¹ In addition to the articles revised and published in this special issue, the following papers were presented at the conference: Beinart, W.: ‘The family, youth organisations, gangs and politics in the Transkeian area.’Google ScholarBloch, M.: ‘Kinship, irrigation and resistance to centralisation among the Merina of Madagascar.’Google ScholarCohen, D. W.: ‘Pim's work: some thoughts on the construction of relations and groups – the Luo of Western Kenya.’Google ScholarGray, R.: ‘Christianity, the family and the control of evil.’Google ScholarGutman, H.: ‘Origins of the North American Black family’ (oral presentation only).Google ScholarLast, M.: ‘The importance of being kin-less.’Google ScholarLevine, D.: ‘Proto-industrialization and demographic change’ (oral presentation only).Google ScholarMeintjes, S.: ‘Ideology and property among Christian Africans in nineteenth-century Natal.’Google ScholarMuntemba, M. Shimwaayi: ‘The changing position of women in Zambia as food producers and suppliers: the twentieth-century experience.’Google ScholarNelson, N.: ‘Is fostering of children on the increase in Central Kenya? Parental strategies in a situation of accelerating urbanization and economic stratification.’Google ScholarO'brien, D. Cruise: ‘The holy family in Touba.’Google ScholarPeel, J. D. Y.: ‘The changing family in modern Ijesha history.’Google ScholarRoberts, A. D.: ‘Kinship and the accumulation of power: the Bemba of N. E. Zambia.’Google ScholarRoss, R.: ‘The Roman Dutch law of inheritance, landed property and Afrikaner family structure.’Google Scholar A limited number of these papers are still available from the History Department, S.O.A.S.

² See, for example, Laslett, Peter, assisted by Richard, Wall (ed.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Demos, J., A Little Commonwealth: Family life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Shorter, E., The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Forster, R. and Ranum, O. (eds.), Family and Society (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Gutman, H. G., The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Lee, R. D. (ed.), Population Patterns in the Past (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Lasch, C., Haven in a Heartless World (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Levine, D., Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Flandrin, J. L., Families in Former Times (London, 1979).Google Scholar For a useful review of some of the American literature in particular, and for the relationship between sociological investigations of the family and the historical interest, see Elder, G. H., ‘Approaches to social change and the family’, in Demos, J. and Boocock, S. S., Turning Points. Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago and London, 1978Google Scholar: supplement to the American Journal of Sociology, LXXXIV).

³ The relationship between the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and Africanist social anthropologists has clearly been intimate and fruitful.

⁴ See, for example, Goody, J., Thirsk, J. and Thompson, E. P., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar and Goody, J., ‘The evolution of the family’, in Laslett, (ed.), Household and Family in Past Time, 103–24.Google Scholar

⁵ Flandrin, , Families in Former Times, I.Google Scholar

⁶ ‘The importance of being kin-less’, I.

⁷ Only one of our contributors in fact dealt with the rise to power of a single family through, in part, the manipulation of rules of succession, in this case in the highly special circumstances of the Mouride brotherhood in West Africa: O'brien, D. C., ‘The holy family in Touba’.Google Scholar

⁸ See especially Last, ‘The importance of being kin-less’, 6–7.

⁹ Cohen, , ‘Pim's work’, 6.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Chanock, M., ‘Making customary law: men, women and courts in colonial Northern Rhodesia’, in Hay, M. J. and Wright, M. (eds.), African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston University Papers in Africa, VII: Boston, 1982), 53–67.Google Scholar

¹¹ Below, p. 208.

¹² Historians are only just beginning to make use of this material for a history of slavery and for reconstructing the demography and family structure of settler society. For a range of this new work, see Elphick, R. and Giliomee, H., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1820 (London, 1979)Google Scholar; for the application of the methods of the Cambridge Group to the eighteenth-century Cape see Ross, R., ‘The “White” population of South Africa in the 18th century’, Population Studies, XXIX (1976)Google Scholar; Ross, R., ‘The age of marriage of white South Africans, 1700–1951’, in Fyfe, C. (ed.), African Historical Demography (Edinburgh, 1981)Google Scholar and his ‘Oppression, sexuality and slavery at the Cape of Good Hope’, in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, VI, ii (1979), 421–33.Google Scholar

¹³ See below, pp. 155–6.

