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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]
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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

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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 Patrick Manning, ‘Family in Anthropology and World History: Definitions and Debates', unpublished paper.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.

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

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

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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.

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