1. Introduction
Fifty years ago, an academic field specializing in the history of kinship and the family in early modern England barely existed, yet there was a shared understanding of what that history must have been; today there is a large body of research on English kinship c. 1550–1800, but there is considerable lack of clarity as to the long-term patterns of continuity and change.Footnote 1 This tension stands at the heart of this article. Its aim is to examine central trends in the history of English kinship with particular reference to the early modern period, to assess important traits, and to suggest new foci for inquiry. This is, I believe, significant in itself, for kinship ties comprise important social relations. However, this also calls for sustained consideration – as I would like to propose here – because the history of English kinship plays a large role in broader explanations of historical continuity and change.
The next section of this article thus seeks to examine the historiography of kinship, starting from the ‘master narrative’, as it was formulated through the works of some of the founding fathers of social and historical thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and proceeding to the major revision of the 1960s to the 1980s. Discussion then turns to an array of findings, established mainly since the late 1980s, which may by now be said to form a ‘neo-revision’. The third section raises five conceptual points, leading to assessments of evidence and debates on continuity and change. The final section presents concluding remarks as well as some possible foci for future investigation. Debates on English kinship, I suggest, currently converge at an important junction. Whereas the ‘master narrative’ highlighted the erosion of kinship in the processes of modernization, and whereas the powerful revision of the 1960s–1980s emphasized the restricted nature of English kinship as one of the pre-conditions for England's precocious growth as the first industrial nation; the cumulative impact of the ‘neo-revision’ has been to highlight the role of kinship in the network-oriented economy and society of the early modern period (on the basis of which commercial expansion and enhanced industrialization, among other developments, took off). Rather than discussing the ways in which kinship was shaped by the forces of modernity; or, conversely, rather than emphasizing the limited role of kinship in social and economic life, recent research thus highlights the merits of kinship for mobilizing social and economic capital and for facilitating or promoting social, economic, and political exchanges of various sorts. Taken this way, kinship ties are often also seen not simply as an historical feature of society, moulded by the forces of change, but as agents and facilitators of change in their own right.Footnote 2
All this, however, raises anew important questions about the nature and pace of historical transitions over past centuries and about manifestations of continuity and change, and enables me to revisit issues examined in the past and to take some matters forward. In a society in which notions of affinity and kinship are undergoing change (as they are indeed in contemporary Britain; see the final pages of this article), I believe it is particularly important to consider questions in the light of both long-term and comparative perspectives. This is significant not only for assessing the force of kinship, as explained here, but for suggesting potentially pertinent contexts for modern phenomena. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’ (studied by historians and social scientists and noted below), may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties that were current in the early modern period.Footnote 3 Aspects of the present-day language of kinship can also be examined over the long run. Bearing all this in mind, let us turn to a brief historiographical survey.
2. Approaches and historiography
The first and oldest approach to the study of English kinship was influenced by what is sometimes called ‘the master narrative’.Footnote 4 This broad and influential approach, formulated most importantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighted the link between modernization and a decline in the force of kinship beyond the nuclear core, not least in England. One can trace this ‘master narrative’ to key nineteenth-century thinkers such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ferdinand Tönnies, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber, and on to Emile Durkheim and twentieth-century social scientists such as Talcot Parsons. Obviously these thinkers differed greatly in their evaluation of the decline of kinship (and the concomitant rise of the nuclear family), but nonetheless – as I would like to suggest – they share a broad understanding about the outlines of this process of change. Broadly speaking, the history of kinship and family ties, from around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the nineteenth, is seen as a history of contraction, in which kinship ties diminished in force and in significance as a result of a process of modernization. Economic growth, industrialization, urban growth, growing individualism, and social and geographical mobility are among the main forces held responsible for the erosion in the scope and force of kinship. England, the first industrial nation, is often seen to have had a particular leading role in a broader European process. The English middling ranks – the active and increasingly capitalistic middle class – are also sometimes seen to have played a leading part in the historical march towards modernity, and towards kinship decline.
