Household Strategies for Survival 1600-2000

Household Strategies for Survival 1600-2000 PDF

Author: Laurence Fontaine

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780521001427

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This book considers the 'labouring poor' not simply as victims, but as actively pursuing a whole range of strategies for survival. These strategies included many economic activities. Building and maintaining networks of kinship and neighbourhood was equally important, as was negotiating support from institutions. Sometimes, strategies were successfully integrated within a household, while in other instances the domestic group was split and members preferred to pursue individual strategies. This illuminating book examines the European past using case studies from present-day situations in Asia and Africa.

Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism

Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism PDF

Author: Mischa Suter

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-06-02

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 047212885X

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Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

The poor in England 1700–1850

The poor in England 1700–1850 PDF

Author: Alannah Tomkins

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1526137860

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This fascinating study investigates the experience of English poverty between 1700 and 1900 and the ways in which the poor made ends meet. The phrase ‘economy of makeshifts’ has often been used to summarise the patchy, desperate and sometimes failing strategies of the poor for material survival. In The poor of England some of the leading, young historians of welfare examine how advantages gained from access to common land, mobilisation of kinship support, resorting to crime, and other marginal resources could prop up struggling households. The essays attempt to explain how and when the poor secured access to these makeshifts and suggest how the balance of these strategies might change over time or be modified by gender, life-cycle and geography. This book represents the single most significant attempt in print to supply the English ‘economy of makeshifts’ with a solid, empirical basis and to advance the concept of makeshifts from a vague but convenient label to a more precise yet inclusive definition.

Between the Social and the Spatial

Between the Social and the Spatial PDF

Author: Katrien De Boyser

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1317174917

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Since the beginning of the 1990s, the gradual widening of scientific and policy debates on poverty from a narrow focus on income poverty to a more inclusive concept of social exclusion, has made poverty research both more interesting and more complicated. This transition to a more multidimensional conceptualization of poverty forms the background and starting point of this book. Researchers studying the 'social' and 'spatial' dimensions of poverty have only started to challenge and explore the boundaries of each other's research perspectives and instruments. This book brings together these different bodies of literature on the intersection of spatial and social exclusion for the first time, by providing a state-of-the art review written by internationally-recognized experts who critically reflect on the theoretical status of their research on social exclusion, and on the implications this has for future research and policy-making agendas.

Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Northern Europe

Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Northern Europe PDF

Author: Ole Peter Grell

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1351931407

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This volume looks at how northern European governments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coped with the needs of the poor, whilst balancing any new measures against the perceived negative effects of relief upon the moral wellbeing of the poor and issues of social stability. Taken together, the essays in this volume chart the varying responses of states, social classes and political theorists towards the great social and economic issue of the age, industrialisation. Its demands and effects undermined the capacity of the old poor relief arrangements to look after those people that the fits and starts of the industrialisation cycle itself turned into paupers. The result was a response that replaced the traditional principle of 'outdoor' relief, with a generally repressive system of 'indoor' relief that lasted until the rise of organised labour forced a more benign approach to the problems of poverty.

Women in Eighteenth Century Europe

Women in Eighteenth Century Europe PDF

Author: Margaret Hunt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 131788387X

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Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Michael J. Halvorson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 135194567X

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Numerous historical studies use the term "community'" to express or comment on social relationships within geographic, religious, political, social, or literary settings, yet this volume is the first systematic attempt to collect together important examples of this varied work in order to draw comparisons and conclusions about the definition of community across early modern Europe. Offering a variety of historical and theoretical approaches, the sixteen original essays in this collection survey major regions of Western Europe, including France, Geneva, the German Lands, Italy and the Spanish Empire, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland. Complementing the regional diversity is a broad spectrum of religious confessions: Roman Catholic communities in France, Italy, and Germany; Reformed churches in France, Geneva, and Scotland; Lutheran communities in Germany; Mennonites in Germany and the Netherlands; English Anglicans; Jews in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands; and Muslim converts returning to Christian England. This volume illuminates the variety of ways in which communities were defined and operated across early modern Europe: as imposed by community leaders or negotiated across society; as defined by belief, behavior, and memory; as marked by rigid boundaries and conflict or by flexibility and change; as shaped by art, ritual, charity, or devotional practices; and as characterized by the contending or overlapping boundaries of family, religion, and politics. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the complex and changeable nature of community in an era more often characterized as a time of stark certainties and inflexibility. As a result, the volume contributes a vital resource to the ongoing efforts of scholars to understand the creation and perpetuation of communities and the significance of community definition for early modern Europeans.

Thieves in Court

Thieves in Court PDF

Author: Rebekka Habermas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1108633390

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From the seemingly insignificant theft of some bread and a dozen apples in nineteenth century rural Germany, to the high courts and modern-day property laws, this English-language translation of Habermas' Diebe vor Gericht explores how everyday incidents of petty stealing and the ordinary people involved in these cases came to shape the current legal system. Habermas draws from an unusual cache of archival documents of theft cases, tracing the evolution and practice of the legal system of Germany through the nineteenth century. This close reading, relying on approaches of legal anthropology, challenges long-standing narratives of legal development, state building, and modern notions of the rule of law. Ideal for legal historians and scholars of modern German and nineteenth-century European history, this innovative volume steps outside the classic narratives of legal history and gives an insight into the interconnectedness of social, legal and criminal history.