¹⁴ Thornton, J., ‘Demography and history in the kingdom of the Kongo, 1550–1750’, J. Afr. Hist., XVIII, iv (1977).Google Scholar

¹⁵ London, 1969.

¹⁶ In his Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism.

¹⁷ See below, pp. 238–9.

¹⁸ Meintjes, , ‘Ideology and property.’Google Scholar In fact, the relatively modern period has been much more handsomely covered. See, for example, Caldwell, John C., Population Growth and Family Change in Africa (London, 1968).Google Scholar Clyde Mitchell's demographic data collected in Zambia in the 1950s, which he is currently reworking, should also prove invaluable to the historian of the family. We are grateful to him for presenting some of his work in progress to the S.O.A.S. African History seminar in 1979.

¹⁹ Edited by Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Forde, D. (London, 1952).Google Scholar The debate and the confusion are by no means limited to Africa, and it was this in part which prompted Laslett to call together the conference whose papers are published in Household and Family in Past Time.

²⁰ Families in Former Times, 4. For the full discussion see pp. 4–22.

²¹ See Sabean, D., ‘The history of the family in Africa and Europe: some comparative perspectives’, below.Google Scholar

²² Below, p. 167.

²³ Below, p. 277.

²⁴ Below, p. 164.

²⁵ ‘Evolution of the family’, 124.

²⁶ Below, p. 181.

²⁷ Wives for Cattle (London, 1982).Google Scholar

²⁸ Roberts, , ‘Kinship and the accumulation of power’, 2–3Google Scholar; see also Roberts, A. D., A History of the Bemba (London, 1973), 173–81, 294–301.Google Scholar

²⁹ See, for example, Lévi-Strauss, C., Les Structures élementaires de la parenté (Paris, 1949), 140–50Google Scholar; and Gough, K. and Schneider, D. (eds.), Matrilineal Kinship (Berkeley, 1961), 649.Google Scholar

³⁰ Baumann, H., ‘The division of labour according to sex in African hoe-culture’, Africa, I, iii (1928)Google Scholar We are grateful to Marcia Wright for this reference.

³¹ Murdock, G. P., Social Structure (New York, 1949), 206–7.Google Scholar

³² For a forceful presentation of this view, see Denbow, J. R., ‘The Toutswe Tradition: a study in socio-economic change’, in Hitchcock, R. and Smith, M. (eds.), Settlement in Botswana (Johannesburg, 1982), 73–86.Google Scholar

³³ ‘Is matriliny doomed?’ in Douglas, M. and Kaberry, P. M., Man in Africa (London, 1969), 129.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid. 130.

³⁵ For some recent work on the significance of cattle for the reproduction of patrilineal societies in southern Africa, see the introduction and essays by Beinart, , Bonner, and Guy, in Marks, S. and Atmore, A. (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-industrial South Africa (London, 1979).Google Scholar

³⁶ Last, ‘Importance of being kin-less’, I.

³⁷ Below, pp. 269–72.

³⁸ Below, pp. 282–3.

³⁹ Wright, M., ‘Technology and women's control over production: three case studies from East-Central Africa and their implications for Ester Boserup's thesis about the displacement of women’, unpublished paper to the Rockefeller Foundation Workshop on Women, Household and Human Capital Development in Low Income Countries (July 1982) especially 17, 23.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Below, p. 179.

⁴¹ Below, p. 179.

⁴² Last, ‘The importance of being kin-less’, 5.

⁴³ Spaulding, J., ‘“The misfortunes of some – the advantages of others”: land sales by women in Sinnar’, in Hay, and Wright, (eds.), African Woman and the Law, 3–18.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Peel, , ‘The changing family in modern Ijesha history’, 4–5.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Below, pp. 263–5.

