Yoon Sun Lee discusses how Enlightenment understandings of race shaped ideas about inheritance, such that property ownership came to be understood in racialized terms and race came to be understood in economic terms. Burke’s and Kant’s writings about heritability thus shed light on the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby, as Lee puts it, “enslaved women of African descent bore children who counted not as population that could inherit things but as property that could be inherited by others, on the basis of a color that had to be ascribed or assumed as the material sign of a legal condition.”

This chapter explores an unusually complicated sixteen-year-long (1928-44) inheritance and paternity dispute that arose originally in the first-instance Sharīʿa Court of Casablanca. The central question in the case was whether the plaintiff’s grandson was entitled to inherit his father and grandfather. The dispute provides numerous lenses into uses of the past as it concerns a Sharīʿa court operating in an ostensible judicial plurality established and enforced by a colonial power (French Protectorate Morocco, 1912-56). Although the judges’ competence was narrowed by the fact of French hegemony, they still enjoyed sufficient independence to use their own legal traditions to adjudicate the cases before them.

Chapter 3 shows how British writers (including Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Percy Shelley) grappled with the question of who owned classical Greek culture in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. With Greece long under rule by the Ottoman Empire, Britain wrote itself as ancient Greece’s culture heir. Inheritance was the temporal form that facilitated this transfer, not only of the succession of culture but also of material, as I show in British arguments surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of marble relics from the Parthenon. I end by considering Greek antiquities in the British Museum and the attendant conflicts about universal cultural heritage they continue to engender.

Charles Darwin publicly denied being influenced by the evolutionary ideas of his grandfather Erasmus, yet he took the trouble to write the biography of this ancestor he never met and praised him for possessing “the true spirit of the philosopher”. Although Charles’s natural selection was formulated within the context of Victorian capitalism, their theories show some striking similarities; moreover, there is clear evidence – such as annotations – that Charles closely studied Erasmus’s writings on evolution. Erasmus’s behavior and beliefs were inevitably conveyed down to following generations, including his warnings about hereditary alcoholism and the family abhorrence of slavery. It was in Charles’s interests to distance himself from a discredited relative and present natural selection as the only viable alternative to repeated miraculous creation. The extent of Erasmus’s effect on his grandson must remain speculative, but it cannot be dismissed.

The structure, function, and even the definition of the family have varied tremendously from culture to culture, and for different social groups within each culture. They have changed over time because of internal developments or contacts with other cultures. Not all families centred on a sexual relationship, but most did, institutionalized as marriage, though in this there was wide variety as well. Norms and patterns of sexual familial relationships were how groups defined themselves, maintained their distinctions from other groups, and reinforced hierarchies within the group. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have developed theories of family and kinship, initially seeing evolutionary stages but now emphasizing variety and divergent lines of development, using qualitative and quantitative sources. They have still found major points of transition in family life: the foraging families of the Paleolithic became sedentary crop-raisers, with intensified social hierarchies; centralized states attempted to control reproduction through laws and norms governing marriage and sexual relations; patterns in family life became more rigid in classical cultures and text-based religions; colonialism and industrialization slowly altered family life and norms of sexuality; government intervention in family life expanded in the twentieth century. Today there is an increasing diversity of family forms around the world.

In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

Mathematical models based on evolutionary and ecological principles can help explain and predict variation in political organization and inequality across societies. This chapter introduces five major themes in human behavioral ecology that contribute to this goal. First, vertical power relationships between dominants and subordinates arise when resources are economically defensible and environmental or social circumscription limits outside options. Second, inequality increases when resources are durable and can be accumulated and inherited between generations within lineages. Third, egalitarian leveling can limit dominance behavior and inequality when there is a high degree of social interdependence, contributions to cooperation can be voluntarily given or withdrawn, or leveling coalitions facilitate collective bargaining. Fourth, organizational hierarchies are favored when they provide net benefits to group members compared to more egalitarian alternatives; inequality within these hierarchies is limited by the ability to replace aggrandizing leaders or move between groups. Finally, large-scale territorial hierarchies such as states and empires arise under conditions of escalating competition between groups over concentrated and defensible resources, such as high-quality agricultural land. The ecological parameters highlighted by these models define a multidimensional space of possibilities for human political organization and inequality.

