This volume takes a fresh and innovative approach to the history of ideas of work, concerning perceptions, attitudes, cultures and representations of work throughout Antiquity and the medieval and early modern periods. Focusing on developments in Europe, the contributors approach the subject from a variety of angles, considering aspects of work as described in literature, visual culture, and as perceived in economic theory. As well as external views of workers the volume also looks at the meaning of work for the self-perception of various social groups, including labourers, artisans, merchants, and noblemen, and the effects of this on their self-esteem and social identity. Taking a broad chronological approach to the subject provides readers with a cutting-edge overview of research into the varying attitudes to work and its place in pre-industrial society.

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives, across the globe and throughout the centuries, on the complexity of the nexus between work and the life course. For industrialized regions, from Germany and Western Europe to China and Japan, it questions the widespread notion of an overall growing working life course instability, since the 1970s. For unindustrialized or industrializing regions, from West Africa to state socialist East Central Europe, as well as for transnational and transcontinental labour migrations, it shows the enormous influence of the extended family and wider kin on individual pathways into and out of work. For early modern Europe, India, and China, and up to twentieth-century state socialism and to current welfare states, it stresses and concretizes the crucial impact of age and gender for both societal labour relations and individual work-related decision making. With all chapters based on original research, the volume reflects a close cooperation between historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Its multidisciplinary approach finds expression in its methodological plurality, reaching from archival research and sophisticated statistical analyses to biographical interviews and participant observation. This mix allows to grasp the interaction between societal change and individual agency.

Transnational migration within Europe and overseas has become a central theme of historical research in recent years - not least because of its current topical significance. This volume collects a variety of perspectives on the multiplicity of different patterns of migration and of the relationships that sometime linked local, continental, and transatlantic migrations. Although the attention of migration research has long been focused mainly on the spectacular transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of migrants moved within Europe. The various authors of this volume use examples selected from different European regions and states to develop specific aspects of the broad spectrum of migration patterns that characterized Europe's population movements from the late eighteenth century to the First World War.

Mit dem vorliegenden Band beendet der DFG-Schwerpunkt 1106 Das Konstrukt Bev- kerung vor, im und nach dem Dritten Reich " seine Arbeiten. Die Leiter des Schw- punkts hoffen, dass diese Arbeiten aufgegriffen und fortgesetzt werden. Sie danken der DFG fur die finanzielle Forderung und die wohlwollende Betreuung sowie den Gutachtern fur die einfuhlsame Beratung; sie danken den Projektleitern und den Mitarbeitern in den P- jekten fur die Arbeiten im Schwerpunkt und fur die erfreuliche Zusammenarbeit. Den M- arbeitern wunschen sie eine erfolgreiche Fortsetzung ihrer wissenschaftlichen Studien. Fur die Redaktion des vorliegenden Bandes hat sich Ursula Ferdinand, unterstutzt von Michael Engberding und Heike Gorzig, besondere Verdienste erworben, fur die wir ihr danken. Rainer Mackensen Inhaltsverzeichnis Vorwort ....................................................................................................... V Inhaltsverzeichnis ..................................................................................... VII Einleitung - Zur Geschichte der deutschen Bevolkerungswissenschaft ............................................................................. 1 Ursula Ferdinand, Rainer Mackensen, Jurgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer I. Bevolkerungswissenschaft und Bevolkerungspolitik ......................................... 4 II. Disziplinare Grenzbeziehungen .......................................................................... 8 III. Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen fureinander ........................................ 9 IV. Das Erbe - Entwicklungen nach 1945............................................................ 11 Bevolkerungswissenschaft und Bevolkerungspolitik Staat und Bevolkerung im 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhundert."