Going round in circles: Some new evidence for population in the later middle ages

The Myntling Register contains some little known and, in some respects, highly unusual demographic evidence relating to the period from around the later fourteenth century up to the 1970s and to the wealthy Lincolnshire Priory of Spalding. It is in the form of hundreds of ‘family trees’ relating to the villein families of the priory's major manors. It has evidence of interest to economic historians of medieval England on several fronts, the three of which dealt with here are proportions of males to females, percentages of females marrying, and most particularly numbers of surviving children per family. This evidence, whilst by no means perfect, is of a much more direct kind than that often used in attempts to calculate later medieval population. As such it has a contribution to make to the very vexed question of later medieval demography.     

Book reviews

Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud and P. Voorhoeve. Handschriften aus Indonesien (Bali, Java, und Sumatra), xi, 71 pp., 6 plates. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985. (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, XXVIII, 2.) DM 64,‐

G. J Knapp, Kruidnagelen en christenen: de Verenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie en de bevolking van Ambon 1656–1696.xii, 323 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1987. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land ‐en Volkenkunde, 125.) Guilders 35.

Rainer Carle (ed.). Cultures and societies North Sumatra. 514 pp. Berlin; Hamburg: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987. (Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Indonesische und Südseesprachen der Universität Hamburg, 19.) DM 95.

J. Noorduyn. Bima en Sumbawa: bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de sultanaten Bima en Sumbawa door A. Ligtvoet en G. P. Rouffaer.xii, 187 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1987. (Verhandelingen van net Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 129.) Guilders 30.

Anthony J. Whitten and others. The ecology of Sulawesi. By Anthony J. Whitten, Muslimin Mustafa, Gregory S. Henderson,xxi, 777 pp. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1987.

Robert Wessing. The soul of ambiguity: the tiger in Southeast Asia. vi, 148 pp. [Dekalb, Illinois]: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 1986. (Monograph Series on Southeast Asia, Special Report 24.) (Distributed by Cellar Bookshop, 18090 Wyoming, Detroit, Michigan 48221.)     

Social,economic and political dilemmas of reform in Yugoslavia

All of the communist party‐ruled states of Eastern Europe, from the elder brother of the ‘socialist family’, the Soviet Union, to non‐aligned, sui generis Yugoslavia, are in some degree of economic crisis. Gone are the once loudly trumpeted assurances that the socialist ‘economic formation’ by its very nature — its centrally planned and directed economy, its leadership by a communist party armed with the ‘scientific’ social and economic theory of Marxism‐Leninism and its foundation on the principles of proletarian social justice — excluded the possibility of economic ailments such as sluggish growth rates, inflation, social inequality and unemployment. It is now admitted that precisely these problems currently threaten virtually all communist systems. The principal issue for the political elites in these countries (with the perhaps temporary exception of relatively prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia and perennially contrary Romania) is not whether radical reform is necessary, but how to implement the requisite economic, social and quasi‐political reforms without undermining the foundations of ‘socialism’ and of the communist party's domination that they identify with it Yugoslavia is a valuable test case of the general project of reform in communist systems, since it consciously undertook to dismantle the of Stalinist system it had been establishing under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II in response to Stalin's ostracism of Tito in June 1948. From its inception the Yugoslav reform process was informed by a commitment to return to the sources of Marxian social and economic theory in order to build an authentic socialist system untrammeled by the structures and immoral practices of Stalinist ‘etatism’. Worker self‐management, ‘market socialism’, the decentralisation of political and economic decision‐making, periodic rotation in office, and a number of other formally democratic, participatory socio‐political processes, most of which Gorbachev and his supporters have been discussing under the rubric of perestroika, glasnost’ and demokratizatsiia, have all been tried in one form or another in Yugoslavia during the past four decades.