The productive and reproductive labour of the enslaved produced one form of capital; the gendered organization of marriage and inheritance amongst the planters and merchants produced another. If families such as the Longs were to survive, secure their land and increase their wealth, they had to reproduce themselves and ensure the continuity of their line: their hope was to establish a dynasty. Elite colonists reproduced the patterns of the landed English gentry, but with a difference, given their ownership of enslaved people. Merchants tended towards partible inheritance. Property was gendered in such a way as to try to assure the creation and accumulation of wealth. The work of white women was to produce heirs and bring capital to a marriage. Long believed in the importance of maintaining pure English blood and had clear views as to how ‘proper’ marriages and forms of family life were essential for an ordered colonial society. He abhorred the scale of miscegenation and illegitimacy and the irregular relations that characterized Jamaica. He loved his wife and children, and did much to support his mother and siblings. At the very same time, he refused those relationships to the enslaved and disavowed any connection between his family and those of the Africans on his plantation: they were naturally different.

In the early fifteenth century it was still the norm for local witnesses to be called to swear to the age of a young person to prove that they were old enough to inherit property. The sworn statements of these witnesses, given orally in ENglish but recorded in Latin translation provide interesting and often amusing details about the lives of ordinary people.

Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.

Advanced age affected the performance of mastery, and some slavers saw the declining fortunes of another as providing them with the opportunity to rise at their expense. Concerns with – and contests over – the authority of aged enslavers did not end at their death. Wealth generated by slaveholding needed to be passed on, and the quest for profit and status that animated southern enslavers saw ferocious disputes erupt over the transferal of property between generations. Contests over wills and inheritance help reveal the complex and contested relations between enslavers, intergenerational tension in the American South, and shifting social hierarchies shaped by the passage of time. Antebellum enslavers prized the presumption of authority and craved respect from family, kin, and community. And yet, in legal challenges to wills, deeds, and bills of sale recorded posthumously, antebellum southerners revealed the disregard they held for aged enslavers’ claims of dominion, and their willingness to trash the reputation of fellow “masters” both before and after death.

This chapter demonstrates how Ibadis, whether merchants or scholars, participated in the everyday legal life of Ottoman Cairo by using its shariah courts. It does so by focusing on two Ibadis living in seventeenth-century Cairo: a merchant named ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Baḥḥār and a scholar named Muḥammad Abī Sitta. The variety of ways in which both men used the court system demonstrates its importance to Ibadi merchants and scholars in the Ottoman period. The chapter’s overarching theme is how Ibadis used the legal tools of Ottoman Cairo, waqf property, and inheritance courts to navigate their everyday lives.

As the Middle East became an economically underdeveloped region, its entrepreneurs did not form movements to constrain either rulers or clerics. They did not bring about liberalization through organizational innovations that strengthened them politically. A basic reason is that, until the transplant of modern economic institutions from Europe, the Middle East’s private enterprises remained small and ephemeral. These characteristics precluded sustained coalitions representing business interests. A further consequence was the failure to institute political checks and balances of the type that made European rulers submit to rule of law. Several elements of the Islamic institutional complex contributed to keeping Middle Eastern enterprises structurally stagnant until the 1800s. Most critically, Islam’s partnership rules allowed partners to pull out at will, and its inheritance system hindered capital accumulation. The upshot is that enterprises did not experience operational challenges of the type that would have stimulated organizational innovations. Among the innovations that did not emerge indigenously are banks, chambers of commerce, business publications, stock exchanges, and formal insurance markets. Their long absence contributed to keeping private economic actors politically weak. It also compounded the endemic weaknesses of civil society.

Suits related to freedpeople’s marriages – the linchpin of familial legitimacy – put the disabilities of the slave past, rather than newly granted rights, at the center of discussions about freedom and abolition. In each, a domestic conflict exposed the need to consider the previous actions and intentions of freedpeople, and prompted an assessment of how the established laws and customs of domesticity could be applied to those formerly excluded from their protection. Rather than exposing the ways that race and former status determined whether freedpeople were entitled to equal rights, this chapter considers whether former status prevented some rights – including the most fundamental among them – from being enjoyed at all.

The mean African American family wealth is 6–8 percent of mean White family wealth. About 1 of every 3 African American families are bankrupt. Both numbers were unchanged during 1984–2017. The African American savings rate is at least as high as the White savings rate for families with the same level of earnings (income). Racial differences in inheritances and in vivo transfers explain the greatest portion of racial wealth disparity.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

The chapter explores the background to Churchill’s upbringing and its bearing on his future career. It introduces and contrasts his American Jerome lineage with his aristocratic British Marlborough ancestry before describing the courtship and early married life of Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston’s education is placed in the context of the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of his father’s political career, the family’s financial difficulties and Lord Randolph’s failing health. The chapter finishes with an analysis of Churchill’s family inheritance and concludes that its importance was more social and political than financial.