The haunting of Susan Lay: servants and mistresses in seventeenth-century England

At Easter 1650, Susan Lay, a servant in an Essex alehouse, saw the ghost of her mistress, who had been buried three days before. This article explores the history that lay behind her experience: of sexual relationships with both her master and his son, the births and deaths of two bastard children, and beneath it all, a relationship of antagonism, competition, and intimacy with her mistress. It uses this and other legal records to examine the relationship between women in early modern households, arguing that, while antagonisms between women are typically part of effective patriarchies, the domestic life and social structures of mid seventeenth-century England bound servants and mistresses peculiarly tightly together, giving servants licence to dream of replacing their mistresses and mistresses cause to feel threatened by their servants, and making the competitive relations between women functional to patriarchal order. It suggests, finally, that at this moment in time and in this context, seeing a ghost was the best, perhaps the only, way this servant had to tell a suppressed story and stake a claim to a household that had excluded her.     

Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture,Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction

The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal was formed under European influence, adopting its techniques of representation from bourgeois realist fiction. Both witness to and participant in the making of colonial modernity, it placed particular emphasis upon the social substantiation of persons through the depiction of domestic interiors. The furniture of the bourgeois house became an important ingredient in that representational process. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's examination of the way in which furnished interiors came to compose the universe of private man in the nineteenth century, I argue that in the Bengali novel, there is a constant tension between that mode of self-construction and the suspicion and distrust of European furnishings exhibited in representative novelists of the period. Ultimately, in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior, as well as a questioning of the very tools of realist representation.     

A THEORETICAL EXPOSITION OF MIGRATION ENFORCEMENT ON EXISTING MIGRANT AND DOMESTIC HOUSEHOLDS*

ABSTRACT This paper presents a model with a domestic household and a heterogeneous migrant household in arrival timing. The domestic and documented migrant households divide their one unit of time between lobbying for/against immigration enforcement expenditures and employment. The analysis shows that an increase in public dislike for undocumented workers lowers domestic and existing migrant households private investment in own child education. It also causes average public expenditures on education to fall and leads to a negative impact on the educational outcomes of all households.     

Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century

This article analyses how public attention to marital violence in Sweden changed from a question of maintaining good order and ambitions to discipline self‐indulgent house tyrants into responsible masters of households in the seventeenth century, to the vanishing of the house tyrant as a cultural stereotype in favour of the female shrew in the eighteenth century, following the formal abolition of the husband's legal right to chastise his wife and an equalisation of liabilities and responsibilities. It also traces the beginnings of the social marginalisation and silencing of marital violence in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon associated with the lower classes and regulated by the law as a case for private action only when committed within the household circle.     

清代满族的“诸申”问题

以诸申作为被剥削者论述社会性质,似偏颇且有自相矛盾之处。广大旗人官员的主要担任者是诸申,而其面对皇帝又自称"奴才",满文是aha(阿哈),与包衣阿哈、户下家奴的阿哈,是同一个词。但诸申、包衣皆非贱民"奴隶",为正身旗人。诸申的"奴才"身份,只对皇帝、王公本主子家有低贱性,对他人并无意义,他们相当多的是处于社会高等阶层。八旗领主领有诸申的分封制,入关后在下五旗中延续实行。道光朝限制下五旗王公所领旗分佐领诸申(哈哴阿)的数量,并解除较高官员之家对王公主子的奴才身份,但至清末仍有三分之一残留。     

TARIFF PROTECTION IN AN OPEN SPATIAL ECONOMY*

Spatial pricing models have been used to illustrate a tariff's asymmetric effects on consumers located at different points in the protected economy, and to demonstrate that the optimum tariff for a small open spatial economy may be positive. In these models, the distribution of households has been taken as uniform and fixed. We extend the spatial model by allowing households to optimally locate and consume variable amounts of land, as well as the domestic- or foreign-produced good. Land consumption, location rents, and the distribution of consumers are endogenous, responding to tariff-induced changes in the delivered prices of the domestic and foreign goods. Within this limited general equilibrium framework, a neoclassical result resurfaces: from the perspective of private consumers, the optimum tariff in a small open economy is zero. The possibility of a positive optimum tariff, however, may remain intact in a more integrated model where domestic profits and tariff revenues are redistributed within the spatial economy.     

论清代史馆修史、幕府修史及私家修史的互动

在清代,史馆、幕府和私家这三类修史形式一直是并存发展的。在治史范围和思想倾向上,三者有明显差异,史馆基本上垄断了国史和当代史的纂修,幕府修史的范围则随着政治环境和幕主个人兴趣的变化而变化,私家修史对社会变迁特别敏感,其研究范围往往最能体现时代特点。同时,这三类修史形式又因为幕主的政治身份和学人们的流动而发生联系,从而使不同的史学思想、修史理念在之间传播、交流。在具体的修史活动中,三者一直处在互动状态,史馆修史或刺激、或打压幕府、私家的修史活动,始终处于主导地位,决定着幕府、私家修史的盛衰消长,而幕府、私家修史在某种程度上也迫使官方不断调整修史政策,以适应社会的变化。     

孙中山与晚清革命党人社会背景的再认识

孙中山早期革命(晚清时期)的社会背景(或基础)不是资产阶级,他所领导的革命也不是资产阶级革命。兴中会时期,他所依赖的社会力量是背离了传统社会体制、率先接受西方影响的边缘阶层,其社会基础十分薄弱,所以他的革命活动到处碰壁。1901年以后,孙中山转向新政中产生的追求民族主义目标的新知识分子,由于革命得到这一新社会精英阶层的认同,社会基础迅速扩大,终获辛亥革命的成功。     

Everyday Life in Late Qajar Iran

The social history of Iran in general and that of the Qajar era in particular, has been little studied. The subject of this paper, private life in the late Qajar period, has barely been touched upon, probably because it is a subject on which there is not much primary material. There are no comprehensive accounts of people's daily lives of any class or occupation. In this article an attempt is made to give an account of the daily domestic life and activities of the household in the Qajar period. As there were major differences between the daily life and households of urban and rural areas, the discussion is limited to urban areas and Shi'i households. The article discusses the roles of the various members of the household as well as the consumption patterns of the family and those from inside or outside the household who catered to its needs.     

