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Abstract
Research on the intergenerational inheritance of occupational attainment has been restricted to sons for a long time. This is remarkable, given the ubiquity of historical settings where female labor force participation was high. This study of civil marriage certificates in nineteenth-century West Flanders investigates a comprehensive sample covering the economic activities not only of fathers and sons but also of mothers and daughters. We find that daughters were more mobile than sons. Daughters, however, enjoyed less growth in terms of intergenerational mobility against the background of a slowly industrializing economy.

Sea — Territorial sea — Status — Whether identical to land territory of coastal State — Extent of jurisdiction of coastal State over territorial waters — Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone, 1958 — Internal waters — Whether to be treated as part of land territory of coastal StateStates — Foreign relations — Conduct of — Matter for central government — The law of Belgium

This article deals with specific traits of the development of ports on the Western coast of Flanders (Nieuwpoort, Dunkerque, Ostende, Gravelins, Lombardsijde, Mardyck) in the late fourteenth — early fifteenth centuries. The research of the documents reveals the profound impact on the life of these towns of their geographical position at the sea and land border of Flanders during the active periods of the Hundred Years' War. Warfare led to serious destructions as well as made special measures to strengthen the defence of these towns necessary. The Anglo-French War also stimulated the flourishing of piracy that was one of the occupations of the population of Flemish ports despite the prohibition of piracy by the government. Most of these towns were situated on the trade routes that connected inner regions with the coast and the clothmaking cities and towns of Southern Flanders and Artois with the main centre of international trade, Bruges, via a system of rivers and canals. These proved to be an important positive factor for the development of some ports. Their citizens had the responsibility to maintain the security, proper condition, and work of these trade routes (to maintain the lighthouses along the coast, fix different problems with the canal system). The population of Flemish ports was mainly occupied in fishery. The analysis of the distribution of several extraordinary taxes voted by Four Members of Flanders makes it possible to reveal the financial abilities of ports of West Flanders. The author considers that the development of Nieuwpoort, with its various forms of economic and social life, differed in many ways from the development of smaller ports such as Gravelins, Lombardsijde, and Mardyck.

In this article we use new, unique data on population composition and socio-economic structure for the c. 670 municipalities of the Belgian provinces of East Flanders, West Flanders and Antwerp in 1796, 1815 and 1846, in order to gain insight into the changing patterns of local migration intensity from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Although so-called micro-mobility is often disregarded in migration studies, this article argues that a spatial and diachronic analysis of local migration rates provides insight into the dynamics of social and economic change in relation to migration behaviour. The data show that the proportion of non-native residents varied strongly in accordance with different regional economies at the end of the eighteenth century, but that spatial variation declined markedly as overall migration rates converged on a higher average level by the mid-nineteenth century – leading to a re-interpretation of the mobility transition hypothesis.

Introduction. The article reveals a complicated language situation in the Flemish region of Belgium - a progressing extinction of Germanic dialects, which are historically spread on this territory. Each dialectal group has its unique features, and the West-Flemish and Limburgish groups might have become grounds for particular languages.Methodology and sources. The methodological base consists in a complex approach, combining the comparative-historical and contrastive methods with the method of sociolinguistic interpretation. The investigation is conducted on the language material, collected from different dialectal dictionaries of Dutch, as well as from special linguistic papers on the language situation in Flanders.Results and discussion. The article represents a multiplicity of Germanic dialects, existing on the territory of modern Flanders. A short revue is given on lexical and grammatical peculiarities of four main dialectal groups, as well as on their peculiar phonetics. A special attention is, respectively, paid to the urban dialects of Antwerp, Gent, Bruges and Hasselt. There are analyzed some interferential phenomena, caused by the contact of the investigated dialects with Romanic and Germanic environment and occurring on all language levels - from phonetic to the syntactic ones. It has been suggested, that certain specific grammar forms in Flemish dialects may be result of phonetic interference. For Marols, which originally belongs to the group of Brabant dialects, the juncture between Germanic morphosyntactic structure and Roman lexis is discussed.Conclusion. For the last 20 years the percentage of persons, speaking the Germanic dialects of Flanders, has demonstrated a catastrophic decrease. Along with that, the main features of these dialects (mostly of the Brabant ones) have gone over to an intermediate language "tussentaal", in both lexis and grammar. This language is being formed inbetween the Germanic dialects and Dutch; the latter is represented in the Flemish region by two variants – standard (common) Dutch and Belgian Dutch. The progressing decrease in the number of persons, speaking the autochthonous dialects of Flanders, is thoughtprovoking towards the exigency to fix the disappearing language variants through a strict scientific way.

ABSTRACTRecent historiography argues that the legal autonomy of municipal governments created the necessary conditions for successful commercial transactions and economic growth in certain parts of Europe in the later Middle Ages, and that these features attracted foreign merchants. This article uses empirical data from England, Flanders and Normandy to test the following questions: were there significant differences in rules, laws and institutions between one place and another in late medieval western Europe? Were the Portuguese merchants drawn to markets that hypothetically had more effective institutions? The findings demonstrate that legal institutions and conflict management were very similar across western Europe, and that there is no evidence that the Portuguese opted for trading in a certain market because of its effective institutions. Moreover, the article claims that the merchants seemed to prioritise protection and privilege while trading abroad, and it highlights the role of commercial diplomacy in conflict management.