Un minucioso ensayo histórico sobre las causas de la pobreza y su continuada persistencia en el periodo estudiado, el análisis de los mecanismos sociales para su mitigación y el estudio de la composición de las clases pauperizadas.

By the end of the fifteenth century most European counties had witnessed a profound reformation of their poor relief and health care policies. As this book demonstrates, Portugal was among them and actively participated in such reforms. Providing the first English language monograph on this this topic, Laurinda Abreu examines the Portuguese experience and places it within the broader European context. She shows that, in line with much that was happening throughout the rest of Europe, Portugal had not only set up a systematic reform of the hospitals but had also developed new formal arrangements for charitable and welfare provision that responded to the changing socioeconomic framework, the nature of poverty and the concerns of political powers. The defining element of the Portuguese experience was the dominant role played by a new lay confraternity, the confraternity of the Misericórdia, created under the auspices of King D. Manuel I in 1498. By the time of the king's death in 1521 there were more than 70 Misericórdias in Portugal and its empire, and by 1640, more than 300. All of them were run according to a unified set of rules and principles with identical social objectives. Based upon a wealth of primary source documentations, this book reveals how the sixteenth-century Portuguese crown succeeded in implementing a national poor relief and health care structure, with the support of the Papacy and local elites, and funded principally though pious donations. This process strengthened the authority of the royal government at a time which coincided with the emergence of the early modern state. In so doing, the book establishes poor relief and public health alongside military, diplomatic and administrative authorities, as the pillars of centralization of royal power.

Focusing on organization, resistance and political culture, this collection represents some of the best examples of recent Spanish historiography in the field of modern Spanish labor movements. Topics range from socialism to anarchism, from the formation of the liberal state in the 19th century to the Civil War, and from women in the work place to the fate of the unions under Franco.

Labour and labour markets in and between town and countryside have been puzzling to economic historians for generations. This book brings together specialists in economic and social history to explore a series of key mechanisms related to the organisation and interdependence of urban and rural labour markets. A variety of issues, such as distribution, specialisation, and division of tasks, economies of urbanisation and -(conversely) rural de-localisation, (temporary) mobility of labour and commercial links, organisation of working time, methods of remuneration, gendered specialisation of activities, are dealt with in this book from the viewpoint of (changing) relationships between rural and urban labour markets. The renewed interest of social scientists in this research field is reflected by the diversity of the cases analysed according to geographical, demographic, and economic and political conditions. This book, therefore, provides interesting opportunities for a comparative reading of the significance of labour in the organisation of societies in the course of the centuries that preceded and led up to the 'industrial age' in Western Europe.