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This chapter examines marriage patterns in Arabian history and how knowledge of these patterns became a key element of Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture. It begins with a review of new historical evidence from the central Arabian oasis town of al-Ghāt, which reveals the way marital patterns preserve knowledge about premodern status hierarchies. It then considers Hamad al-Jāsir's use of marital patterns as a tool of lineal authentication, a practice epitomized in his study of a historically maligned Arabian tribe, Bāhila. It also shows how al-Jāsir made use of Arabian marital patterns as a form of ethnographic data that could serve as a basis for rehabilitating the reputation of historically maligned Arabian tribes and advancing a nativist ethical blueprint for modern Saudi society in which tribal and religious values could cohere harmoniously against perceived external threats.

This chapter demonstrates how kinship was demonstrated in Sui-Tang, Turko-Mongol, and Eastern Eurasian societies. It takes a look at the two primary types of kinship bonds in foreign and domestic affairs, which were marriage and fictive kinship. The latter is based on genealogical manipulation, surname bestowal, adoption, and fosterage. The first section focuses on political marriages, including the marriage patterns, and strategic cultures involved, and notes that marriage alliances are one of the most studied features of Eastern Eurasian diplomacy. This is followed by a discussion of fictive kinship, which is taken from the patrimonial preference for modelling the polity on the household.

This chapter offers a social and demographic analysis of the large families who claimed pronatalist tax exemptions in Old Regime France between 1666 and 1760. Samples suggest that recipients were mostly members of urban middling groups including craftsmen and professionals. Demographically, their high fertility was the result of early, long‐lasting marriages and the employment of wetnurses. In social, economic and demographic terms, these families do not seem strikingly different from the French urban households who were beginning to adopt contraceptive practices during the same era. The chapter also reviews contemporary religious sources that not only forbade contraception, but that endowed marriage and prolific reproduction with positive spiritual value. It concludes with a brief study of the strategies some of the large families used to pass on assets and preserve harmony among their numerous progeny.

The introduction sets out the contexts for understanding the early modern French state's decision to intervene proactively in its subjects' reproductive lives. It defines pronatalism, a terms that refers to policies intended that promote both population growth and the extension of the gendered identities associated with procreation and childrearing. The adoption of pronatalist policies in early modern France coincides with some of the earliest statistical evidence for the practice of contraception; both contraception and pronatalism demonstrate the spread of attitudes accepting human intervention to shape fertility. Pronatalist policy also extended the early modern French state's growing interest in regulating the domain of marriage and family.

The chapter introduces the theme of the book: pre-industrial marriage in Europe and Asia. The book aims to challenging the rhetoric of an East-West dichotomy in marriage patterns and mechanisms between Asia (China) and Europe (England). In Europe, late marriages, high celibacy rates, preventive checks, individualism – in Asia, early marriages, universal marriage, positive checks, parental authority (e.g. Malthus, Hajnal, Wrigley/Schofield, Macfarlane, Wolf, Skinner). The chapter claims that the East-West binary, based on studies of social norms and aggregate statistics implies a picture that is too simplistic. It argues for the EAP approach to the study of pre-industrial marriage: comparison of local populations in Asia (China, Japan) and Europe (Belgium, Italy, Sweden) for which individual-level longitudinal data are available, using the same models and methods of analysis (presented in chapters 2 and 3).

This chapter argues that the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) played a fundamental role in western Europe’s economic development. The EMP emerged in northwestern Europe in the late medieval period as a result of the Catholic Church’s promotion of marriage based on consensus, the rise of labor markets, and specific institutions concerning property transfers between generations that encouraged wage labor by women. This combination of factors resulted in a demographic regime embedded in a highly commercial environment, in which households interacted frequently with labor, capital, and commodity markets. The authors also discuss possible long-term consequences for human capital formation and institution building, which are elaborated upon in later chapters of the book.

This chapter introduces seven populations (1716–1912) used in the comparative studies of this volume: Scania in southern Sweden, Sart and Pays de Herve in eastern Belgium, Casalguidi in central Italy, Shimomoriya and Niita in northeastern Japan, and Liaoning and Shuangcheng in northeast China. We compare descriptively their socioeconomic and household characteristics, as well as nuptiality patterns, and describe data sources and the empirical design of the model. We illustrate how variables are constructed and present the statistical methods used.We also demonstrate the first hand results of the event history analysis of first marriage and further introduce questions which will be answered in the later chapters.

The chapter summarizes the findings of the comparative and country-specific studies included in the book. In relation to the East-West binary, the EAP findings confirm the previous picture of general differences in marriage pattern and family system. However, when studied at the individual-level, great similarity in human behavior across study populations was found. When comparing ages at first birth instead of age at first marriage, the East-West divide diminishes considerably. Also, some potential determinants of marriage behavior like sex, age, or duration of widowhood influenced marriage chances in the same way, while others like co-resident kin or socioeconomic status indicated similarity in behavior given the differences in family system. In relation to marriage as the prime mechanism of the Malthus model, results give little support. In the European locations there was no marriage response to fluctuation in food prices in the lower socioeconomic status groups, and male marriage candidates from more prosperous families married earlier in all study populations.

In this chapter, the authors take a larger view and explore how different constellations of family organization have affected the position of women in societies across the Eurasian landmass. We discuss the recent contribution to the literature by Dennison and Ogilvie and provide our take on their work. A statistical analysis is conducted to see how significant the relationship between the position of women and economic development is as well as how family organization has affected the position of women. The conclusion is that family arrangements influence the position of women and that the position of women is an important determinant of economic development.

