Journal Article

Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe: a challenge to spatial patterns of the European family

Abstract

In their modelling and classificatory ventures western scholars have usually mistakenly included family forms in historical Eastern Europe by induction in well-established generalizations about Russian or Balkan populations. At the same time, well into the late 1990s, most of Eastern European historians have shown no interest in studying domestic groups in socio-historical perspective. This article attempts to restate that picture through a thorough analysis of an unprecedented collection of historical household data for the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largests political entities in Europe of that time. Through an application of a variety of methodologies three regional family patterns have been distinguished on the historical Polish territories, their main characteristics described and then juxtaposed against the major features of paradigmatic examples of the ‘Eastern European family type’. The results indicate that the existing models of household systems in preindustrial Europe are far too rigid to meet the diversity of residential patterns of the Eastern European serfs. Analysis of the data set on spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated a preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. The data presented here suggests that the conventional wisdom regarding the institutional mechanisms of the Eastern European manorialism of the second serfdom as sufficient to create a homogenous pattern of family residence must be seriously questioned. In particular, what must be meticulously revised is a sweeping generalization still in practice that posits a functional link between coercive forms of labor control and complex household structures among peasant subjects.