“Jewish protection rights” (Judenschutzrechte) — the legal category according to which Jews were tolerated in a few territories of the old German Empire during the early modern period — made it difficult for Jewish subjects to establish a secure existence. There were, above all, two reasons for this. First, the personalized nature of protection rights enabled the respective authorities to develop selective settlement policies oriented consistently towards the fiscal interests of the state. The direct results of this were increased tributary payments and the withdrawal of one's “protection document” (Schutzbrief) if taxes were not paid. Second, legislators for the territories developed a multiplicity of restrictive decrees concerning the gainful employment of Jews. Consequently, there were only a few economic niches n i which “privileged Jews” (Scbutzjuden) were permitted to earn a living. In the countryside — which is where such settlements were mainly situated in the early modern period — Jews were thus dependent upon peddling foods, textiles and cattle as well as upon lending money. The specific methods of business which developed from this were reflected in the anti-Jewish legend of the deceptive travelling salesman who, by awakening ever new consumer needs, brought his Christian customers into increasing debt. If one confronts this legend with reality, one finds two characteristic methods of business which arose out of necessity: the cultivation of a varied palette of goods offered, and the development of a differentiated system of payment by instalments. At the same time, these business methods accorded with the model of an “economy of makeshift”. In the sense of such “makeshift trade”, Jewish peddlers were prepared to travel for days in order to make even the most insignificant profits.

In the last two decades, scholars have significandy expanded, through die use of probate inventories, our purview of early-modern European households. Their work has tended to focus on the social and cultural implications of the material culture found in these inventories.1 Seldom, however, have they used these sources to study the family economy found in many early-modern European households, and since artisanal small-scale production remained the predominant mode of urban economic activity, this has produced a conspicuous gap in our knowledge.1 This essay, which contains a comprehensive investigation of probate inventories from artisanal households during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is a modest attempt to fill some of that gap by providing a more nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, and economic survival strategies employed by the poorer households as they struggled to avoid the abject indigence of the truly destitute.

In urban Africa today, like elsewhere, the purported survival strategies of individuals are determined constantly by severe material constraints. The poor and the new poor are overwhelmingly new city dwellers dependent on precarious, intermittent odd jobs (petits boulots; single women with small children; young school dropouts (déscolarisés, condemned to the expediencies of the streets, illicit actions and, in many cases, delinquency; unemployed graduates (diplomés-chômeurs), without opportunities for paid employment; as well as those designated successively in the vernacular as conjoncturés, déflatés and compressés (i.e. affected by wage reductions, permanent employees downgraded to temporary contracts or casual labour, and workers who have lost their jobs through massive redundancies). These individuals can meet only the most basic needs (eating, feeding their children, paying the rent). When survival becomes an issue, long-term strategies tend to be constrained by the need to fulfil the most basic needs and daily necessities. At any rate, pursuit of this objective does not involve selective mobilization of optimized means, when those who admittedly are looking out for themselves (se cherchent), rummage about (grouillent à droite [et] à gauche), pursue small jobs in unskilled manual labour or portering, or as night watchmen (racolage pour trouver des petits contrats de manoeuvrage, de manutention ou de veilleur de nuit), search constantly for opportunities to sell items that they bought for a little bit less, inland or across the border. They may also try to establish a business or small craft shop and, during the interim, get by with difficulty thanks to sporadic aid from relatives who are also unemployed.

Financial self-help organizations can be found in many parts of the world, and the cities of Java are among the areas where they are particularly widespread. Since about the 1950s, interest in these institutions among anthropologists and development sociologists has increased considerably. Analyses of financial self-help organizations have most often focused on their economic or their social function; few scholars have pointed to their function as providers of security and identified self-help organizations as typical forms of local social security institutions. The main shortcoming of most of these studies is that they base their conclusions solely on an analysis of the financial arrangements provided by these self-help organizations, neglecting the accommodating practices that people undertake in order to fit the provisions of self-help organizations to their own household needs. This essay explores the observation that financial self-help organizations do not simply provide security through the different kinds of insurance mechanisms they might contain, but that, particularly through the way in which people use them and participate in them, these institutions become meaningful for coping with insecurity. It examines the question of whether participation in financial self-help organizations contributes to the ability of households to cope with adversities and deficiencies in a concrete social context. Research aiming to answer this question was conducted in Bujung, an urban ward on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.

During the 1990s, over seventy per cent of the married men and adult children of Stone Mill village in northeastern China have been employed i n wage labor each year. Because a vast number of household laborers (i.e. husbands, sons, and daughters) have nonagricultural jobs outside the village, daily agricultural tasks are performed by married women and elderly men, who are fondly described by the villagers of Stone Mill as “Troop Number 3860” (3860 budut). The number 38 refers to International Women's Day, March 8, representing the women in the village's agricultural labor force, while the number 60 represents the minimum age of the elderly agricultural workers.