Domestic Strategies: Work and Family in France and Italy, 1600-1800

by Stuart Woolf (Editor)

Overview

Domestic Strategies offers a new reading of the historical sources in order to understand the social relations and strategies of laboring families toward the organization of productive processes and institutional arrangements in early modern Europe. In contrast to many other works, the essays in Domestic Strategies place laboring families as the actors on the historical scene, rather than as passive recipients of historical changes. Conceptual insights derived from both anthropology (Sahlins and Geertz) and sociology (Bourdieu, Elias and Mary Douglas) are applied to individual case studies of social groups from north-central Italy and the French Alps, and the whole offers an important new perspective on the working lives of European families during the early modern period and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521892339
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/04/2003
Series:	Studies in Modern Capitalism
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.59(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction Stuart Woolf; 2. Social relations and control of resources in an area of transit: eastern Liguria, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Osvaldo Raggio; 3. Family cycles, peddling and society in upper Alpine valleys in the eighteenth century Laurence Fontaine; 4. Local market rules and practices. Three guilds in the same line of production in early modern Bologna Carlo Poni; 5. Group strategies and trade strategies: the Turin tailors' guild in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Simona Cerutti; 6. Conceptions of poverty and poor-relief in Turin in the second half of the eighteenth century Sandra Cavallo; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"[T]hose interested in families' strategies towards work and social institutions—whether guilds, charitable organizations, or municipal authorities—will find much good material in this volume." Judy Coffin, Journal of Economic History

From the Publisher