Thus, for example, nineteenth-century historian and jurist Sir Henry Sumner Maine argued that ‘the movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency, and the growth of individual obligation in its place’.Footnote 5 The erosion of kinship, according to Maine, thus formed an integral and important part of a larger transformation from ‘status’ to ‘contract’, as kinship groupings dissolved into separate households and households into individuals.Footnote 6 Maine also saw England as playing a leading role world-wide in this general process of modernization and kinship fragmentation. Like Maine, Friedrich Engels described the contraction of extended kinship forms and the rise of the conjugal family, seeing this process as part of a general transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Although his interpretative thrust was different, he drew on the work of Maine (as well as the writings of Karl Marx and anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan).Footnote 7 For the German thinker Ferdinand Tönnies, the decline of kinship formed part of an historical transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft: from the realm of the blood, the family, and obligations to kin, community, and nation to the realms of commerce and modernity.Footnote 8 According to Tönnies, too, changes in property ownership and modes of production brought about familial change. This transition was also connected with a shift from status to contract, as previously explained by Maine and noted by Marx and Engels, as well as with the transition from feudalism to capitalism.Footnote 9 A similar developmental view is also embedded in Emile Durkheim's argument on the rise of the nuclear family and the concomitant erosion of broader kinship ties in leading centres in Europe; see, for example, his definition of the conjugal family: ‘By “conjugal family” I mean the family as it evolved among societies descended from Germanic society or among the most civilised peoples of modern Europe.’Footnote 10 Similar ideas continued to be promoted in twentieth-century sociology.Footnote 11 The most important modern historian writing under the influence of this ‘master narrative’ was undoubtedly Lawrence Stone. His key argument on the ‘rise of the nuclear family’, first published in essay form in 1975, was expanded in a highly influential book, The family, sex and marriage in England, 1550–1800 (1977), with an extremely widely selling abridged version first published in 1979.Footnote 12
When a new generation of economic and social historians started their work around the 1960s, their intent was often to question some of the assumptions of this ‘master narrative’.Footnote 13 The new evidence that they produced did indeed quickly transform the field. Whereas the ‘master narrative’ portrayed the history of kinship in terms of change, the new findings were employed to mount strong arguments of continuity. Whereas the ‘master narrative’ suggested the historical existence of broad kinship ties and their subsequent erosion, the emphasis now shifted to the nuclear family. Historians, demographers, and historical anthropologists – such as Peter Laslett, E. A. Wrigley, Alan Macfarlane, and Keith Wrightson – all argued forcefully, in a series of highly influential works, that the nuclear family was in fact typical of English society from at least the Middle Ages. A narrow universe of kin with rather shallow ties among its members, therefore, was not the result of a process of modernization in England. On the contrary, path-breaking studies now established that it was usual for young men and women early modern in England to create separate households upon marriage, rather than joining the household of kin.Footnote 14 It was found that most households included, at least at some point in the life cycle, nuclear families or their relics, with or without servants.Footnote 15 Inheritance practices clearly also privileged near kin.Footnote 16 Even relief for the elderly poor, historians emphasized, was provided through parish support, rather than primarily through the support of kin.Footnote 17 At the same time, there existed strong neighbourhood ties, which were crucial both socially and economically in early modern English localities; it has been suggested that these networks thrived not least because of the relative attenuation of kinship ties. By the 1980s it had become widely accepted by scholars that, for most English people below the aristocracy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, kinship ties beyond the nuclear family were of limited significance; indeed this was seen to have been the case since at least the late Middle Ages. Less than two decades after its emergence, therefore, the powerful revision had acquired the status of textbook orthodoxy.Footnote 18
As opposed both to the ‘master narrative’ and the revisionist approach, however, an array of studies has appeared in the last two to three decades which by now can be said to form a third, ‘neo-revisionist’ approach. Many of these studies do not engage with debates about the long-term history of kinship.Footnote 19 Focusing on particular periods and places, however, they suggest the enduring vibrancy of kinship ties in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and beyond. Thus, for example, Michael Anderson, Tamara Hareven, and David Cressy all suggest in various ways the role of kinship in processes of migration from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. For example, English people migrating to America, as Cressy shows, kept contact with relatives in the old country and certainly could activate their links and make claims asking relations to ‘play the part of a kinsman’, even if the relationships were very distant. Letters written by migrants to their relatives in England attest to such exchanges. Kin often also migrated in the footsteps of kin in processes recognized as ‘chain migration’.Footnote 20 In neighbourhoods and localities such relations were often tied in with patterns of short- and long-distance mobility and migration.Footnote 21 In a similar way, Richard Grassby has shown extremely strong and dense kinship ties among overseas merchants. These networks of mercantile families existed among numerous relations by blood and marriage, and they extended over time and space. Ties were maintained and alliances fostered, marriages were negotiated with care, and credit and goods were exchanged throughout.Footnote 22 Focusing on England, Craig Muldrew highlights the significance of kinship in debt and credit relations; the early modern ‘economy of obligation’, he explains, was based on credit and was tied closely with exchanges among kin and ‘friends’ (the contemporary term employed for designating important allies, including, not least, kin).Footnote 23 Moreover, when the ‘economy of obligation’ failed, kin and ‘friends’ could be mobilized to underpin trust and maintain social reputation. Thus, for example, when eighteenth-century sea surgeon Charles Hill fell into debt, he secretly asked a cousin to lend him funds and enlisted his father for surety.Footnote 24 Examining the urban ‘middling sort’, Margaret Hunt emphasizes the role of kin in raising capital for commercial investments.Footnote 25 Michael Muscuch and Keith Wrightson highlight the role of familial considerations in economic action more broadly: risk-minimizing among family and kin, they suggest, could be no less important than desire for economic advancement, if not more.Footnote 26 Margot Finn highlights the importance of similar considerations among colonial families in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 27 Local studies reveal how, in times of need, kin could also be helpful in providing relief (even if they did not actually house needy kin). Appeals to ‘friends’ or, conversely, piteous claims of ‘friendlessness’, thus played a role in the makeshift strategies of the poor.Footnote 28 Cumbrian pauper petitions studied by Steve Hindle, for example, manifest ‘vivid tales of ongoing filial duty and sacrifice, involving relatives well beyond the narrow range of lineal kin stipulated in the welfare legislation’.Footnote 29
