This article aims to analyse how the intertwining of politics and religion, economic transformation due to industrialisation, and family influence each contributed to the abandonment of the traditional, religious marriage calendar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Barcelona Area or the Oficialitat de Barcelona, the most populated deanery among the four that comprised the Diocese of Barcelona. We make use of the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database, covering the period 1715–1880, to calculate descriptive statistics and linear probability models. Our main findings indicate a progressive change in marriage seasonality; with an increasing number of marriages taking place during Lent across the nineteenth century, as well as the emergence of a December peak in marriages in the first third of that century. Although the primary occupational sector was declining, farmers tended to adhere to the traditional marriage calendar, while the upper classes and artisans were increasingly likely to marry during Lent. During periods of Liberal political influence, which were marked by steps toward secularization, the proportion of marriages taking place during Lent increased. However, independent of the political period, Lenten marriages tended to be passed from one generation to the next, confirming the continuing influence of the family on the timing of marriages in Spain.

Socialist Yugoslavia and Zambia became dynamic Cold War partners in the Non-Aligned Movement, with extensive cooperation in economic development, national defence, and international diplomacy. This article explores the roots of this “East–South” cooperation by looking at the pioneering contacts between North Rhodesian and Yugoslav trade unions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how Yugoslav trade union officials opened up new perspectives for the Yugoslav organized labour movement as it reached out to the “global” at a time of rising decolonization and incipient non-alignment. Further, it offers a nuanced perspective on Cold War trade union internationalism and sheds new light on the politicization of the Zambian labour movement. The article shows that the national trade union federations and their officials on both sides were proactive sociopolitical actors, paving the way for future diplomatic contacts akin to “workers’ proto-diplomacy”.

Although real wages have long been a cornerstone of our understanding of the premodern economy, in recent years historians have become sceptical about their usefulness as a proxy for living standards. One of the main concerns is that, before industrialization, most households did not depend on wages but were self-employed. This article therefore proposes a new methodology to test the representativeness of real wage series for the general population by comparing changes in the purchasing power of builders’ wages with the relative position of building labourers in tax lists. Not surprisingly, it confirms their exceptional position, which evolved according to remuneration. Instead of disregarding the unreal wages, the methodology shows a promising path forward. The relationship between changes in wage income and the relative position in fiscal sources can be exploited to identify other groups who were or became dependent on this type of labour. Accordingly, it holds the potential to retrace shifts in the functional distribution of income and the wage systems for different groups in the premodern economy.

This paper investigates the labour market for female servants in England and Wales between 1780 and 1834, using previously unexplored archival materials alongside qualitative sources. After introducing the dataset, the study provides a micro-level analysis of wage determinants and traces the sources and evolution of employer market power. The findings show that real wages fell substantially during the early decades of the nineteenth century and stagnated throughout the period from 1780 to 1834. Amid rising cost-of-living pressures in the early 1800s, declining real wages were accompanied by increased nominal wage bunching, suggesting greater employer market power. These trends are contextualized with insights from servants’ autobiographies and household manuals. The combined quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that service labour markets were highly localized, employers coordinated wage-setting and working conditions, and servants faced barriers to job mobility due to living in tied housing, difficulties in recovering unpaid wages, and the critical role of character references. The results indicate that employers in the largest segment of the labour market had considerable wage-setting power, which intensified during the early years of industrialization.

This paper is a review of existing sources across disciplines focusing on the topic of female farm ownership. Throughout the centuries, females have been explicitly excluded from owning and prevented from inheriting land. The purpose of this paper is to examine historical customs and rules governing female land ownership in Ireland and to demonstrate how the ‘old’ laws and customs have contributed significantly to the patriarchal system of farm ownership that is still in existence today even though the gender-based laws have disappeared. This paper argues that a contributing factor to the current male-dominated farm ownership figures is the normalisation of patriarchy by way of the old, gendered laws and practices. Although gender discrimination is no longer acceptable in such a direct legal form, the tradition and culture that established and supported such customs can still be seen today, as males account for 87% of Irish farmholders. This research addresses a lacuna in our understanding of women’s unequal position when it comes to the ownership of farms in Ireland.

This article examines conflicting notions of political home or homeland (waṭan) in the early twentieth-century Western Indian Ocean. In a period of colonial consolidation and shifts in trans-oceanic mobility, determining political belonging took on urgency for both British officials and Omani intellectuals and migrants. This article examines how, in contrast to both anti-colonial nationalists and British colonial officials, homeland in Omani religious scholarship was neither bounded territorially nor articulated through origins or subjecthood. Yet, it was spatial, affective, and hierarchically determined. And, it was manifest, embodied, and performed in the daily requirements of prayer. Spatial but not territorial, necessary but personally, hierarchically, and affectively decided, this pious notion of homeland has for the most part been replaced by the nation-state form. Yet, legacies of attachment to waṭan outside the bounded territorial model occasionally surface, operating as a simultaneous, but not synonymous, expression of political and personal belonging.

This paper explores the modernisation of rural Southern Italy between 1950 and 1962, focusing on the role of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public entity created to address the socio-economic divide between the North and South of Italy. The Cassa was central to the restructuring of rural areas, promoting land reclamation, infrastructure development, and the electrification of agricultural regions. The study examines how the ‘agrarian question’ intersected with the broader ‘Southern question’, reflecting persistent economic disparities within Italy. By analysing the early stages (1950–1962) of extraordinary intervention, this article demonstrates that modernisation efforts were aimed not only at reducing regional imbalances but also at addressing structural deficiencies that hindered agricultural productivity. While significant progress was made in modernising rural Southern Italy, this paper argues that the foundational agricultural reforms, although vital, needed to be complemented by broader industrial policies to ensure long-term socio-economic convergence with the more developed North.

This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and dependency on wage labour. For labourers’ and farmers’ households alike, textile production at home became more important; in the 1860s, half of the labouring households owned spinning wheels and weaving looms, and for farmer households, the shares were even higher. Our study reveals not only the dynamism of the rural pre-industrial Swedish economy but also the unequal nature of this dynamism.

Through an in-depth exploration into the Norwich weavers’ riots in 1829 and Swing Riot protests in Swanton Abbott, Norfolk, in January 1831, this article shows urban and rural protests were linked together in multifaceted ways. When these two protests are situated in the context of urban-rural relations, it becomes clear that the participants were part of an active renegotiation of the relationship between city and country brought on because the pressures of industrialization were pushing the two together in ways that many found threatening. Each of those involved had a different vision for what this relationship should look like, as well as a vested interest in ensuring this vision prevailed. By foregrounding how these participants approached the boundaries between urban and rural worlds, this research emphasizes the ways this boundary could be a crucial point of contention in early industrial Britain.