This study has arisen out of two interests. First, in the past, accounts of the major oriental and Mediterranean societies have often presented a picture of the position of women, and of domestic life more generally, which seemed to disregard the fact that at marriage they were endowed rather than purchased. Secondly, this approach has led to an opposition between East and West which encouraged ethnocentric notions, sociological and popular, about differences in family and marriage which various authors have tried to relate to the process of modernisation. Some have seen Marx's Asiatic mode of production as characterised by an Asiatic mode of reproduction. In the eyes of others, the more appropriate comparison was with Africa or even Australia. My account tries to reconsider these views by looking at the domestic relations of those societies in terms of certain substantive hypotheses and general theories, as a result of which I try to place them in a context that is in many respects less exotic than these approaches suggest.

The role of the family in the development of ‘capitalism’, ‘industrialisation’, ‘modernisation’, is a common theme of the social sciences and forms the backcloth to the global sociological theses such as those of Max Weber, of many Western historians committed, consciously or unconsciously, to a strong view of the uniqueness of the West, of anthropologists contrasting family and kinship, complex and simple exchange, of demographers interested in and concerned about the demographic transition, the value of children and domestic strategies.