At the same time, historians emphasize the role of kinship in political networks and patronage, from the Tudor nobility to eighteenth-century gentry and court circles (as recently studied, for example, by Elaine Chalus, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Hannah Smith, and Ingrid Tague).Footnote 30 ‘In counties and boroughs, ‘dynastic families’ were prominent.Footnote 31 The same was true of occupational networks: the politics of kinship were evident among Northampton innkeepers from 1560 to 1760 and among Oxfordshire boatmen from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, while members of the seventeenth-century London guild of brewers recruited kin from as far away as Leicestershire.Footnote 32 More recently, Diana O'Hara has placed renewed emphasis on the importance of kinship in marriage negotiations. The support of kin and ‘friends’, she argues, was crucial for young men and women at the point of marriage.Footnote 33 ‘Friends’ acted as intermediaries and proposed candidates for a match, whereas kin and ‘friends’ negotiated with prospective partners to promote marriages, issue advice or warnings, and generally ensure the compatibility and economic viability of prospective alliances and households. When marriages broke down, ‘friends’ and kin intervened once more.Footnote 34 At the same time, single men and never-married women (whose numbers rose by the seventeenth century, amounting to roughly one in four or five), as well as childless couples (who normally could number roughly one in five of all married couples), very often cultivated attachments with lateral kin and ‘friends’.Footnote 35 Finally, my own work, which belongs to this ‘neo-revisionist’ approach, also strongly emphasizes both the importance of familial cooperation and solidarity among the middling sort of people in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which kinship ties were crucial for mobilizing economic and political resources. I have also identified and analysed the language of kinship, the social vocabulary that enabled people to designate an array of kinship relationships in order to claim and activate ties. A middling man such as the Sussex shopkeeper and diarist Thomas Turner, to name but one example, was thus typically linked to a web of relations and ‘friends’: near and distant kin, masters and teachers, patrons, and personally selected friends. His siblings and companions participated in the same networks. Marriage alliances were extremely important in consolidating and enlarging this pool of ‘friends’ and kin. Ties were cemented by godparenthood, close professional connections, and political alliances, as well as visits, exchanges, and periods of co-residence. While a man such as Thomas Turner was tied horizontally to an array of kin and ‘friends’, many of his relationships were also hierarchical. The political networks in his locality spun the webs of ‘friendship’ and patronage, from the Prime Minister of England to the level of ordinary villagers. Thomas Turner's alliances, however idiosyncratic, were not unusual. His experiences of kin and ‘friends’ – and the language of kinship he employed – were shared by many. Analysis of the diary of the seventeenth-century clergyman Ralph Josselin, for example, reveals many similarities (see below). A range of comparable personal, legal, prescriptive, and literary sources provide further examples.
What, then, are we to make of the ‘master narrative’, the ‘revisionist approach’, and the ‘neo-revisionist’ interventions? Can such diverse arguments be tied within a coherent interpretative framework? And what are we to make of individual historical actors such as Ralph Josselin or Thomas Turner? Can their kinship, family, and ‘friendship’ ties be described in an historical perspective as being part of an increasing or decreasing trend, as relatively extensive or narrowing down, as individually affective or instrumental, as changing or largely continuous? In Section, 3 five points are discussed which, it is hoped, can contribute towards a fruitful re-assessment of the debates on English kinship and family ties in the long run.
3. Points and assessments
The first point to be raised concerns the basic similarity between the ‘master narrative’ and the revisionist approach. Although the revisionist approach emphasizes the enduring limitation of kinship ties in England in the early modern period and the eighteenth century, rather than their declining importance (as suggested by the ‘master narrative’), it is significant that scholars of the revisionist approach still adhere to a basic premise that highlights the connection between the nuclear family and modernity. According to the ‘master narrative’, the nuclear family was the result of a process of modernization. According to the revisionist approach, the nuclear family and the relative weakness of kinship ties beyond it were among the basic conditions that enabled modernization to take place in England. As Wrigley has argued, for example, the existence of a society composed of small conjugal families prior to the industrial revolution was ‘strongly congenial to relatively high real incomes, adaptability and growth’.Footnote 36
The most extreme hypothesis, which both traces the attenuated nature of English kinship ties back to the remote past and links it to modernity, has been advanced by Alan Macfarlane. As an anthropologist, Macfarlane realized that ‘there is no necessary correlation between the predominance of the nuclear family and industrial growth’.Footnote 37 Nonetheless he argued that there is a special association between the nuclear family and modernity and economic individualism.Footnote 38 He thus discounts processes such as the Reformation, urbanization, and industrialization as agents of historical change. Instead, he sees the essentially individualistic and nuclear kinship pattern of England as a cultural genetic code, a unique molecular structure that has manifested itself again and again through centuries of great events, leading England to its early and successful capitalist development, economic growth, and industrialization.Footnote 39 His analysis of the kinship and family patterns of diarist Ralph Josselin provides him with a prime example for a revisionist argument: Josselin is depicted as an individualistic person, essentially modern in his kinship affiliations and focused mostly on his nuclear family.
