Practices such as surveys, guided by scientific statistics and the discourse of political economy, were indispensable tools in the construction of “the social” as a field in Denmark in the late nineteenth century. Leading Danish statisticians were able to create new representations of the structures of society that could be accepted as truth by conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike. Two episodes serve as examples for close examination: the establishment of the “workers’ question” as a social problem in the 1870s, and the new categorization of death in infancy as a social problem around 1900.

While demography has made many valuable contributions to the analysis of contemporary demographic reversals, the discipline seems as far as ever from explaining the dynamics of fertility change. Commentaries on “populations” routinely link fertility control and small families with progress, modernity, and western values; in “traditional” societies, fertility regulation is left to chance, God, and custom. However, countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy, which score relatively high on various indicators of “tradition”, have recently registered fertility rates far below the level of their more “advanced” neighbours. The same appears to be true of Italian immigrants in Australia. Italians are often depicted as traditional people recently confronted by modernity and painfully coming to terms with its liberating potential. In conducting detailed studies of specific communities, however, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars provide what are arguably more empirically accurate explanations of procreative behaviour: ones based on discontinuities, alternative strategies, mutual dependencies and exploitations, and diverse rationalities and traditions, cultures, and economies.

The many women who acted as traders in cities and towns along the North German, Baltic, and Scandinavian coasts during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occupied an ambiguous position. Continuing a tradition begun in the medieval period, women in these ports were often intimately connected to commerce. As wives and widows, they engaged both in retail traffic and, on occasion, wholesale merchanting. Evidence of their activities is scarce, however. Though women kept shops and accounts, inspected merchandise in warehouses, and struck deals for freight, rent, and capital, contemporaries did not see such women primarily as traders but under other rubrics instead. With few exceptions, a woman’s commercial contribution was often obscured beneath a wealth of platitudes about her domestic virtues. Ironically, north European women had left the upper echelons of commerce by the mid-nineteenth century, even as business and inheritance laws were changed to make access for them easier. As the merchant’s world in the northern ports became increasingly masculinized in the nineteenth century, the widow who continued in business became an oddity.

Not only did male inmates of the St. Martin in the Fields Workhouse in London manipulate the offered assistance to meet their needs, but in doing so actually demonstrated the very virtues the workhouse was intended to instil. The logic of the behaviour of these poor men becomes readily apparent from a close analysis of workhouse admission and discharge records between 1815 and 1819 and of parish officials’ interviews with applicants. As an inculcator of moral virtue, the workhouse was redundant and, hence, unnecessary. This evidence begins to call into question one of the basic premises of nineteenth-century poor law reform: the need for moral regeneration.

Canadian historians have not fully explored how post-1945 mass immigration heightened contemporary panics about crippled personalities, failing families, and declining moral standards and how these panics also served to bolser state surveillance of those considered a source of contamination. Among the groups considered potentially dangerous, in the discourse of the time, were European refugee and immigrant men. Popular writers, journalists covering ethnic murders, professional researchers, government officials, ethnic Canadians, and caseworkers dealt with the sexual, moral, and mental health of New Canadian men in ways that were often contradictory. An examination of some of these sources sheds light on an under-studied dimension to the exaggerations and alarmist predictions that fuelled the moral panic of the early Cold War years.

OVER THE LAST 20 years, historical research has increasingly employed concepts and ideas popularized by the writings of Michel Foucault. For example, many contemporary historians demonstrate familiarity with Foucauldian approaches to concepts like power, knowledge, and government and may eclectically incorporate into their work the analytical techniques of discourse analysis, genealogy, or moral regulation. Consistent with a more postmodern view of social relations, the adaptation of Foucauldian thought within contemporary historical studies reflects a broader concern within the humanities for radically rethinking the relationship between power, knowledge, and the human body. The selective employment of Foucault’s governmentality approach to an examination of Canadian youth groups such as the Girl Guides and the Boy Scouts at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates how the application of Foucault’s work deepens our understanding of the politics of childhood and enriches our historical view of Canadian children. For the most part, the value of using a governmentality approach in the study of Canadian youth groups lies in its enhanced potential to politicize childhood. Broadly stated, liberal schools of thought examine how changing cultural views of childhood and contemporary knowledges have supported the belief that childhood is a time to nurture children’s potential for citizenship, while Marxist approaches usually examine the underlying power relations of state mechanisms of social control over children. Neither of these views thoroughly combines an interest in issues of social knowledge and power relations with a critique of the development of self-regulatory practices in children. That is, neither fully explores the development of children’s capacities to regulate their own bodies, or to govern themselves, especially as these capacities developed in non-state locations such as philanthropically based youth groups. Furthermore, these views are rarely critical of the underlying epistemology that constructs childhood as a social location for the “natural” development of children’s capacity for self-government.