Adapting methods to needs: studying fertility and nuptiality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Belgium

The authors describe and evaluate a series of historical demographic methods that fall between family reconstitution and aggregative methods and that were developed during a study of the demographic impact of early industrialization on the processes of fertility, nuptiality, and migration in Verviers, Belgium. The methods involve the use of truncated fertility histories for the first few years of marriage rather than complete fertility histories. The authors suggest that the methods proposed are an effective means of reducing the cost of accumulating data while increasing the number of cases studied.     

Migrants and the diffusion of low marital fertility in Belgium

Although the diffusion of fertility behavior between different social strata in historical communities has received considerable attention in recent studies, the relationship between the diffusion of fertility behavior and the diffusion of people (migration) during the nineteenth century remains largely underexplored. Evidence from population registers compiled in the Historical Database of the Liège Region, covering the period of 1812 to 1900, reveals that migrant couples in Sart, Belgium, from 1850 to 1874 and from 1875 to 1899 had a reduced risk of conception. The incorporation of geographical mobility, as well as the migrant status of both husbands and wives, into this fertility research sheds light not only on the spread of ideas and behaviors but also on the possible reasons why the ideas and behaviors of immigrants might have been similar to, or different from, those of a native-born population.     

Commerce and morality in eighteenth-century Italy

This paper would like to discuss some aspects of current trends in studies on eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. In the first part it addresses recent approaches devoted to the reconstruction of the conceptualization of Eastern Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, which have often been inspired by the work of Edward Said and Martin Bernal. These include Larry Woolf's Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). Michael Confino has provided a detailed critique of Woolf's approach. It can be argued that Woolf is in fact projecting Cold War divisions back into the eighteenth century.

The article argues in favour of a less “Orientalising” approach to the history of Eastern Europe, by proving an alternative overview of the historical dimensions of the eastern (and northern) regions of Europe in the eighteenth century. Eastern Europe was inextricably connected to its western European neighbours. Without Eastern Europe, European history is incomplete and incomprehensible.

In the third part the article argues that the interpretative framework of the “first crisis of the Old Regime”, which Franco Venturi outlined in his Settecento riformatore in the 19870s and 1980s represented a subtle rejection of the East/West dichotomy, and in fact foreshadowed the eventual reunification of Europe after the end of the Cold War.     

Anatomists and entrepreneurs in early eighteenth-century London

Anatomical demonstration in the eighteenth century took place in many formats. In this essay I discuss public anatomical demonstration as performed by entrepreneurial anatomists in London between 1700 and 1740. These anatomists offered courses, advertised in newspapers, to anyone who was willing to pay. In contrast to courses offered in official settings to prospective physicians and surgeons, these courses emphasized natural philosophy and natural theology rather than practical knowledge. Entrepreneurial lecturers also aimed to entertain. In this article I examine the lectures of James Douglas, William Cheselden, and Frank Nicholls, each of whom differed significantly from the others in style and content but were all anatomical entrepreneurs. All of them, moreover, employed not only human cadavers but also living and dead animals in their lessons. I examine the content of the lectures and the motivations of the lecturers' audiences. I also argue that the prevailing historiographical representation of eighteenth-century science as "polite" requires considerable revision to accommodate as impolite an activity as public anatomy.     

Female domestic servants as desirable refugees: gender, labour needs and immigration policy in Belgium, The Netherlands and Great Britain

The immigration policies adopted by Western European states during the interwar period were marked by increasing restriction, especially after 1933. One notable exception to this was the relatively generous treatment afforded to women who were prepared to take up employment as domestic servants. This article looks at the reasons behind this anomaly and compares the responses of three states that were in the front line of the refugee efflux from Germany and Eastern Europe in the years leading up to the Second World War.     

Culture versus commerce: societies and spaces for elites in eighteenth-century Liverpool

Our understanding of an eighteenth-century renaissance in English towns is based around the emergence of cultural infrastructures and organisations which formed the cultural capital of a polite society concerned with both sociability and differentiation. Urban improvements are seen as spreading to a wide variety of towns including a number of large commercial centres. This paper explores the experience of this urban renaissance in Liverpool, focusing in particular on the ways in which cultures and counter cultures were created around the changing social and economic infrastructure of the town. The changes occurring in Liverpool were characteristic of wider debates about the relationship between commerce and culture. The town had ambitions to cultural grandeur, a wealthy corporation and a growing number of middle-ranking professionals, merchants and tradesmen. And yet many of its social and leisure facilities were lost as Liverpool grew into the leading provincial port of late eighteenth-century England. Rather than see the fate of these spaces and societies as the triumph of commerce over polite culture, or as a reflection of an alternative culture, the paper argues that their demise can only be fully understood in the context of political and ideological conflict between elite groups, especially over the slave trade. The gradual resolution of these conflicts around the turn of the nineteenth century encouraged growing investment in cultural capital in the town.