If we looking more critically at this developmental perspective, however, it appears that there is no vast difference between the ‘master narrative’ on the decline of kinship and some of the premises of the revisionist approach. The main difference between them concerns not the salience of the developmental model but rather its particular chronological and causal features. According to one approach, the great changes in the English family and kinship took place together with the advent of modernity between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth. According to the other, these changes may have happened earlier and some of the causal relationships in the process may have been reversed. But whether it was the advent of modernity that brought about the erosion of kinship ties and the rise of the nuclear family, or whether it was the prevalence of the nuclear family that helped bring about the advent of modernity, the premises of the discussion remain similar: in either case ‘extended’ and ‘nuclear’ kinship and family patterns are understood as distinct structures, the former clearly associated with traditionalism and the latter with modernity. In either case they are placed in an inverse relationship: if the one is prominent, the other must surely be muted. This postulated opposition between the ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family patterns, and their supposed inverse relationship, take me to my second point.
This concerns the problematic dichotomy between ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family in England, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By discussing this problematic dichotomy we can also moderate in some of the debates between the different scholarly approaches discussed above. This, I suggest, also brings us closer to understanding the historical social universe of early modern kinship and its enmeshed social culture of relatedness.Footnote 40
To start from the basics, it is important to remember that, as anthropologists emphasize, small kin-based domestic groups are virtually universal among human societies.Footnote 41 Absence of extended family residence does not necessarily indicate a lack of a possibly wide range of kinship relationships. At the same time, the labelling of these possible relationships as simply ‘extended’ is a rather crude form of differentiation.Footnote 42 At this basic level, then, a dichotomy between ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family forms is highly problematic.
In the context of the English historiography, however, this dichotomy between ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family forms is also problematic because the concept of the ‘the nuclear family’ is employed unsystematically, thus also clouding our understanding of the concepts of ‘the extended family’ and of ‘kinship’. In studies of historical patterns of household residence, for instance, the nuclear family is defined most narrowly.Footnote 43 The addition to a household of any relation beyond the conjugal unit turns it into an ‘extended family household’. If the parent of either spouse joins the household, for example, it is said to be extended upwards, or if a sibling joins the household it is defined as being extended laterally. As I have argued elsewhere, these definitions are important for comparative studies but they are also hair-splitting and too rigid for representing the frequent movement of people in and out of households, whether as servants, apprentices, boarders, lodgers, or long-term visitors. Such movement was particularly typical of households of the middling ranks in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. When it comes to assessing the recognition and effectiveness of kinship ties in the period, however, these rigid yet systematic definitions of the nuclear family are generally not applied. In this context the ‘nuclear family’ is understood much more broadly to include the nuclear family of origin, the nuclear family of procreation, and sometimes also the nuclear family of origin of one's spouse. Taken this way, the ‘nuclear family’ can stretch to include at least two sets of parents, a married couple, siblings, and siblings-in-law, sons and daughters, and sons and daughters-in-law; the addition of half-relations, step-relations, grandparents, and grandchildren further complicates the picture. In his seminal study of the kinship network of Ralph Josselin, for example, Macfarlane argued influentially that ‘apart from the nuclear family there was no effective kin group in Josselin's world’Footnote 44 – but this was a rather extended notion of the nuclear family. Using the six nuclear-family terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘son’, and ‘daughter’, Josselin was able to claim kinship with a wide circle of relatives by blood and marriage. At one point I counted that the number of people he recognized as members of his ‘nuclear family’ (using these six basic terms alone) amounted to at least 32. His mother, step-mother, and mother-in-law, for example, were all recognized by him as ‘mothers’, with his daughters marriages he gained ‘sons’, and as his sisters married he recognized their husbands' as ‘brothers’. In addition he had servants, whom he also recognized as members of his ‘family’, as well as other individuals claimed by him as kin and important ‘friends’.
Once we realize this unsystematic use of family definitions among historians – and, conversely, the rich and complex historical language of kinship – it is possible to resolve some of the apparent differences between the various scholarly approaches. Evidently, most English people since at least the Middle Ages did not have clear lineages and complex structured networks of cousinage. All the same their nuclear relationships had a considerable capacity for internal extension, for they could grow with marriages and other alliances to include many kin and ‘friends’. These kinship ties were also maintained over time, thus stretching the generational span of what can be defined as ‘extended-nuclear networks’. Beyond them there were uncles, aunts, and cousins of various degrees. Indeed, the contemporary vocabulary of kinship and ‘friendship’ enabled people to claim as kin not only a wide range of relations, half-relations, and relations-in-law, but also non-related individuals; one man nurtured by Ralph Josselin as ‘cousin Josselin’, for example, was either very distantly related by blood or marriage or not related at all. Moreover, the contemporary social framework of the household-family offered various forms of domestic affiliation and permitted a great degree of flexibility and mobility. In the household of the eighteenth-century shopkeeper Thomas Turner, for instance, there were at least eleven different individuals who came and went in the course of eleven years and who were all recognized by Turner as members of his ‘family’, including his wife, child, siblings, nephews, mother-in-law, and several non-related persons (although usually no more than three to five people lived in the ‘family’ at any point in time).Footnote 45 With all this, it appears that the allegedly isolated nuclear family of early modern England was less structurally isolated than has sometimes been argued. There was no clear dichotomy between ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family ties in early modern England, and therefore there could be no necessary inverse relationship between them such as various scholars have suggested.
