Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages (review)

Transregional and Transational Families in Europe and Beyond is an ambitious collection that aims to take “the idea of ‘kinship’ seriously for the history of European societies,” as Sabean and Teuscher write in their introduction (2). Scholars have long recognized the importance of family networks for diasporas of people, ideas, and goods alike, but they have not always acknowledged how much family structures, and even definitions of family, have varied over time and space. This volume’s most important contribution is to provide a sense of the extent to which the elasticity of family structures has affected migration, the growth and support of group identities, and the process of modern state formation.

Using a variety of methodologies—from analyzing the statistics within demographic databases to contemporary fieldwork among refugees and immigrants—this book is broadly interdisciplinary by nature. It will be useful not only to scholars of family history but also to those interested in transnational history, migration, gender, and religion. Despite the book’s geographical and temporal span, the recurring themes of migration, endogamy, honor, and marriage give it coherence. Indeed, in many ways this is a book about marriage, which is a central topic in most of the essays. Most elements of kinship networks are socially constructed, as Sabean stresses, but marriage remains the most obvious opportunity for individual and familial choice; marriage patterns shed light throughout the chapters on the different values, goals, taboos, and strategies applied to expanding or consolidating families over time.

A few of the chapters stand out from the rest. In his thoughtful chapter about patrician families in early modern Western Europe, Teuscher argues that the mobility of individual family members—particularly younger sons, who could not have been supported adequately by limited family resources had they stayed—made possible the vaunted rootedness of patrician families in general. Johnson’s chapter about kinship and nation-building in France from 1750 to 1885 focuses on families in one region of Brittany as they moved across the nation; it provides a useful reminder that since many administrative apparatuses were “nations” in name only, families that expanded across the regions of a state helped to make “the nation in human terms” (201). Stéphanie Latte Abdallah’s chapter about Palestinian families since 1948 reveals how hard men worked after the exodus to create a notion of family that was unchanging and rigidly hierarchical by gender, as well as how women used a variety of tactics, including voluntary celibacy, to resist efforts to make their subordination within the family a defining feature of Palestinian identity.

Partly because of its heavy focus on the early modern period and resulting source limitations, the book gives disproportionate attention to elites. As Jose C. Moya points out in his chapter about transregional families in the longue durée, “peasants and proletarians” could be—and often were—part of transnational families, too (32). Yet, although many of the book’s chapters have a wealth of interesting information about a microscopic minority of aristocratic families, too few of them have much to say about anyone else. This limitation aside, however, the book is an impressive accomplishment that will be useful to scholars in a variety of fields.