Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This introduction deals with the historiography on women’s participation in crime in various regions in Europe in the early modern and modern period. It introduces the chapters in this volume and places them in the framework of three topics around which the debates about crime and gender have centered over the past decades: violence, prosecution and punishment, and representation. It furthermore pays specific attention to the importance of socio-economic and cultural contexts, arguing that contextualisation of women’s crime is an essential instrument for explaining why women committed crime, why their registered criminal patterns changed and how their crimes were represented by contemporaries

Based on prosecution data for the period 1600–1900, this chapter re-assesses existing literature to stress the importance of discontinuity and variations in female crime rates in Europe. Women’s share among criminal offenders was not static and even reached significant levels throughout the early modern period. This chapter identifies five contextual factors as having an influence on female crime rates: urbanisation, moral norms, legal norms, family systems and living standards. With regard to the nineteenth century, it suggests that the link between industrialisation, removal from the labour market and the decline of female crime rates was by no means clear. On the contrary, it seems that the rising living standards and the development of the welfare state in Europe had a greater impact on female crime rates than a hypothetic confinement to the house.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Dutch Republic became a striking example of a capital-intensive state, in which taxation relied heavily on the cooperation between rulers and capitalists. The sale of urban and provincial annuities and the investment of citizens in such annuities and loans were a crucial part of this financial system for several reasons. First, taxation may have been the most import source of revenue for the Dutch Republic; a considerable part of the income of the state came from annuities and loans. The sale of annuities was an important source of income, particularly because loans were necessary for extraordinary expenses that could not be financed with regular tax money. Taxes and annuities were to a certain extent complementary. Second, the taxation system was often linked to the sale of annuities, and before the rise of a free capital market in the seventeenth century, coercion was a key factor in this. Sometimes additional taxes were imposed in the form of an annuity that would later be redeemed. Such renten were enforced contributions, quite similar to taxes. The legally forced nature of these loans makes it hard to discern between taxation and loans. Third, the financial success of the Dutch Republic between c. 1580 and 1650 was also made possible because taxes allowed for a funded debt. From 1547 onwards provincial annuities that were sold and managed by the cities created a debt that was backed by new permanent excises.