In recent years the analysis of individual communities in England has shed
increasing light on their economic, social, demographic, cultural and
religious development during the three centuries prior to the Industrial
Revolution. Contemporaneously, and to some extent resulting from
these local studies, there has been a growing interest in the family and
patterns of inheritance. Similarly, among social anthropologists there has
been the development of the concept of ‘strategy’ with writings on
marriage, fertility, inheritance and migration strategies, although these
may be regarded as components of general family strategies. Whereas in
some writings strategies are shown as being pursued by individuals for
their own purposes, others focused on family strategies, particularly ones
designed to keep a family landholding from being divided. However,
whether these studies of social organization in continental Europe and
Asia can be applied to the English experience remains to be seen. To begin
with they are all concerned with peasant landholding and as such may not
be appropriate to the English experience where the debate on whether a
peasantry even existed was begun by Macfarlane's The origins of English
individualism in 1978.Secondly, there is no universal agreement on what kind of strategies
were being followed, either individualistic or familial. Thirdly, there
remains the question as to whether the strategies were intentional and the
outcome of rational decision-making, or subconscious and rooted in
implicitly accepted and long-established principles. These could have been
that a landholding should remain undivided, that men had primacy over
women in inheritance, that primogeniture would be practised and that
younger brothers would not challenge their eldest brother's inheritance.
A refinement of these approaches has been the view that family strategies
could be very different. Some may have wished to hold on to the family
estate and pass it on to the next generation. Others wanted to enlarge it
and may have needed to do so for familial reasons, and yet more families
may have wanted to create an estate where none yet existed. But in all
cases, it is stated, there were families consciously planning and pursuing
a strategy for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, it is said
that these strategies could only be pursued by families above the level of
the poor and only became possible in western Europe in the sixteenth
century as a result of changing attitudes and growing individualistic
commercialism.
Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Preindustrial Economy*