Beyond the Home: Space and Agency in the Experiences of Female Service in Early Modern England

This article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless - in their dealings with their employers.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

‘The Company as Their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah’: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730

The emergence of new historiographical approaches to the study of British imperialism over the past two decades, has begun to challenge the trade-to-empire narrative which continues to dominate the way historians understand the English East India Company's presence in Asia, anchoring the beginnings of empire there to the mid-eighteenth century. However, as this article argues, Company servants operating on the West Coast of Sumatra sought imperial expansion through political hegemony and territorial acquisitions as far back as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Company servants, distinct from the directors in London, formulated these imperial, expansionist policies on the West Coast in support of a private, patriarchal authority which they had developed to rule over the people they encountered there.     

唐至明代南京旧园林探赜

通过对南京自唐至明这一时期文献记载及遗存的园林旧址的探赜、勾沉,并参照今人的一些著述,以皇家园林为契入点,对以私家园林特别是诸多宅园为主的故址、风貌、建园、修葺、重建等状况加以阐述,体悟文人诣趣、构景理式的隽永况味,并于片鳞半爪间窥其全貌。     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa,c.1408

This article presents a summary and analysis of the slaves and slave owners who were living in a particular late medieval city at a particular time. The data for this overview comes from the 1408 Liber Manifesti of Manresa, a tax document which is quite similar to the Florentine Catasto of 1427. Unlike the Catasto, however, the Liber Manifesti consistently designates slaves as distinct from other servants. As a result, the Manresan document allows us to know many basic but often elusive figures such as the total number of slaves in our town, the proportion of slaves to free people, the percentage of households who owned slaves, the proportion of women and children amongst slaves, and even the market value of female, male, and child slaves vis à vis the cost of hiring a domestic servant. Access to such an unusually complete sample also enables us to make some fresh assertions about the extent and nature of renaissance slavery as a whole. Several of Iris Origo's influential observations, which still stand as a benchmark of renaissance slavery some 50 years after they were presented, are here both corroborated and challenged. For example, to what extent did renaissance slave owners pair male slaves with female slaves, as Origo's anecdotal evidence suggested? Our sample also provides invaluable data on the wealth, occupations, and family background of slave owners. We can gain some insight into the phenomenon of women as slave owners, and also coordinate slave owning with urban political power. In addition we can suggest an answer to the elusive question of just how much of a ‘luxury item’ slaves really were in the post-Black Death Mediterranean. In Manresa, as it turns out, slave owners were anything but a uniform block of ‘wealthy townspeople.’     

Advances in the Household Archaeology of Highland Mesoamerica

Recent investigations and reconsideration of households in the Mesoamerican highlands illustrate the central role of domestic spheres of interaction to the broader cultural dynamics of the region over four millennia. Methodological advances in the analysis of past houses permit more sophisticated social reconstructions of the spaces and activities that constituted domestic life for the diverse peoples of the region. Current studies highlight the economic interdependence and diversification of households, their strategic flexibility in affiliation, the integrative ritual practices undertaken within domestic spaces, the material correlates of prestige competition between households, and the manner in which households articulated with a larger social universe.     

Gender morality and emotion work in Taiwanese immigrant in-law relations

This study examines major social, economic, and cultural factors that sustain in-law inequality in Taiwanese transnational families. Data are based on life-history interviews with 16 Taiwanese immigrant women and ethnographic observations in a Midwest urban area. Findings suggest that middle-class immigrants’ abilities to host in-laws for lengthy periods and parents-in-law’s financial support for immigrant couples lead to the living arrangement of three-generation households in many immigrant families. Daughters-in-law in these households experience enormous stress because their mothers-in-law demand obedience. Traditional gender norms become moralized when the women’s husbands, mothers, and fellow immigrants reinforce Confucian cultural values of filial piety and respect for the elderly. Considering the importance of securing a stable family and children’s well-being, the women hesitate to challenge the power imbalance in their in-law relations. In a single ethnic household and a private domestic space, no competing gender ideology is available to contest Confucian culture. As a result, the women are compelled to fulfil their gender role expectations as submissive daughters-in-law. To cope with this home environment, they conduct varying degrees of emotion work and silence their voices, which results in the persistence of in-law patriarchy in these transnational households.     

Household Archaeology in the Andes

Data from domestic contexts can be used to address significant anthropological research questions. Archaeological investigations in the Andes (areas once incorporated into the Inka empire, including northwestern Argentina, highland Bolivia, northern Chile, Ecuador, and Peru), like many parts of the world, rely on ethnohistory and ethnography to interpret the archaeological remains of domestic areas and make inferences about households. In this review I describe the ideas about Andean households that archaeologists are using and how domestic remains are being examined to infer social, economic, and political processes. Household archaeology in the Andes requires ethnoarchaeology and theory-building in order to understand the complex social dynamics at the foundation of ancient Andean societies.