Het kleine roomse gezin. Geboortebeperking onder Nederlandse katholieken, 1950-1970
Marloes Schoonheim
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The small Catholic family: family planning among Dutch Catholics, 1950-1970
Compared to those of other denominations, fertility rates among Dutch Catholics remained high in the Netherlands during the twentieth century, only to fall rapidly after 1960. This article focuses on those Catholics who, in spite of Church regulations, practiced family planning between 1950 and 1970. The first paragraph evaluates research on Catholic fertility behaviour and the explanations given for its deviance. The second paragraph discusses the socio-economic and religious characteristics of Catholics who practiced family planning, and the methods they chose. Ego documents, revealing how Catholics got away with family planning under the watchful eye of the Church, are analyzed in the third paragraph. These Catholics oppose the stigma of the large Catholic family and the historiographic value of research on their fertility behaviour is discussed in the conclusion.

De zeepaccijns in de negentiende eeuw. Van nieuwe technologie en oude wetten
C.M. Kooi
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Dutch excise on soap in the nineteenth century. Of new technology and old laws
In the Netherlands, during the nineteenth century, an excise on soap was charged and would not be repealed until 1893. The main product of the Dutch soap industry was soft soap. The excise law, based on technological concepts dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century, contained many irksome regulations impeding developments in the branch. The regulations were comparable both in structure and impact with those for sugar, flour and beer excises. The soap factories remained small-scaled, with an average capacity of only 245 tons in 1892. Development of new products lagged and exports were insignificant. After 1860, the availability of oleic acid enabled customers to make soap at home. The excise law would gradually be impossible to enforce. This practice took tens of percents off the market. After 1893, the branch would start flourishing again. By 1920 the average plant would produce over 1200 tons, and exports started to increase.

'’t Is altijd beter wat te lang vertoeft, als wat te vroeg begonst'
Het voorhuwelijkssparen van dienstboden binnen het Brugse Vrije in de achttiende eeuw
Veerle Delahaye
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'Look before you leap'. Premarital saving of servants in the rural district 'Brugse Vrije' during the eighteenth century
Rural servants are an age specific professional category: three quarters of them are between fifteen and 30 years old which allows us to investigate aspects of premarital saving and spending patterns. In this paper we focus on the country district 'Brugse Vrije' in eighteenth century Flanders. For this purpose we use the rare farm accounts that have come to us. Evidence presented in the article shows that the relative amount of money servants saved differed from person to person. There is however a connection between the share they saved and the age of the maid or the farmhand: the older they were, the more money they reserved. Especially girls built up a trousseau in which clothing took an important share. There are also indications that certain servants even reserved some cattle. When it comes down to the real value of the wage, it is striking that the real wage (the nominal wage in proportion to the lease prices of agricultural land) shows a stable course from 1710 until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. From the 1770s onwards, the spending capacity of servants began to decrease: during a span of three generations, the purchasing power was reduced with one third. There are indications that this economic phenomenon had an impact on the marriage rates which were remarkably lower at the end of the eighteenth century. This is confirmed by a change in the age structure of rural servants in the nineteenth century: on average they were older than maids and farmhands around the middle of the eighteenth century. This implies that a lot of young people didn’t have the means to marry.

Patronen, processen en periodisering van zeeroof en zeeroofbestrijding in Nederlands-Indië
J.N.F.M. à Campo
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Patterns, processes and periodisation of piracy and piracy control in Indonesia in the nineteenth century
Inspired by its present-day resurgence historians have renewed research of Southeast Asian piracy and its suppression in the colonial era. This article contributes to the current debate by providing a statistical description and theoretical analysis of the historical pattern from the perspective of interaction. The statistical description is based on a database of recorded cases of piracy and suppression. The conflict pattern is characterized by both asymmetry and disparity, which sets preconditions for both decline and recurrent upsurges of piracy. The interaction dynamics in this setting is modelled as a decreasing pulsating wave. The hypothetical pattern and the historical course of piracy clearly fit. This suggests that the spatiotemporal course of the conflict partly results from the conflict constellation itself.