Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.

Chapter 10 tackles the intersection of family business ownership and wealth inequality, investigating how family-controlled enterprises can both perpetuate and alleviate economic disparities. While wealth concentration through inheritance challenges democratic ideals, family businesses also offer pathways for social mobility, particularly for immigrant and minority communities. This chapter analyzes the dual role of family businesses as both drivers of inequality and mechanisms for opportunity, emphasizing the nuanced relationship between kinship, capital accumulation, and social advancement. Through case studies, the chapter highlights how family businesses can blend community responsibility with entrepreneurial resilience. The chapter concludes that rather than condemning or celebrating family business models in isolation, policymakers should consider the broader social and economic contexts that influence their impact on inequality.

In this chapter, we look at some factors as foundational to development, namely genetics and the mechanisms of biological inheritance. In the first major section of the chapter, we examine some of the basic tenets of genetics, including behavioral genetics. In the second section, we discuss the basic ideas of evolutionary theory, particularly as related to children, childhood, and development.

This chapter reads scenes of judging and judgment in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) in the context of debates about the nature and scope of equity as well as the value and limits of the laws regulating familial relations. Through Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s interventions in disputes concerning marriage, custody, and inheritance, the novel affirms the value of equity as the basis for judgments in the Court of Chancery while showing the need to apply equitable principles to everyday life. The central principle underlying Richardson’s equitable jurisprudence is impartiality. Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s ability to assume other perspectives allows them to mediate conflicts in fair and flexible ways without issuing arbitrary or subjective decisions. Richardson’s commitment to equity shapes his experiments with epistolary form, prompting readers to examine conflicts from multiple points of view. Through his accounts of domestic disputes and his formal experiments, Richardson shows the need to extend the era’s equity jurisprudence to rectify injustices enshrined in and fostered by English common and statutory law.

In her chapter, Pilar Villar-Argáiz shows how the poetry of Eavan Boland often invokes the very revivalism she seems at times to critique. Villar-Argáiz examines a number of Boland’s poetic predecessors in order to show her multiple points of contact with the Irish past. Though Boland engaged critically with W. B. Yeats’s revivalism, particularly as reflected in the “lyric imperative” that runs throughout his work, her posthumous published collection The Historians represents a partial reconciliation with Yeats’s work and poetic example. This reconciliation allows Boland to celebrate what she inherits from Yeats – particularly his use of use poetry to create a sense of community, not only among other writers but more broadly among the Irish people at large. Boland’s work strives for this sense of community, of belonging through relationships with landscape and “domestic interiors. In her late twentieth century revivalism, Boland thus revitalizes the bardic function so important to Yeats.

‘Testamentary Drama’ continues to assess the pitfalls associated with the expression of the will by charting the presence that last wills took both as material and virtual stage props. What I term as the testamentary tradition in English Renaissance drama – plays that address both the restorative and destructive outcomes of testamentary execution – begins with Ulpian Fulwell’s interlude Like Will to Like (first printed 1568). This play focuses on the ruinous effect that Lucifer’s fake will and testament has on the destitute and prodigal beneficiaries who are enticed (and ultimately damned) by the property offered within it. The last will, thus, functions to punish wickedness and reveal the futility of willing itself. Like Will to Like sets a precedent for the popular dramatic function of these documents: last wills typically function as vehicles for testators to impose their personal will over networks of beneficiaries; last wills were commonly used as tools of moral instruction and social control to draw attention to the fraught politics of testamentary inheritance; playwrights consistently portrayed acts of will-making to be disastrously prone to being counterfeited.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Sohail Hanif provides a detailed examination of the complex legal debates surrounding women’s inheritance in Islam, particularly within the Hanafi school of law (madhhab). The chapter emphasizes how these debates are highly nuanced, requiring an understanding of how Islamic law balances financial responsibilities between genders, ensuring that what women might seemingly lose in inheritance is offset by their entitlement to maintenance.

Two younger sons of two fathers, one in the Prodigal Son parable and the other, Jacob, son of Isaac, each acquires his inheritance before the father’s death and is resented by an older brother. In both instances, heaven so directs events as to mitigate fraternal discord.

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.