Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 At Empire's End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-century India
- 2 The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate
- 3 ‘Silk Road, Cotton Road or … Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times’
- 4 The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?
- 5 Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796
- 6 The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation
- 7 Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India
- 8 Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative
- 9 Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers
- 10 The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara
- 11 ‘Kiss My Foot,’ Said the King: Firearms, Diplomacy and the Battle for Raichur, 1520
- 12 Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
- 13 Chinese Revenue Farms and Borders in Southeast Asia
- Publications
- Index
12 - Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 At Empire's End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-century India
- 2 The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate
- 3 ‘Silk Road, Cotton Road or … Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times’
- 4 The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?
- 5 Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796
- 6 The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation
- 7 Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India
- 8 Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative
- 9 Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers
- 10 The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara
- 11 ‘Kiss My Foot,’ Said the King: Firearms, Diplomacy and the Battle for Raichur, 1520
- 12 Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
- 13 Chinese Revenue Farms and Borders in Southeast Asia
- Publications
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Not much analysis has yet been conducted on the global patterns and global interactions of family life. Anthropologists and sociologists have tended to analyse families as local, ethnically based organizations, whose rules and structures have been inherited from the ancestors and reproduced without much regard for the outside world. While the ethnic particularities of families are unmistakable, it would be strange if families were uniquely resistant to global influences in a world where economic, political and ideological trends are now thought to have circulated and interacted widely.
Migration opens an obvious avenue for thinking of family in transregional terms. One need only think of merchant families, stretched across the lengths of their trade routes, to recognize the significance of migration as a non-local factor influencing family life. Working from this insight, the present study considers migration and its influence on family structure. I argue that there exists a social nexus linking migration to family structure—that migration, though highly variable, is typical in family history. This interpretation focuses on modelling the dynamics of family structure, the dynamics of migration and the familial mixing resulting from their interaction. I present my interpretation of change and interaction in families by deploying and documenting several simplified models of family, migration and their interaction. If family structure can be shown through this analysis to have been influenced significantly by migration, the door is then opened to further studies of the influence of migration on the governance and ideology of family life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World HistoryEssays in Honour of John F. Richards, pp. 299 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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