Domestic Strategies offers a new reading of the historical sources in order to understand the social relations and strategies of laboring families toward the organization of productive processes and institutional arrangements in early modern Europe. In contrast to many other works, the essays in Domestic Strategies place laboring families as the actors on the historical scene, rather than as passive recipients of historical changes. Conceptual insights derived from both anthropology (Sahlins and Geertz) and sociology (Bourdieu, Elias and Mary Douglas) are applied to individual case studies of...