The second chapter examines the transition from arranged to companionate marriages among Ashkenazic Jews in the three cities and, in particular, as a reaction to the expanding market of leisure spaces in the process. The formation of the contemporary Jewish family underwent a dramatic shift as the notions of individual autonomy came to supersede the predominant influence of the extended family. In the process, the changing needs and expectations of the Jewish family imposed new expectations on the community as a whole regarding how and where the Jewish family was to be formed.

This chapter looks at the marriage patterns of Vilnans amid the ethnic and confessional diversities of their city. It looks at the available historical sources on courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century Wilno. Given the nature of the sources—above all, the lack of marriage records over any large period for any of the communities and the absolute lack of church record books for the Ruthenians, both Orthodox and Uniate—the stories told herein are anecdotal, based on a variety of disparate types of documents: a memoir, letters, litigation, testaments, and fragmentary Roman Catholic and Calvinist marriage records. From these, the chapter attempts to produce snapshots of attitudes and patterns surrounding marriage in a few very specific contexts and networks as well as to provide some hypothetical answers to some of the general questions regarding marriage and courtship in Wilno.

The beguine movement is a most remarkable phenomenon in the history of the Low Countries, but it still remains to be explained. The skewed sex ratio, diminished access to convents, and religious revival of the late Middle Ages seem insufficient to explain the movement in the long run. This chapter argues that the specific attitude toward women in the Low Countries that originated with the emergence of the European Marriage Pattern created a fertile and unique basis for the beguinages to develop: the beguinages may have offered women in the Low Countries safety and security if they chose to remain single.

Western social scientists and demographers have typically seen Central and Eastern Europe as the locus of complex family organization and familistic societal values. This chapter argues for a less stereotypical image of families outside Western Europe. Drawing on an unprecedented collection of census microdata from historical Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, and combining demography with socio-economic history and anthropology, it identifies and differentiates multiple subpopulations in the area. Significant variations in household formation, marriage, residence patterns, and welfare functions of the family group separate these subpopulations, encouraging us to examine social, ecological, economic, and cultural factors that influence people’s decisions regarding domestic group membership. This compositional approach questions the existence of a demographically uniform Eastern Europe. The revealed diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development should free us from the simplistic view not only of the continent’s familial history, but also of standard units of population as homogeneous.

This chapter aims to give a comprehensive explanation as to how the “blue” families differ from the “red” ones by researching certain geographic patterns regarding the red v. blue family strategies. The US has undergone a technological revolution and as a result it has become wealthier, which leads to a series of changes in marriage patterns, divorce, and childbearing. However, these changes did not turn out uniformly by class, race, or region. Instead, family structures seem to have worsened the existence of income inequality and signified the cultural marker between different social groups. The regional distribution of family patterns shows that age, specifically age at first birth and age at marriage, is the biggest difference between red and blue families. This chapter shows other related state averages as influenced by race, income, religious beliefs, and reproductive practices in an attempt to only describe and not control such factors that affect cultural patterns.

This chapter introduces the concept of female agency and sets up the framework for the rest of the book. The authors explain how age at marriage can be an indicator of the degree of power a woman has in a relationship, as well as her role in society. This chapter argues that the European Marriage Pattern (free choice of marriage partner) played a fundamental role in the economic development of Western Europe, leading to the Industrial Revolution and a higher standard of living. The authors explore the contemporary situation, presenting correlations between marriage age and composite measures of gender equality, as well as zooming out to the global level to discuss differences in how women have fared in terms of human capital formation, access to the capital market, and participation in the labor market.

This chapter explores the main social and economic consequences of plague between the 1340s and the 1390s. In 1400 England was still not at the forefront of European economic development, but it was beginning to close the gap on the leaders. GDP per head, the proportion of people in non-agricultural employment, and the livestock share of agriculture had all increased irreversibly. Dependence upon the market for basic commodities and manufactures had increased, and population and taxable wealth were spread more equitably across the country, reducing the economic divide between the south-east and the rest of the country. Recent arguments that the European Marriage Pattern (EMP)—one of the main institutional characteristics of the Little Divergence—was established in England soon after the Black Death are assessed on the basis of the economic and demographic evidence. Serfdom had declined quickly and significantly, and the implications of the English experience for our understanding of the decline of European serfdom are explored. The main institutional changes in factor markets in general, and the spread of contractual arrangements in particular, are considered. By 1400 the main changes had worked their way through the economy, and further significant developments did not occur until population began to rise again in the sixteenth century.

Presents estimates of village and parish populations from the early fourteenth to the later seventeenth centuries. Durham likely was underpopulated before the Black Death and its population remained low into the fifteenth century. In the bishopric of Durham, marriage to a widow was common, but otherwise household size resembled other villages in England. Local landholding practices, including the right of widows to hold land even if they remarried, encouraged mobility. In the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth century, population began to rise quickly, and as landholding became more concentrated, the number of landless people quickly increased. By the seventeenth century, family and household size had increased and the region exhibited the characteristics of the north-western European Marriage Pattern.

This chapter presents a reconstruction of mortality, nuptiality, and fertility dynamics in the Lower Yangzi Valley from the early nineteenth to the second quarter of the twentieth century. Principal data are compilations of ‘faithful widows’ constructed for the Qing dynasty, and other genealogical sources. This substantial body of information requires interpretation in terms of distinctive forms of marriage, differential survivorship of kin categories, contemporary events, and health conditions. Pre-modern life tables show that in the countryside of the Lower Yangzi Valley, the traditional pattern of age-specific mortality hardly changed before the Japanese invasion of 1937. The pattern is also shown to be true for nuptiality and for the variable annual fertility during the years of maximum childbearing. Significant demographic variations between local regions are revealed, though far more in mortality and fertility than in nuptiality. The assumptions and logic of inference needed in reconstructing these populations are discussed in detail.