As old as the prehistoric bones jumbled in caves, as new as the latest union consummated in a test tube, the family in one form or another is at the heart of every society. Our most common institution, it is also the source of some of the world's most compelling and persistent questions, touching the very quick of history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. A History of the Family is the first work to address all these aspects of the family over time and across the earth--to search out what the family means in its most particular and universal senses.

This monumental work in two volumes brings together experts from every discipline to show what the study of each epoch has to tell us about the family. Why is the family universal and yet so different in its various cultural manifestations? What notions of kinship regulate it, and how do these develop and change?

Françoise Zonabend's anthropological perspective on these questions, leading off Volume I, surveys familial terms and arrangements from familiar patrilinear models to matrilinear societies in Sumatra and Ghana to polyandry among the Nayar and the Toda of India. The following essays, which move from prehistory to antiquity to the middle ages, trace the evolution of the family from primate behavior to codified practices--in Sumer and Babylon and ancient Rome, in feudal Europe and medieval Byzantium, in China and Japan and Arab Islam--and relate these developments to religious, economic, and governmental concerns from land ownership to dynastic control and the maintenance of public order.

This monumental work in two volumes brings together experts from every discipline to show what the study of each epoch has to tell us about the family. Why is the family universal and yet so different in its various cultural manifestations? What notions of kinship regulate it, and how do these develop and change?

The shock of modernity shapes the story in Volume II, as the authors explore the impact of the industrial revolution, socialism, and contemporary practices from birth control to the widespread employment of women on the forms and norms of the family. This volume ranges from the changing influence of church and state on marriage and inheritance in early modern Europe to the demographic catastrophe wrought by the Spanish conquest in Mesoamerica; from the redefinition of family during the Chinese Revolution to the organization of nation and business along family lines in Japan since the Meiji Restoration; from the effects of British colonial policy and nationalistic reform on the family in India to the interplay of urbanization and the spread of Islam in new family codes in black Africa. The result is a complex, encyclopedic picture of the family confronting vast changes in politics, economics, and technology, adapting freely or perforce and yet fiercely maintaining the diversity that has marked it from the beginning of time.