This clarification opens a path to a less combative and more productive assessment of the role of kinship and household experiences in early modern England, as well as of changes over time. It also brings us closer to understanding the enmeshed social worlds of historical actors such as Thomas Turner and Ralph Josselin, and their notions of kinship, ‘friendship’, and household-family life. It now appears that, while in some respects kinship ties could be narrow and restricted, in others they could be wide, open, or diverse. Keith Wrightson's ‘revisionist’ suggestion that ‘our current working hypothesis must be that kinship ties beyond those of the nuclear family were of limited significance in the social structure of village communities’, therefore, does not necessarily contradict Cressy's ‘neo-revisionist’ argument that the English kinship system was ‘valuable, versatile and wide-ranging’, or Jeremy Boulton's point that it seems possible that kinship did operate as a significant social force in a neighbourhood.Footnote 46 Nor does it necessarily contradict my own claim that, although there were few unavoidable obligations, relatedness entailed important expectations of consideration, duty, and reciprocity among kin, as manifested in the culture of the time. The task, then, is not to formulate either/or questions, but rather to investigate how diverse kinship and family patterns interacted in particular historical contexts. This takes me to my third point.
This concerns the problematic dichotomy between individualism and ‘familism’. Economic individualism and enterprise are traditionally seen as hallmarks of modernity. At the same time, the middling ranks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often typified as driven by personal enterprise and economic ambition. This depiction obviously goes back to Marx and Weber, but it is also typical of more recent scholars who take the ‘revisionist’ approach. For example, Macfarlane has not only famously postulated a clear dichotomy between individualism and ‘familism’ but has also described England as a society uniquely characterized by economic individualism from a very early stage.Footnote 47
There is now considerable evidence to show that, rather than being at opposite poles, individual and familial economic enterprise often went hand in hand in England and indeed they sustained one another, particularly among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century middling ranks. The middling ranks – as can also be seen from the examples cited above – used family connections in their economic enterprises; they also initiated and justified their economic actions on the grounds of familial requirements and needs. Familial reputation was important for maintaining credit, and familial considerations were very significant in calculating risks.Footnote 48 London businessmen, provincial farmers and tradesmen and overseas merchants and entrepreneurs all reveal some similar familial and economic patterns: shared responsibilities, primarily among parents, adult offspring, siblings, and siblings-in-law; individual enterprise alongside the pooling of familial labour and resources; and mutually calculated risks. Historical studies increasingly highlight the importance of social networks and social capital in early modern society. In such enmeshed social worlds, kinship could undoubtedly comprise a valuable asset. The provincial mid-eighteenth-century shopkeeper Thomas Turner (mentioned above), to name but one, was undoubtedly economically minded but he also traded in close collaboration with his mother, owned property together with his siblings, and had debt and credit relations with a range of kin and ‘friends’.Footnote 49 It was not least thanks to his successful manoeuvring among the networks of family and friends that he managed to accumulate wealth and become upwardly mobile. In this he was far from unusual. The more we know about economic and social life in the eighteenth century (both in England but beyond), the more we realize how much it was enmeshed in networks of kinship and ‘friendship’ ties. This takes me to my fourth point.
This concerns the problematic dichotomy between ‘interest’ and ‘emotion’.Footnote 50 In family and kinship relationships, interest and emotions were often closely bound, and in many cases the nearer the relationship, the greater was its instrumentality.Footnote 51 As parents and children, husbands and wives, sibling groups and other kin pulled forces together, their interests and emotions were often closely intermixed. I saw this in my work on eighteenth-century families, among whom material exchanges were expressed and negotiated from casual assistance to substantial help. Similar patterns are also identifiable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, for instance, discusses the ways in which close relations between parents and adolescent and adult children were bound together in a long-term economy of both emotional and material exchange.Footnote 52 O'Hara (as noted above) highlights the role of dowry in the processes of spouse-selection in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, showing how important were material considerations for both the young people and the families involved.Footnote 53 Between strategic marriage and love at first sight lay a broad terrain in which prudence and affection interplayed. When it came to commerce and credit, familial relations and interests often also had a role (as several of the examples mentioned above suggest). The same applied to early modern politics. The work of Sir Lewis Namier has been both criticized and admired for its focus on eighteenth-century ‘connexions’.Footnote 54 One does not need to be an ardent ‘Namierite’, however, to realize the importance of kinship in forging alliances in early modern political life. The role of kinship (again, as I have observed above) is widely recognized by scholars, from Tudor politics to the formation of loyalties during the English Civil War and on to the Whig and Tory interests of the eighteenth century.Footnote 55 Indeed, the duty of a political man, as eighteenth-century historian and politician Edward Gibbon maintained, was first and foremost to employ the ‘weight and consideration’ of office in the service of ‘friends’.Footnote 56 There was, therefore, no necessary opposition between interest and emotion in early modern kinship relations, which brings me to my fifth and final point.
