relations, when obligations to kin were tested and liabilities negotiated. Family ties have generally been regarded as a positive resource, and a key form of insurance against failure, but in practice the terms and conditions of assistance could be a matter of delicate negotiation. Focusing on a case study from nineteenth-century Sheffield, the article uses personal and business correspondence to reveal the different positions of family members in managing failure, and the emotional tensions that accompanied this process. Through cooperation, assets could be protected and the family name preserved from the shame and expense associated with the formal process of bankruptcy. However, the family’s response to failure also highlighted differences between grades of kin and across generations. Direct financial support was one option, but separation of assets was an alternative way of proceeding that could offer strategic benefits. The case demonstrates the role of microhistorical study for exploring the tensions and emotions that could be generated within families. Responses to financial crisis highlight the role of family relations and emotion as important factors in understanding economic behaviour.

This article examines local credit markets and debt networks in Austria during the eighteenth century. Since professional financial institutions were inaccessible to the wider population, orphans who had inherited were a source of credit alongside kin or local institutions. Reasons for borrowing included investments, taxes or deferred payments. Events in the life-course, such as marriage and inheritance, could trigger debt relations, which were thus closely intertwined with other social relations and structured by legal practice. Guardians were appointed to administer the inheritance of children who had lost one or both of their parents, to invest it profitably and to prevent misuse by their (step-)parents or local authorities. They were often relatives or local dignitaries whose personal networks were crucial in allocating capital, and wealthy orphans could extend credit to a large number of people. Using a sample of mortgage deeds and guardianship accounts, we examine the practices of guardianship and local credit, such as the reasons for lending and borrowing, the investment strategies of guardians and the conditions and securitization of credit within and outside kinship and in varying familial constellations. In addition, we look at the position of different groups within local credit networks using social network analysis.

This article focuses on early modern rural economic practices, investigating the scope for action that emerges when we trace how money was handled, loaned and borrowed. The aim is to contextualize probate inventories and interlink them with other sources to reveal the plurality of economic activities in which people engaged. We look at two case studies from early modern southern Tyrol between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries: a wealthy widow who held her first husband’s agricultural estate in usufruct and managed it successfully over many years, and an innkeeper whose probate inventory is testament to his substantial businesses, commercial activities and family financial dealings. Both can be termed rural entrepreneurs based on their skilful economic activity, from lending and trading to saving, which only becomes apparent when the legal procedures and documents are closely examined. The main sources are local court records, and in the first case we examine their interlinkage based on a database. The results not only expand our knowledge of female and male rural actors but also enable us to observe social groups and their pluri-activities and credit relations, particularly within the middle stratum of a rural economy a socio-economic middle stratum that has received little attention to date.