Organizer and Chair: James Lee, California Institute of Technology
Discussant: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University
Ever since Malthus, we have commonly recognized that the processes of demographic and economic change are a product not only of the economic and political power structures governing property and remuneration, but also of value systems governing interpersonal relations within the family and the wider collectivity. As a result, Western social scientists have recently elaborated and popularized two ‘ideal’ family systems to explain our divergent history: a Western system characterized by primogeniture, delayed marriage, life cycle service, and independent residence, and a non-Western system characterized by partible inheritance, familial labor, early and universal marriage, and virilocal joint residence.1 These models have been influential in Asian Studies as well.2
This panel summarizes four recent book-length projects on specific Chinese, Japanese, and Korean populations from 1500 to 1950 which modify and revise these models, at least for East Asia.3 The results are of considerable interest and importance not just for our understanding of East Asian society, but also for comparative history, economic history, and historical sociology in general.
1. John Hajnal, "Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system," Population and Development Review 8, no. 3 (September 1982): 449–494; Peter Laslett, "Family and household as work group and kin group: areas of traditional Europe compared," in Richard Wall and Peter Laslett (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe, (Cambridge University Press, 1983, 513–564); Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property, and Social Transition (Oxford University Press, 1978); Marriage and Love in England, Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (Basil Blackwell, 1986); Roger Schofield, "Family structure, demographic behavior and economic growth." In Walter, John and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, 1989. 279–304).
2. Susan B. Hanley, and Arthur P. Wolf (eds), Familv and Population in East-Asian History (Stanford University Press, 1985); Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap (Basil Blackwell, 1997).
3. James Lee and Cameron Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark Peterson, Korean Adoption and Inheritance: Case Studies in the Creation of a Classic Confucian Society (Ithaca: Cornell East Asian Series, 1996); David Wakefield, Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
Getting a Head in Northeast China: Headship Succession and Household Division In Eight Banner Serf Populations, 1789–1909
Cameron Campbell, University of California, Los Angeles
In late imperial China, as many as 10 percent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labor were state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This paper examines household headship succession and household division in eight such Banner populations from Northeast China organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).
The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division, many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship, and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict. The goal of this paper is to compare some 40,000 individuals in eight banner populations from Daoyi, Chengnel, Dami, Feicheng, Gaizhou, Gaizhou Mianzhuang, Guosantun, and Nuizhuang to ascertain how their headship succession and household division practices differed, and what implications these differences had for local society. These issues are of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of some 12,000 individuals in one of these populations, Daoyi, revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by relationship to the household head (Lee and Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 17 74–18 73, Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Leaving Home in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rural Japan
Satomi Kurosu, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
Using the local population registers ("ninbetsu-aratame-cho"), this study analyzes the patterns and determinants of children’s departures from home in two agricultural villages in northeastern Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Leaving home" is the first migratory moves of sons and daughters that result in their leaving the parental home and living elsewhere. The timing of leaving home has important bearing on the mechanisms of the family systems. In pre-industrial Japan, the stem family, in which one and only one child continued to live with his parents after marriage, is said to have been ideal and dominant although regional variation existed. The departure and its timing of non-heirs, therefore, were important for the integrity and economy of the household based on small-scale family farming. Based on the observation of the lifecourse of 2,893 individuals born in the two villages during 1716–1869, I first ask whether one child did stay and others all left; and if there were any differences in the schedules and reasons (e.g. marriage, adoption, service, and branching-out household) of leaving home related to children’s sex and to sibling composition. Further, I analyze the timing and determinants of children’s departure by considering children’s household economic status and events—marriage and first birth of heirs, death of household head, and transfer of household headship. By comparing the results to a previous study on central Japan, I suggest how the stem family rule might have been modified by the different economic and demographic constraints of the different regions.
Family Division in Korea: Before and After the Seventeenth Century: Aristocrats, Commoners and Slaves
Mark Peterson, Brigham Young University
Using inheritance documents and census registers, this paper looks at the way family property was passed to the subsequent generation. Dynamics were different before the seventeenth century, when property was divided equally between siblings, and after the seventeenth century when primogeniture for the male heir became the rule. After the seventeenth century, lower classes emulated the upper class and similarly moved to male-dominated primogeniture. The paper will examine the alternatives for the non-primogeniture heir, patrilocal marriage for females, and neolocal residences for other sons. The paper will argue that the class distinctions must be observed and that there were distinct patterns of marriage for slave families, although slaves began to mimic the aristocratic pattern of primogeniture.
Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China
David Wakefield, University of Missouri
The division of household property in agriculture societies lies at the center of the transmission of economic control from one generation to the next. In assembling an impressive body of data concerned with fenjia (household division) in Qing (1644–1912) and Republican (1912–1949) China, David Wakefield investigates one of the central topics in understanding how Chinese society functioned and continues to function.
Scholars have long been uneasy with the assumption that Chinese family property was divided equally among all brothers. Such a practice seems to be economically "irrational" since it created property fragmentation; further, given the vast historical and geographical variations in Chinese culture, it would seem that inheritance practices night also vary from region to region. In his presentation of case studies of household division as it operated in Qing-dynasty Taiwan and Republican-era North China, Wakefield determines that equal division was the rule, yet living parents and single siblings had property rights as well. Property could also be taken out of the division process, established as a set-aside or trust, and dedicated to a certain purpose. Variations in inheritance orientations had dramatic and far-reaching effects on land ownership patterns, lineage property patterns, lineage strength, class formations—and even on state efficacy and its influence on village society.