My last point concerns the limitations of narrow material approaches to the history of kinship and the importance of negative relationships among kin. Historical studies of kinship focus all too often on positive exchanges, such as manifestations of care and love. At their crudest, questions of family and kinship can focus on who lived together with whom and who gave money to whom. However, it is important to go beyond actual exchanges and to examine the expectations – and frustrated expectations – among kin. What people expected from their kin gives us insights into social and cultural life no less than what actually came about. This is particularly important because relationships among kin were often marked by negative tension and disappointment. For example, for an eighteenth-century woman such as Nancy Woodforde who left her parental home to keep her uncle's house, the tensions between expectations and reality were crucial in creating her experience of kinship and moulding her sense of her own identity.Footnote 57 For Thomas Turner, his frustration with his kin was a regular feature in his life. He continually saw himself as giving much and receiving little. To be sure, kinship for him implied obligation, but all too often, in his view, obligation was expected yet inadequately fulfilled. Ralph Josselin noted (years after the event) how, when he was in need, ‘friends were not so kinde as I expected’.Footnote 58 Personal documents reveal numerous negotiations of anger.Footnote 59 Formal archives contain rich accounts of disputes among kin (indeed, a great many of the legal records in our possession, on which historians draw, were probably generated owing to family conflict). Lastly, while negative relations among kin were widely prevalent, it is important to remember that they could play positive roles too. As Sylvia Yanagisako has shown in her analysis of present-day Italian business life, kinship disruption can in fact be a factor in economic growth and diversification, as kin split away from family firms and establish businesses of their own.Footnote 60 Thus, in all these ways, what kin did not do was as important as – and possibly more important – than what they actually did.
4. Questions of continuity and change
The five points raised above address core conceptual issues about the role of kinship, yet they also highlight questions of continuity and change. Once we appreciate the similarity between the ‘master narrative’ and the ‘revisionist approach’, and once we see the inadequacy of the concepts ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’, it becomes clear that any exploration of change and continuity in terms of distinct and dichotomous ‘extended’ and ‘nuclear’ kinship and family ties must be problematic. What follows is that any developmental model that postulates an evolutionary relationship between ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ kinship and family ties is also problematic; this, in turn, has ramifications for studies of continuity and change. If we add in here the possible alignment of individual and familial strategies, it is possible to think further about the relationship between kinship and social and economic change, and indeed between kinship and ‘modernity’.
It is thus possible to speculate on some long-term patterns. Evidently, there is by now very significant data to suggest that there was important continuity in kinship and family patterns in England throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Patterns of kinship recognition and alignment, such as the extended-nuclear networks described here, were largely continuous over the period. So was the recognition of ‘friends’. So also were the social and economic manifestations of these patterns in terms of credit relations, capital investment, or economic cooperation. Other continuing roles were matrimonial advice, guardianship, and patronage. Negative and positive sentiments among kin continued to exist. In addition, residential arrangements within the framework of the household-family remained broadly similar throughout the period, including mobility within and among households. Although most households contained nuclear families or their relics, significant minorities of households included wider kin, and the presence of kin in households also changed as needs arose, over time and in the course of the life cycle.Footnote 61 Evidently, then, there was no decline in the force of kinship ties in this period, as the ‘master narrative’ implied. On the contrary, kinship ties were routinely drawn upon in the period's vibrant social and economic networks; in certain sections of society, or in particular circumstances, they could be especially useful.
So much for the early modern period, but what about the succeeding centuries? Just as it was a mistake to argue in favour of an enduring pattern of ‘the nuclear family’ in England from the early modern period to modernity, it would be unfortunate to slip into arguments about the unchanging force of kinship. Changes such as economic growth, mobility, urban growth, scientific advance, legal and state intervention, war, dislocation, and cultural transformation have surely had an impact on kinship ties, and in various ways may have been shaped by them. One important challenge, then, is to integrate more closely the diverse findings of the ‘revisionist’ and ‘neo-revisionist’ studies, and to work through them to create fuller syntheses of kinship and family ties in England over the long run. These are bound to converge not in any single lineal narrative but in diverse, partly overlapping – and undoubtedly also partly conflicting – shifts and processes. In the rest of this article, I highlight three points of focus that I believe merit further assessment: two chronological and one cultural and geographical.
My first chronological point of focus concerns the transitions from the early modern to eighteenth-century period and to the nineteenth century. While a great deal of work has been done on the Tudor and Stuart period and ‘the long eighteenth century’, and while the nineteenth century is widely researched, transitions from the early modern period and the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century are relatively little explored. To give but one example, we know of significant links between kinship, geographical mobility, and urban growth in the processes of industrialization in England. Future research may investigate some related patterns. Considering the fact that kinship relationships were so important for raising business capital and establishing credit, for instance, it would be interesting to know more about what impact the growth of banking had on kinship networks: did it serve to dissolve existing loyalties, or were they consolidated in new ways? Risk and debt facilities also changed, from the expansion of insurance in the eighteenth century to the introduction of limited liability in the second half of the nineteenth, thus potentially affecting the ‘fear of ruination’ that for centuries had haunted individuals, kinship groups, and joint stock companies.Footnote 62 Another possible process will be to explore further the changing patterns of education in the period: did they simply sever previous patterns of kin support and apprenticeship or did the growth of formal schooling and the extension of children's years at home interact with familial and kinship patterns in other ways?Footnote 63 It is only recently that researchers have also begun to understand more fully the effects of (arguably) the greatest structural change in English kinship in the long run: the increased practice of family limitation and fertility decline from around 1860.Footnote 64 Other processes of change from the early modern period to the nineteenth century that may be further examined with particular regard to kinship include geographical and social mobility, changing transport and communication technologies, the growth of meritocracy, the impact of war, and developments in housing.
