Thijs Lambrecht

Famine, exchange networks and the village community. A comparative analysis of the subsistence crises of the 1740s and the 1840s in Flanders

This article focuses on local agency in two near-famines in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Flanders. Our comparative analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845-1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and a formal way. The main thesis is that the impact of hunger crises in peasant societies is directly related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more-or- less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis has always had local roots.

Data Transcoding in Multicast Sessions in Active Networks

In this paper a multicast application is presented, based on active networking techniques, in which processing of the multicasted data is done in intermediate network nodes, according to requests or demands done by users joining the multicast session. The problem of transcoding in multicast sessions is divided into two subproblems. First some issues about the application of active networking techniques are briefly discussed. Then, the problem concerning the optimisation of the location of transcoding nodes in the multicast tree will be the main subject of this paper. The exact solution and a number of heuristics are discussed and simulations of the solutions will illustrate the advantages of the application of transcoding in multicast sessions.

An old poor law on the Continent? Agrarian capitalism, poor taxes, and village conflict in eighteenth-century coastal Flanders

Poor relief provisions in early modern Europe are often considered to have been characterized by a divide between a uniform, compulsory, tax‐based, and relatively secure and generous poor law ‘system’ in England, and the more haphazard, voluntary, relatively parsimonious, insecure, and predominantly urban relief practices on the Continent. In this article we challenge these assumptions by arguing that the spread of agrarian capitalism in coastal Flanders fostered a reorganization of poor relief that displayed many features considered unique to the English old poor law, including the levying of poor taxes. By exploring the introduction, diffusion, and effects of poor taxes in the rural district of Furnes in the second half of the eighteenth century, we demonstrate that poor taxes were not unique to England, and sharpen our comparative understanding of the causes, implications, and conflicts associated with this particular way of raising revenue for the poor. This supports our more general contention that the influence of the normative framework should not be overstated: more than differences in legislation, similarities in socio‐economic development can explain variations in relief practices in preindustrial Europe.

STREAM (Spatiotemporal Research Infrastructure for Early Modern Brabant and Flanders): Sources, Data and Methods

This article presents the technical characteristics of the Belgian STREAM-project (2015–2019). The goal of STREAM is to facilitate and innovate historical research into local and regional processes...