Charles Wetherell

Social Networks, Kinship, and Community in Eastern Europe

Social Networks, Kinship, and Community in Eastern Europe How people in the past used and valued kinship in their daily lives is one of the most important and most elusive matters in contemporary social history. The largest issue is the character of community life and how that character changed in the temporally imprecise, yet unmistakable, transition from the traditional to the modern world. Intimately related to this central question are others surrounding the nature of family life and the relationship of family to the various ecologies, economic systems, demographic regimes, and cultures that dotted the historical landscape of Europe and the West. We propose that a social network approach not only serves to conceptualize kinship and community in new and productive ways, but also helps to reconcile two long-standing concerns in family history that have led historians to study kinship in competing ways, and which reflect the current division between family history and family demography. In support, we offer a case study of kinship in an Eastern European peasant estate in the midnineteenth century. Although we do not advance either a fullfledged model or a complete application of the social network approach, the network perspective that we apply adds to the understanding of European kinship and provides a guide for future work.

Social network analysis of historical communities: Some questions from the present for the past

The essay suggests to historians the usefulness of using a social network analytic approach to studying communities and community-like social structures such as kinship groups and work groups. Historians have long employed social network as a metaphor, but few have embraced the substance, theory, or methods of the social network paradigm. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians and other social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic revisited questions about the nature of family and community life, and, searching for connectivity, laid the groundwork for a social network approach to the study of community. The community question itself evolved as sociologists changed their ideas about what constituted community and where to find it. Researchers were no longer restricted to searching for community in the solidarities of neighborhoods and kinship groups. Instead they studied all active community-like relationships, no matter where located. As a result, analysts were able to show that community had not been “lo...

Fertility and Culture in Eastern Europe: A Case Study of Riga, Latvia, 1867-1881

Recent research on the secular decline of fertility in historical Europe has focused on cultural explanations in the wake of the European Fertility Projects failure to confirm demographic transition theory. Using the city of Riga in present-day Latvia as a case study, the essay provides initial estimates of nuptiality and fertility for resident language and religious groups in 1867 and 1881, and reviews the prospects of future work. Despite obstacles, Eastern Europe offers researchers an exceptional opportunity to test major cultural and economic hypotheses about the fertility decline because sustained ethnic diversity coexisted with economic development.

Intergenerational transfers of headships over the life course in an Eastern European peasant community, 1782–1850

Research on intergenerational transfers of valued goods has focused mostly on historical western Europe and its propertied peasantry. This article analyzes the population of an estate (Pinkenhof) in the Russian Baltic province of Livland—one of the lands of the so-called “second serfdom”—during the nineteenth century, before and after the emancipation of serfs. Here peasants did not own land; the most valued good that peasant families had to bequeath was an office—the headship of a farmstead. Emancipation brought a substantial decrease of kin as successors to headships, and a corresponding increase in the proportion of headships that went to non-kin from the same farmstead. A possible explanation for this phenomenon lies in the new attitudes of the post-emancipation period, as estate owners and peasant families gave greater value te demonstrated competence than to kinship in choosing candidates for headships.

The Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the Rise of Partisanship

Few parliamentary measures in modem times generated as much contemporary concern as the Great Reform Bill of 1832, a phenomenon historians have naturally attempted to explain in some detail. Designed primarily to correct perceived abuses and inequities in Englands electoral system, the bill provoked intense debate over the future course reform appeared to chart. Opponents viewed the bills probable impact as an unqualified disaster, while proponents saw it as nothing less than political salvation. After 1832, disagreements over the acts effects were just as vehement and varied, leaving historians the task of separating the rhetoric from the reality of English politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Two of the most pressing questions in recent years have been how reform politicized the electorate and how it affected behavior at the polls. The interpretation that currently dominates minimizes the impact of reform. An analysis of Shrewsbury politics between 1819 and 1841, however, indicates that reform redefined both political discourse and political behavior. Agitation for reform blended local and national political concerns; the electorate responded by closing partisan ranks. Once behind party banners, Shrewsburys voters rarely defected. Shrewsburys experience further suggests that even in Englands broadly participatory unreformed political system, one already familiar with parties and issues, the Great Reform Bill of 1832 transformed the rhetoric and reality of political life.

Patrilines, surnames, and family identity:: A Case Study From the Russian Baltic Provinces in the Nineteenth Century

The Imperial decrees emancipating the serfs of the Russian Baltic provinces (1816–1820) included the requirement that serfs, who would now become free peasants and obtain legal standing, have both a first name and a surname, the latter of their own choosing. The article examines the process through which Baltic peasants obtained surnames and analyzes the choices they made. In the Pinkenhof estate, in the province of Livland, emancipated serfs most often chose surnames that reflected their place of residence, but also frequently chose names from the natural world, occupations, and other similar sources. The acquisition of surnames helped to consolidate family and lineage identity, which had been difficult in the pre-emancipation perion when individuals bore only a first name plus the name of the place in which they were currently residing, the latter changing as they moved.

The 1881 census in the Russian Baltic provinces: An inventory and an assessment

The 1881 census of the Russian Baltic provinces of Livland, Estland, and Kurland was the first modern-type systematic population enumeration in the Baltic area. It had been preceded by enumerations of other kinds—land cadastres that included aggregate population counts (during Swedish control of the area) in the 17th century, and fiscal revisions (during Russian control of the area) that did list residents by name but did not follow any principles of modern census-taking. The Baltic German politico-economic elite, which controlled public affairs in the Baltic provinces, decided to carry out a census of a modern kind, and produced the 1881 count. Although initially the initiative was coordinated by the statistical specialists of the three provinces, the publication of results was decentralized, resulting in a series of volumes that supplied different tables for each province. The article analyzes the contents of the census, some of its shortcomings, as well as its strengths.

Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. by Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xiv, 721 pp. Cloth,

This collection examines 18th-century material culture. Through a dissection of colonial manners, goods and social institutions, it traces the rise of Americas aggressive bourgeois consumerism. The essays touch on fashion, home furnishings, architecture, advertising, sports and shopping.