A second and broader chronological scope that is worthy of further investigation (and that also requires more extensive discussion here), concerns the even longer run, going from the early modern period to the middle of the twentieth century, especially the period from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, when changes in kinship patterns appear to be particularly marked. This period saw a rise in divorce and forms of co-habitation, increasing acceptance of flexible domestic arrangements, and the development of new forms of relatedness, whether through non-marriage, same-sex alliances, scientific intervention, or various forms of adoption, fostering, and partnership. At the same time, forms of family planning had also developed, longevity increased, and female education and employment patterns had undergone very significant changes. Some facts and figures can be mentioned briefly to illustrate these changes. More than one in three couples who marry in Britain nowadays divorce and a significant proportion remarry, thus leading to complex reconstituted and blended families.Footnote 65 Non-marriage is also an option that does not preclude parenthood. Figures issued by the Office of National Statistics confirm that more than one in three births in the UK currently occur outside marriage, compared with one in sixteen in 1960.Footnote 66 Notions of illegitimacy, which have segregated social and biological kinship for centuries, have thus also been transformed, as were possibly some notions of incest.Footnote 67 The headship of households has also changed. One in five families with dependent children in the UK is nowadays headed by a lone parent, for instance, compared with one in twelve in 1971. A national organization such as English Heritage now offers subscriptions for dual- and single-parent families as a matter of course. When one takes into account both heterosexual and same-sex alliances, as well as notions of queer kinship, the possible range of kinship variation increases. While most English people at the start of the twenty-first century therefore probably experience nuclear-family residence at some point in their lives, many also spend part or most of their lives in other kin and domestic arrangements.
Social scientists studying such transformations highlight the demise of the nuclear family and the emergence of ‘new families’ or ‘families of choice’.Footnote 68 Taking an early modern historical perspective, however, one might wonder to what extent the ‘post-modern family’ of the late twentieth century also has some long-term antecedents. As Lawrence Stone remarked as early as 1977, there is structural resemblance between the reconstituted and ‘blended’ families created as a result of widowhood in the early modern period, and those established owing to divorce in recent times. In both cases, the initial rate of family breakdown roughly amounts to about one in three.Footnote 69 Single-person families, widely current today, certainly also existed in varying forms throughout the early modern period and in the nineteenth century.Footnote 70 Moreover, if one looks at the ‘household-family framework’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, additional and potentially pertinent comparisons come to mind. Early modern household-families were domestic and residential units, whose members were bound together by a series of contractual, occupational, and affective relationships, yet they were not necessarily related by blood or marriage.Footnote 71 Household-families were often also marked by fluctuating populations of kin and non-kin, and were tied to networks of non-resident kin and ‘friends’. To be sure, the internal relationships within such household-families changed over the course of time. Whereas the household-family framework of the early modern period was hierarchical, patriarchal, and often occupational, the organization of domestic units nowadays is more diffuse. Some long-term similarities and differences seem apparent, however, and they merit further investigation.Footnote 72 One might speculate, for example, as to whether, as well as witnessing as a crisis of the conjugal family, contemporary society is also experiencing a re-emergence of the household-family and associated kinship and family patterns.
Indeed, another aspect of kinship – one that seems suggestive in the long-run perspective – concerns the English language of relatedness. In a previous context I argued that, far from being constant (as some ‘revisionist’ historians have argued), the English language of kinship has undergone significant changes over time, in terms of both its terminology and its conventions of use.Footnote 73 If the vibrant and rich early modern language of kinship was important in negotiating the social alliances and networks of its period it appears that recent changes are also significant, however. The word ‘partner’, for instance, historically employed to describe those linked by business or marriage, is now increasingly used even in legal and contractual contexts ‘to refer to a member of a couple in a long-standing relationship of any kind’, thus often also intentionally giving equal kinship recognition to marriage, co-habitation, same-sex relationships, and so on.Footnote 74 Likewise, the terminology for designating step-relations has been significantly enlarged over time. In 1755 Samuel Johnson remarked that the only surviving usage of the compounds of step- was in the term ‘step-mother’. Nowadays, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, ‘stepfather is hardly less frequently used’, and ‘stepson, -daughter, -child, -brother, -sister are by no means rare’.Footnote 75 Other potentially suggestive changes concern the ‘in-law’ terminology, which manifests changing boundaries between relations by blood and marriage over the long run (in the early modern period the ‘in-law’ terminology was also applied to step- and half- relations). At the same time, several conventions for claiming relations by marriage have become obsolete, such as the application of kinship terms on their own or together with names and surnames, which affects not only the recognition of kin but representations of age and gender hierarchies.Footnote 76 It would be unlikely for a present-day speaker to use the elementary kinship terms for inclusively naming diverse relations by marriage while also differentiating females by their marital status as, for example, Ralph Josselin had done when designating his ‘extended-nuclear’ network (for instance, ‘my brother Jeremy’ was in fact the brother of Ralph Josselin's wife; ‘my sister Betty’ was probably the wife of that same ‘brother’; and ‘my brother Worral’ was the husband of Ralph Josselin's wife's sister, whereas ‘sister Hodson’ was Josselin's own sister by blood and marriage, identified by her married nameFootnote 77). In addition to all this, collective terms for naming kin and non-kin, such as ‘friend’ and ‘connexion’, have also largely fallen out of use, whereas Scripture-based terms (such as the use of the term ‘nephew’ to designate grandchild), have become entirely archaic.Footnote 78 Taking a ‘Whiggish’ view, it appears that between the early modern period and modernity, these and other changes had the cumulative effect of defining more clearly familial roles and relationships, restricting the number of kin recognized by naming, and highlighting biological kin while isolating the nuclear family. Collective terms became outdated, relationships by marriage were more clearly differentiated, and the inclusiveness and opacity of many terms and usages have been considerably reduced.Footnote 79
Such changes can be especially discerned from around the early nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, it appears that English kinship terminology was considerably ‘nuclearized’. Terminological shifts from the twentieth century and onwards, however, now seem to be heading in new ways. The current use of the term ‘partner’, for example, is indicative of the new inclusive definitions, and is not unlike those employed in the early modern period for both designating kin and obscuring their exact number, degree, or gender (like the terms ‘relation’ and ‘friend’Footnote 80). Definitions of ‘family’, too, are evidently undergoing diversity. And so, while in some respects the historical English language of relatedness clearly reveals continuity, both the terminology and conventions of usage suggest change, highlighting the need for further investigation of the language of kinship, with broad chronological perspectives in mind.
