Changing patterns of familial sociability: family members as witnesses to (re)marriage in nineteenth-century Flanders

Based on research in three Flemish communities, the author concluded that during the course of the second part of the nineteenth century, there was an increasing trend toward choosing family members as witnesses to the marriage ceremony (of first marriages). This was interpreted as an aspect of the "familiarization" of marriage. It might also, however refer to changing family contexts and social networks, to switching roles of parents and youth, to shifting intergenerational power, and to new family situations of solidarity and conflict. In this follow-up study, the author demonstrates that the former conclusions also hold true for other Flemish regions, for all social groups, and for remarriages. It also appears that marrying people increasingly selected brothers and brothers-in-law as witnesses, rather than descending or ascending kin. These observations support the thesis of the increasing familiarization of family relations during the course of the nineteenth century.     

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.     

Marrying in the city in times of rapid urbanization

Economic, social, political, and demographic processes changed Western European cities strongly during the nineteenth century. Especially during this time, the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) became highly urbanized. Investigating the long-term development of the marriage pattern in the cities of Antwerp, Aalst, and Ghent gives a detailed picture of the evolution of the urban marriage pattern. In this article, specific emphasis is on gender, social, and migration distinctions. The results confirm that there is a male-female difference and variation among various social and migrant groups in the age at first marriage during the period 1800-1906. Moreover, regional differences are also visible. In the port city of Antwerp, massive immigration caused a unique evolution in the age at first marriage during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which did not appear in the textile cities of Aalst and Ghent during this time.     

Pollen analysis of 15th century cesspits from the palace of the dukes of Burgundy in Bruges (Belgium): evidence for the use of honey from the western Mediterranean

Pollen analysis of two late medieval cesspits from the palace of the dukes of Burgundy in Bruges (Belgium) revealed the presence of pollen from several food plants and their associated weeds. Also a large amount of exotic taxa was found, most of which are not commonly used as food plants. This last group of taxa shows 4 common characteristics: (1) their distribution is restricted to the Mediterranean region, (2) no macrobotanical remains from these taxa have been found (3) they are insect-pollinated and (4) most of these taxa are important elements in pollen assemblages from modern honeys from SW-Spain and S-Portugal. The presence of these pollen types can therefore most probably be attributed to the use of honey originating from this region. The consequences for the palynological analysis and interpretation of pollen assemblages of medieval and post-medieval cesspits and other types of waste deposits are discussed.     

A theoretical framework for evolutionary economic geography: industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economicdevelopment as an evolutionary branching process of productinnovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunityfor an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing cityor a new city. One can then obtain both firm size and city sizedistributions as two aggregates resulting from a single evolutionaryprocess. Gains from variety at the firm level (economies ofscope) and the urban level (Jacobs externalities) provide thecentral feedback mechanism in economic development generatingstrong path dependencies in the spatial concentration of industriesand the specialization of cities. Gains from size are also expected,yet these are ultimately bounded by increasing wages. The contributionof our framework lies in providing a micro-foundation of economicgeography in terms of the interplay between industrial dynamicsand urban growth. The framework is sufficiently general to investigatesystematically a number of stylized facts in economic geography,while at the same time it is sufficiently flexible to be extendedsuch as to become applicable in more specific micro-contexts.A number of extensions related to the concepts of knowledgespillover and lock-in, are also discussed.     

Effects of Autonomy, Performance Contracting, and Competition on the Performance of a Public Agency: A Case Study

What effects do new control mechanisms have that governments use to monitor the performance of quasi‐autonomous public agencies? The control mechanisms under review are managerial autonomy, performance contracts, financial incentives, and competition. Using principal‐agent theory, a theoretical model is developed. In order to assess its value for further empirical research this model is then confronted with evidence of an in‐depth case study of a Flemish public agency, which encompasses two embedded cases. In this case, the four control mechanisms seem to induce the public agency to performance‐enhancing behavior through ways assumed in the theoretical model, but only under very specific conditions. The case study points to another and seemingly more fundamental motivation for such behavior, that is, the need of the public agency to strengthen or restore its legitimacy toward its customers and especially toward its political principals, when it is confronted with certain threats to legitimacy.     

Preserving the Neapolitan state: Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani on commercial society and planning economic growth

Both Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani devised strategies for Neapolitan economic development, which they realised was essential for preserving its recently acquired independent statehood. In order to avoid any socially disruptive effects they considered how economic processes changed the human mind. Both thinkers grounded their political visions on foreign trade on highly sophisticated ideas of the nature of self-interest. In spite of the similar characters of their projects, the political thought of Genovesi and Galiani has never been subject to serious comparison. Instead the two thinkers have tended to be portrayed as opposite characters with highly divergent political leanings. It is argued here that this view is historically questionable and itself a product of a distorting canonisation process that was set in motion in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ironically, comparing the moral philosophies and economic ideas of Genovesi and Galiani, a picture emerges that inverts the myth that started at the end of the eighteenth century and that until this day has determined accounts of the early Neapolitan Enlightenment.     

An information-theoretic approach to the analysis of location and colocation patterns

The study of location and colocation of economic activities lies at the heart of economic geography and related disciplines, but the indices used to quantify these patterns are often defined ad hoc and lack a clear statistical foundation. We propose a statistical framework to quantify location and colocation associations of economic activities using information-theoretic measures. We relate the resulting measures to existing measures of revealed comparative advantage, localization, specialization, and coagglomeration and show how different measures derive from the same general framework. To support the use of these measures in hypothesis testing and statistical inference, we develop a Bayesian estimation approach to provide measures of uncertainty and statistical significance of the estimated quantities. We illustrate this framework in an application to an analysis of location and colocation patterns of occupations in US cities.