Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:11:07.271Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

PATRICK MANNING
PATRICK MANNING*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Families, while usually thought of in local terms, also have their global dimension: some families stretch around the world, while families anywhere are affected by worldwide declines in mortality. This study addresses the local and global changes brought to family structures by migration. Through comparisons of five pairs of regions from the early modern Indian Ocean world and Atlantic basin, the study shows how migration created distinctive regional age and sex ratios. It also traces the flows of migrants between Atlantic and Indian Ocean and compares the intensity of migration in each zone. It argues that expanding migration reinforced familial mixing and family frontiers in virtually every region and every social grouping. The resulting complexity in family mixes often caused families to become smaller, yet brought new criteria (birthplace, colour, religion, etc.) for hierarchy and social order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 315 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 I believe that migration in previous periods was also influential in modifying family structure, though it will be more difficult to document the argument.

2 In a related paper, I address the historiographical and conceptual aspects of the study of family at the world-historical level. There, I argue in general for the existence of global patterns of family development and interaction. I argue that historians are increasingly in a position to begin identifying and exploring such patterns, and that a world-historical standpoint leads to helpful clarification of the numerous and competing definitions of family. Patrick Manning, ‘Family in Anthropology and World History: Definitions and Debates', unpublished paper.

3 For more detail on the definition of habitat and on the distinctive character of local mobility, see Manning, Patrick, ‘Cross-Community Migration: A Distinctive Human Pattern’, Social Evolution and History 5 (2006)Google Scholar.

4 This definition does not account for the variations in status or class within a given habitat. For a lower-class person to join an upper-class family is to cross great social barriers, but rather lower barriers in language and culture.

5 For an excellent compilation and analysis of parish records, see Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

6 Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen, Richardson, David and Klein, Herbert S., eds, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Vink, Markus, ‘“The World's Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History 14 (2003): 131–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For a recent discussion of general patterns, see Manning, Patrick, Migration in World History (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar.

8 Historical studies of changing family structure tend to give minimal attention to migration. For one such study, see Seccombe, Wally, A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar.

9 Changes in birth rates and death rates can also change the size and shape of the population pyramid, but these are neglected here.

10 Ludden, David, Peasant History in South India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other studies of migration and family in India, see Guha, Sumit, ‘Household Size and Household Structure in Western India c. 1700–1950: Beginning an Exploration’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 35 (1998): 23–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haynes, Douglas and Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Conceiving Mobility: Weavers' Migrations in Pre-colonial and Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 36 (1999): 35–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Pearson, M. N., Coastal Western India (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1981)Google Scholar.

12 Boxer, C. R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (New York, NY: Knopf, 1969), pp. 69–78Google Scholar.

13 Metcalf, Alida C., Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Moreau, Filipe Eduardo, Os Indios nas cartes de Nóbrega e Anchieta (São Paulo: Annablume, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 Isaacman, Allen, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution. The Zambesi Prazos, 1750–1902 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

15 Austen, Ralph A. and Derrick, Jonathan, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dapper, Olfert, Description de l'Afrique (Amsterdam, 1686)Google Scholar.

16 Alagoa, E. J., Small Brave City-State: A History of Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Jones, G. I., The Trading States of the Oil Rivers: A Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

17 Eaton, Richard M., “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650,” in Chatterjee, Indrani and Eaton, Richard M., eds, Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 115–135Google Scholar. Habshi generals were able to marry women from elite Deccan families; infantrymen formed relationships when possible with women of the Deccan or the small number of Habshi women who made the passage, or went with or without family ties.

18 Bosman, Willem, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1967)Google Scholar; Law, Robin, The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Manning, Patrick, Slavery Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Vink, Markus, ‘“The World's Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History 14 (2003): 131–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Dunn, Richard, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of a Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Wood, Peter H., Black Majority (New York, NY: Knopf, 1974)Google Scholar.

21 Pearson, M. N., Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Misra, Satish C., Muslim Communities in Gujarat: Preliminary Studies in their History and Social Organization (New York, NY: Asia Publishing House, 1964)Google Scholar.

22 De Vries, Jan, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

23 Canny, Nicholas, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Language distributions of the Americas, however, demonstrate that intermediate-distance migrations had been a regular characteristic of pre-Columbian Amerindian societies.

25 Further, it made families smaller in biological, residential and social terms.

26 One can get a sense of the range of marriage practices by asking any pair of biological parents whether they are formally married, whether the relationship is monogamous or polygamous (i.e. if either party is in another relationship), whether the parents reside together, and whether the children are recognised by both parents. Of the 16 logically possible combinations of these four factors, roughly half were actually utilised with some frequency in the seventeenth-century world as described here. For instance, there were few marriages which were formalised, monogamous and co-resident in which the parents denied recognition to their children. But there were informal, polygynous, non-coresident relationships in which the male parent denied recognition to his children.

27 Ewald, Janet, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedman, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’, American Historical Review 105 (2000): 69–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 If these basic considerations on the interplay of migration and family structure can be confirmed, further analysis could address in more detail the various types of migration and family structure. In later times, the degree of migration and familial interaction increased, and the amount of documentation increases substantially, but the magnitude and the complexity of the processes makes the analysis more difficult. Manning, Patrick, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 315–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Russell-Wood, A. J. R., World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415–1808 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

30 Chojnacka, Monica, ‘Power, Family, and Household in Early Modern Italy’, Journal of Family History 22 (1997), pp. 491–495Google Scholar.