⁴⁶ Below, p. 173.

⁴⁷ Below, p. 183.

⁴⁸ Wright, , ‘Technology and women's control’, 34.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Below, pp. 277–8.

⁵⁰ ‘Is matriliny doomed?’, 129–30.

⁵¹ Below, p. 209.

⁵² This comes out perhaps more clearly from his ‘The rise of the Cape gentry’, in Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London), Collected seminar papers on the Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries (London, 1982), vol. 12, than from his paper to the conference.Google Scholar

⁵³ Below, p. 209.

⁵⁴ Below, p. 160.

⁵⁵ For an extreme statement of this viewpoint see Magubane, B., The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa (New York, 1979), 56–9.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ ‘Christianity, the family and the control of evil’, I.

⁵⁷ Ibid.. 3.

⁵⁸ Below, pp. 252–6.

⁵⁹ ‘The changing position of women in Zambia as food producers.’

⁶⁰ Harries, P., ‘Kinship, ideology and the nature of pre-colonial labour migration: labour migration from the Delagoa Bay hinterland to South Africa to 1895’, in Marks, S. and Rathbone, R. (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Changes in South Africa. African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (London, 1982), 142–66.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Murray, C., ‘The high price of bridewealth, migrant labour and the position of women in Lesotho’, J. African Law, XXI, i (1977)Google Scholar; see also his ‘Migrant labour and changing family structure in the rural periphery of southern Africa’, J. Southern African Studies, V, ii (1980), 139–56Google Scholar and his Families Divided. The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

⁶² ‘“The family” and early migrancy in southern Africa’, unpublished paper presented to the African History Seminar, S.O.A.S. and I.C.S. (May, 1979).Google Scholar

⁶³ Goody, , ‘The evolution of the family’, 119.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ ‘“Wailing for purity”: prayer unions, African mothers and adolescent daughters, 1912–40’, in Marks, and Rathbone, (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change, 338–57.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ ‘The family, youth organisations, gangs and politics in the Transkeian area.’

⁶⁶ ‘Pim's work’, 8–9

⁶⁷ John Peel's paper turned to our attention to the ‘psychological role’ of the family, which he explored through the diary entries of a single individual; Richard Gray's fine discussion of the significance of the family in controlling and coping with evil also led us in that direction. For a major article directing historians to the possibilities of understanding familial bonds of affection in the past, despite unpromising sources, see Medick, H. and Sabean, D., ‘Family and kinship: material interest and emotion’, Peasant Studies, VIII, ii (1979), 139–60.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ ‘The changing family’, I.

⁶⁹ Bloch, , ‘Kinship, irrigation and resistance’, 3.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Ibid. 15.

⁷¹ ‘Ideology and property among Christian Africans in Natal’; this was of course also the theme of the contributions by Ross and Crummey discussed above.

⁷² ‘Making customary law’; for another very different but major account of the effects of colonial law on marriage and bridewealth and thus on production and reproduction, see Guy, J. J., ‘The destruction and reconstruction of Zulu society’, in Marks, and Rathbone, (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change, 167–94.Google Scholar

⁷³ Cambridge, 1969.

⁷⁴ For some of this material see, for example, Azu, G., The Ga Family and Social Change (Leiden, 1974)Google Scholar; Fortes, M., The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi (London, 1949)Google Scholar; Good, E.y, ‘Kinship, marriage and the developmental cycle among the Gonja of northern Ghana’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1961)Google Scholar; Kaberry, P. M., Women of the Grassfields: a Study of the Economic Position of Women in Bamenda, British Cameroons (London, 1952).Google Scholar One might also add the work of Peter Lloyd, Kenneth Little, Polly Hill, Claude Meillassoux, Christine Oppong, Simon Ottenberg and David Brokensha.

⁷⁵ The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925.

⁷⁶ Price, R., Maroon Society (Baltimore, 1979).Google Scholar