A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe.

In recent years, the history of Western European pre-industrial peasant and laboring-class families has moved in two divergent directions. One direction has been toward a historical anthropology emphasizing changing definitions of family, household, and kin groups; regulation of the family by kin, neighbors, the peer group, and church and state; courtship, betrothal, marriage, and inheritance practices; and shifting notions of domestic roles, the life cycle, and gender roles. The other direction has been toward a historical sociology, stressing comparison, the construction of broad generalizations, demographic processes, and the concepts of labor, class struggle, and modes of production. Seccombe's synthesis of the recent literature on peasant, proletarian, and proto-industrial demography and family history from the early Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution represents an ambitious attempt to unify these two approaches.

Like David Levine, Seccombe seeks to bring together materialist and neo-Malthusian perspectives and to integrate demographic and economic history by relating shifts in patterns of household compositions, fertility, marriage, migration, and mortality to changes in the social relations of production. And like Franklin Mendels, Seccombe emphasizes the importance of the economic and demographic strategies of peasant and laboring class households in the onset of industrialization. Rejecting structural-functionalist perspectives as excessively mechanistic and modernization theories as excessively unilinear and insensitive to class and gender differences, Seccombe instead stresses the flexibility of laboring class family strategies in the face of shifting economic and social conditions, and argues that demographic forces and changes in family forms played a critical role in the emergence of new modes of production.

Underlying the structure of Seccombe's book is a sustained challenge to the thesis of Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure that a small, nuclear family structure predominated in pre-industrial Western Europe and that laboring-class families underwent no major structural changes in the transition to industrial capitalism. In his analysis of peasant families during the Middle Ages, Seccombe argues that feudal and seigneurial property forms fostered a stem family cycle among peasants, which, in eastern Europe, was characterized by early marriage and patrilocal residence, and in Western Europe by later marriage and neolocal household formation. Medieval peasants' goal, he contends, "was to keep the ancestral holding intact and to compensate offspring excluded from the core tenement as generously as possible by means of an ancillary land grant, chattel wealth or a money settlement".

Succeeding chapters, which analyze the transition of a peasant to a proletarian family cycle, challenge the Malthusian view that prior to the eighteenth century the most important restraint on population growth were limits on available land, which forced peasants to delay the age of marriage. In contrast, Seccombe, like David Gaunt and Michael Mitterauer, links household size and structure, marriage, fertility and inheritance patterns, and the household division of labor to each households' labor needs and the availability of particular kinds of work. Seccombe argues that English family forms tended to foster rural proletarianization, while family forms in France and certain other areas impeded the process; and that English forms, which produced a more mobile, employment-responsive labor force, promoted the development of the Industrial Revolution.

Readers of the book are sure to be impressed by the breadth of Seccombe's reading, the clarity and precision of his writing, and the incisiveness of his critiques of recent literature, especially the works of Wilhelm Abel, Robert Brenner, Jack Goody, Emmanuel Ladurie, and Michael Posten. They will also be struck by his sensitivity to issues of gender and his thoughtful discussions of peasant and protoindustrial household power dynamics.

Some critics, in turn, are sure to argue that his quest for generalizations leads him to overstate the role of economic factors and underplay the importance of ecology, culture and custom, inheritance, law geographical diversity, and temporality (for example, Seccombe, unlike David Herlihy, tends to downplay changes in kinship organization over the course of the Middle Ages). Others are likely to seize on textual over-statements (for example, the statement that contemporary full-time housewives "are in a far more dependent position than peasant housewives were". Still others will debate his argument that a stem family cycle predominated in northwestern Europe; his hypothesis that a distinctive Western European marriage pattern originated in the late Middle Ages; and his contention that the status of older working-class women compared poorly with that of their peasant predecessors.

Such minor criticisms, however, should not obscure the significance of this thoughtful and provocative overview and interpretation of laboring-class families.

Steven Mintz University of Houston