Lastly, my third point for focus and further investigation concerns geographical and cultural comparative scopes. Whereas discussions of the ‘master narrative’ took broad cultural and historical perspectives and whereas key works of the ‘revisionist’ approach also developed with explicit and implicit comparative views (and often in close dialogue with scholars in continental Europe), many ‘revisionist’ and ‘neo-revisionist’ studies centre exclusively on England.Footnote 81 In view of the importance of networks and social alignments, however, comparative perspectives appear suggestive here too. European perspectives reveal many similarities. The networks of kinship, friendship, and patronage linking the French provinces to Paris and the court, for example, are not unlike those traced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, despite the many differences in political culture and inheritance patterns.Footnote 82 In the prosperous world of the Dutch Golden Age, connections with family and friends played a major role in trade and business, and were moreover closely entwined with other neighbourhood and community networks.Footnote 83 Kin were more likely to trade together than with one another, so as not to make a profit out of each other (thus often also manifesting dense webs of alliances by blood and marriage, as highlighted here). The family fortunes, as Anne Goldgar explains, were ‘in some ways the responsibilities of all’.Footnote 84 Indeed, when it came to credit and commerce, English, Swedish, and Dutch trading companies evidently drew on similar economic and social resources and converged on the same global junctions – whether in India, China, the Middle East, or the Americas.Footnote 85 Some international networks were particularly kinship-based: from the seventeenth-century English Atlantic traders studied by Grassby and the Scottish and Swedish traders explored by Leos Müller to Dutch-based Jewish banking and trading networks or Italian and Chinese traders and manufacturers.Footnote 86 Beyond all this, global perspectives increasingly attract attention and again throw into focus England's story of economic growth. Whereas path-breaking investigations date a ‘divergence’ between England and China to the period around 1800, say,Footnote 87 other studies trace it through the early modern period to the Black Death, if not earlier. Future research may further examine the role of English kinship in stories of adaptability and growth, and open yet new comparisons with cultures worldwide.
The history of English kinship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus highlights the importance of continued and renewed investigation. As well as the ‘infinite variety of experiences that individuals encountered’,Footnote 88 it is important to re-examine shifting social, economic, and cultural patterns, and pertinent manifestations of relatedness – both comparatively and over time. Moreover, if the ‘master narrative’ highlighted the demise of kinship in the processes of modernization, and if ‘revisionist’ critiques saw the limitation of kinship as a precondition for growth, recent research suggests that in the enmeshed society of early modern England economic, social, and cultural exchanges were often propelled along kinship tracks. Thus they could be motivated, facilitated, promoted, and frequently disrupted and derailed by alliances of kin and ‘friends’. Wide sections of early modern English society were thus typically marked by highly adaptable networks of relatedness: habitually ‘nuclearly-extended’, with existing and co-opted ties, expanding and contracting with life-cycles and life-events, enmeshed in credit and commerce, and closely tied to migration, mobility, and occupational ties. However effective they may have been (potentially or in practice), such networks were also volatile and easily splintered, for emotions blended with interests and interests were bound up with emotional ties. Going back to Wrigley's words quoted above, then, one wonders to what extent it was this pattern of enmeshed kinship and family, rather than just ‘the small conjugal family’ that was ‘strongly congenial to relatively high real incomes, adaptability and growth’, and that lay behind England's commercial and political expansion, both prior to industrialization and alongside it.Footnote 89 Future research may say more on that.
With a substantial body of existing research on kinship, and with renewed scholarly interest and clearer conceptual frameworks, we are now in a better position to address anew questions of continuity and change, which will not only contribute to English history, but will indeed strengthen comparative perspectives both in Europe, and beyond. As Fernand Braudel famously observed, in the end, it is the long run that always wins.Footnote 90
