Content area
Full Text
Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the Englishspeaking World, 158o-174o. By Richard Grassby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx + 506 pp. Tables, appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $64.95. ISBN 0-521-78203-1.
In Kinship and Capitalism, Richard Grassby examines the history of the business family during what might be described as "the long seventeenth century," paying particular attention to the importance of family and kin during a period conventionally associated with the origins of competitive individualism. The book is constructed around a substantial database that the author has compiled of some 28,000 business individuals (mostly men, and mostly from London) between 1580 and 1740. Data have been coded for ninety-nine variables having to do with family and business behavior, ranging from residence, occupation, religion, and status to marriage, remarriage, and children, to inheritance, partnerships, and apprenticeship. Obviously, the information for any one individual is not complete across all variables, but the size of the data set is such that Grassby's conclusions are generally based on samples of known cases, which include anywhere from a couple of hundred to well over a thousand individuals.
Using statistics presented in tabular form and copious illustrative examples, Grassby addresses three main topics: marriage, relations between family and kin, and the family and business. Among his most important conclusions are that, as we would expect, marriage was...