Introduction

A similar discovery about household size has been made in the last few decades about widely different societies, namely parts of Europe in pre-industrial times, India, and China. It was until recently widely believed that in pre-industrial Europe, as well as in India and China, large households used to be the norm. The discovery that the average household size was of the order of only five persons therefore came as a surprise.

The traditional household formation systems of India and China are similar (at least in the aspects dealt with in this chapter). But the household formation systems of north-west Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were very different (though they yielded households of roughly the same size). The aim of this chapter is to compare and contrast the two kinds of household formation system in quantitative terms. The term ‘household formation system’ has been used to indicate that the intention is to compare modes of behaviour which result in the formation of households of various kinds as well as to compare the results of that behaviour. A household formation system is defined by household formation rules, as described in section II.

Enough data have now been accumulated by historians to support strongly, in spite of gaps in the evidence, the conclusion that (as was implied in the previous paragraph) the household formation systems of all populations in pre-industrial north-west Europe shared certain common features which distinguished them from India, China, and many other pre-industrial populations.