To assess claims about the role of the extended family in late imperial Chinese society, we examine the influence of kin network characteristics on marriage, reproduction, and attainment in Liaoning Province in Northeast China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We compare the influences on outcomes of the number and status of different types of kin as well as the seniority of the individual within each type of kin group. We find that the characteristics of kin outside the household did matter for individual outcomes but that patterns of effects were nuanced. While based on our results we concur that kin networks were important units of social and economic organization in late imperial China, we conclude that their role was complex.

This article studies how policy on venereal disease participated in the construction of twentieth-century Swedish citizenship. Contact tracing and mandatory medical treatment, the two cornerstones of the Swedish attempt to eradicate venereal disease, became part of the contemporary citizenship discourse. Policy on venereal disease in Sweden was administered by infectious disease officers in every county and provincial physicians in every district. These civil servants were helped by the local police, who searched for recalcitrant patients. To be fully entitled to the rights of free medical care required extensive cooperation from the ill, some of whom found it impossible to comply. In Stockholm women were more frequently targeted by this legislation and were often treated more severely.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of comparative economic history, focusing on recent debates concerning alternative pathways of development in Europe and Asia, the agricultural systems of early modern England and the lower Yangzi region in China, and the historical demography of Eurasia. The article concludes that such debates support the perspective that there is substantial path dependency and contingency in economic history and that alternative development paths can be discerned across and within Europe and Asia.

Victor Lieberman'sStrange Parallels is the culmination of an extended effort to compare many major polities of the Eurasian continent in the early modern age. Lieberman finds common cycles of administrative integration and disintegration that were increasingly synchronized over time. Although he does not give a single-factor explanation for this synchronization, his model provides a common vocabulary for political, economic, and cultural analysis that can inspire all comparative world historians. China, however, is missing from this analysis, even though its dynastic cycles share much with the other polities. China's ambivalent position in Eurasia deserves comparative study because of divergent interpretations of Chinese dynastic relations with frontier warriors, the strong influence of Chinese trade and power on its neighbors’ polities, and China's long-lasting cultural and bureaucratic tradition.

Population aging in France in the nineteenth century concerned mainly women, as men's life spans increased only after World War I. The article assesses the impact of this gender-differentiated aging process on wealth distribution, using individual data on bequests collected for the period 1800-1939. Over time, more women died without assets. But those who owned assets were richer. As a result, women's aging contributed both to a more unequal wealth distribution and to narrowing the gender gap between asset owners.

Peter C. Perdue's China Marches Westargues that the Qing dynasty's ability to break through historical territorial barriers on China's northwestern frontier reflected greater Manchu familiarity with steppe culture than their Chinese predecessors had exhibited, reinforced by superior commercial, technical, and symbolic resources and the benefits of a Russian alliance. Qing imperial expansion illustrated patterns of territorial consolidation apparent as well in Russia's forward movement in Inner Asia and, ironically, in the heroic, if ultimately futile, projects of the western Mongols who fell victim to the Qing. After summarizing Perdue's thesis, this essay extends his comparisons geographically and chronologically to argue that between 1600 and 1800 states ranging from western Europe through Japan to Southeast Asia exhibited similar patterns of political and cultural integration and that synchronized integrative cycles across Eurasia extended from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet in its growing vulnerability to Inner Asian domination, China proper—along with other sectors of the “exposed zone” of Eurasia—exemplified a species of state formation that was reasonably distinct from trajectories in sectors of Eurasia that were protected against Inner Asian conquest.