Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T06:01:16.245Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2014

Patrick Manning
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Richard M. Eaton
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Munis D. Faruqui
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
David Gilmartin
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University
Sunil Kumar
Affiliation:
University of Delhi
Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Not much analysis has yet been conducted on the global patterns and global interactions of family life. Anthropologists and sociologists have tended to analyse families as local, ethnically based organizations, whose rules and structures have been inherited from the ancestors and reproduced without much regard for the outside world. While the ethnic particularities of families are unmistakable, it would be strange if families were uniquely resistant to global influences in a world where economic, political and ideological trends are now thought to have circulated and interacted widely.

Migration opens an obvious avenue for thinking of family in transregional terms. One need only think of merchant families, stretched across the lengths of their trade routes, to recognize the significance of migration as a non-local factor influencing family life. Working from this insight, the present study considers migration and its influence on family structure. I argue that there exists a social nexus linking migration to family structure—that migration, though highly variable, is typical in family history. This interpretation focuses on modelling the dynamics of family structure, the dynamics of migration and the familial mixing resulting from their interaction. I present my interpretation of change and interaction in families by deploying and documenting several simplified models of family, migration and their interaction. If family structure can be shown through this analysis to have been influenced significantly by migration, the door is then opened to further studies of the influence of migration on the governance and ideology of family life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History
Essays in Honour of John F. Richards
, pp. 299 - 317
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×