Over the last few decades, researchers in fields such as history, the social sciences and medicine have had improved access to census materials in northern Europe, making an update on these infrastructures both possible and topical. This book’s presentation of European census history and infrastructure is not strictly limited to northern Europe, although most of the Mosaic materials originated north of the forty-fifth parallel. The template for modern census-taking was created by Adolphe Quetelet in Belgium in the 1830s, and his census standards were spread almost globally by the international statistical conferences. This book explores Icelandic residence patterns amongst the elderly; Siberian polygamy as indicated in the Polar Census; men’s living arrangements in Northern Norway; Sweden’s pioneering register-based census in 1930; unique source materials on the Soviet family; and data on Ukrainian and Russian population groups in the most recent Ukrainian censuses. All of these contributions stress the book’s focus on Northern European census data. This book was originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive statistical picture of the Russian economic development covering the Imperial, Soviet, and New Russian periods. The authors have reconstructed Russian socio-economic statistics from both published and archival materials. The book gives concise descriptions as well as new insights on the Russian economic development. Compiled such that estimations by the authors are kept to a minimum and extensive explanations and notes on the sources, the definitions, the statistical methodologies, the problems and inconsistencies of the original data, and the pitfalls of interpreting the time series are given makes this a standard reference book of the Russian economic history. It will be of value to economists, scholars of collectivist economics, and scholars of Russia and the Soviet experience.

The special relationship between the United Kingdom, an established and secure power, and the United States, a rising one, began after the War of 1812, as the former enemies sought accommodation with, rather than the annihilation of, one another. At the same time, Mexico, also a rising power, was not so fortunate. Its relationship with Spain, an established but declining power, turned hostile with Spain’s final exit from North America after Mexico’s War of Independence, leaving its former colony isolated, internally unstable, and vulnerable to external attack. Significantly, Mexico posed little threat to its northern neighbor. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, then, the fate of North America was largely discernable. Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history. In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies.

Covering three centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic changes, this textbook is an authoritative and comprehensive view of the shaping of Irish society, at home and abroad, from the famine of 1740 to the present day. The first major work on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective, it focuses on the experiences and agency of Irish men, women and children, Catholics and Protestants, and in the North, South and the diaspora. An international team of leading scholars survey key changes in population, the economy, occupations, property ownership, class and migration, and also consider the interaction of the individual and the state through welfare, education, crime and policing. Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently setting Irish developments in a wider European and global context, this is an invaluable resource for courses on modern Irish history and Irish studies.

The fifth volume of the this series examines historical events and cultural, social and political structures which were introduced between the 16th and 18th centuries.

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume – all noted scholars in their region – have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years’ work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities’ contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy.

The medieval development of the distinct region of north-east England explored through close examination of landscape, religion and history. The recent surge of interest in the political, ecclesiastical, social and economic history of north-eastern England is reflected in the essays in this volume. The topics covered range widely, including the development of both rural and urban life and institutions. There are contributions on the well-known richness of Durham cathedral muniments, its priory and bishopric, and there is also a particular focus on the institutions and practices which evolved to deal with Scottish border problems. A number of papers broach lesser-known subjects which accordingly offer new territory for exploration, among them the distinctive characteristics of local jurisdiction in the northern counties, the formation of north-eastern landscapes, the course of agrarian development in the region and the emergence of a northern gentry class alongside the better known ecclesiastical and lay magnates. CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY is Lecturer in History at the University of Durham, where R.H. BRITNELL is Emeritus Professor.

The central theme of this book is the changing spatial pattern of human activities during the last 2,500 years of Europe's history. Professor Pounds argues that three factors have determined the locations of human activities: the environment, the attitudes and forms of social organization of the many different peoples of Europe and lastly, the levels of technology. Within the broad framework of the interrelationships of environment, society and technology, several important themes pursued from the fifth century BC to the early twentieth century: settlement and agriculture, the growth of cities, the development of manufacturing and the role of trade. Underlying each of these themes are the discussions of political organization and population. Although the book is based in part of Professor Pound's magisterial three volumes An Historical Geography of Europe (1977, 1980, 1985), it was written especially for students and readers interested in a general survey of the subject.