Abstract
This chapter develops an interrelated set of hypotheses about the links between gender relations, family systems and economic development in Eurasia. First, we briefly discuss a number of ideas from the recent literature about the links between gender relations and economic development. Second, we suggest a measure of historic gender relations via the classification and measurement of historical family systems and offer a set of maps of the institutions concerning marriage, inheritance and family formation that determine the degree of agency that women enjoyed at the micro level. Third, we discuss the possible explanation of the genesis of the Eurasian pattern in family systems and gender relations as a by-product of the spread of agriculture and the process of ancient state formation that followed the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 years ago. Finally, we link these patterns in family systems and female agency to economic growth after 1500. We empirically demonstrate that high female agency and per capita GDP between 1800 and 2000 are related. The ‘reversal of fortune’ that happened within Eurasia between 1000 and 2000, whereby the ancient centres of state formation and urbanization in the Middle East, India and China were overtaken by regions at the margin of the continent (Western Europe, Japan, Korea), can in our view be linked to this spatial pattern in gender relations and family systems found there.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Chap. 2 by Diebolt and Perrin.
- 2.
We should make explicit here that when we talk about the position of women or female agency, we do not construe these in the way that modern measures of gender equality do (i.e. with data on labour force participation, life expectancy, political empowerment, etc.). Rather we turn to institutional measures which capture the position of women in the ways families organize themselves across Eurasia.
- 3.
Although her actual ability to claim a share of property may depend on various other factors (Agarwal 1997).
- 4.
- 5.
Weinreb discusses why marriage between cousins remains an attractive option when the association with birth defects and lowered immunity has become clear. He concludes that one of the mechanisms which is at work is that in situations where women have very little agency, marriage within the kinship group allows them to manipulate family ties, giving them a degree of agency as compared to if they had married outside the group (Weinreb 2008). Leach (1951) describes how in the case of systematically arranged marriages, such as cousin marriages; it is almost always a group of men determining whom should be married to whom rather than individuals choosing their own partners.
- 6.
We have also performed robustness checks using the simple index of the ‘female friendliness’ of family systems in Eurasia. The more points a country scores on a scale of 0–5, the more its institutions can be said to favour female agency. Using this simple version of the female-friendliness index gives similar results (available upon request from authors).
- 7.
These corrections were made because of the relative strengths of both datasets. Murdock’s data is the strongest in Africa and parts of Asia, whereas Todd is at his most detailed for Europe. In Rijpma and Carmichael (2016), tests were conducted, and source analysis carried out which resulted in a hybrid dataset for endogamy/exogamy, domestic organization and the equality of inheritance practices (not necessarily by gender).
- 8.
Dyble et al. (2015) analyse sex equality among hunter-gatherers as an adaptive strategy to maximize cooperation and see this as a ‘shift from hierarchical male philopatry typical of chimpanzees and bonobos’.
- 9.
This index measures state formation between the Neolithic Revolution and AD1. It is well known that these ancient states first emerged in Mesopotamia, followed by Egypt, Northern India and Northern China and then gradually spread to adjacent areas. The ‘World History Atlas and Timelines since 3000 BC’ by GeaCron presents maps per century of the changing boundaries of these ancient states. We reconstructed for each contemporary country if an ancient state existed on its territory between 3000 and AD1 and on that basis constructed an ‘ancient state index’ using the same method as the ‘state antiquity index’ by Putterman and Bockstette (3.1 version), which covers the 1–1950 AD period (http://devecondata.blogspot.nl/2007/03/state-antiquity-index.html and http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Louis_Putterman/antiquity%20index.htm). All countries are scored per century (and before 1500 BC per half millennium) on the existence of a state, and these scores are added using a discount rate of 10% per century. States with old roots, such as Iraq, Egypt, India/Pakistan and China, score (nearly) the maximum, whereas regions such as Scandinavia, Southeast Asia and Japan, where states emerged or spread to after 1 AD, score zero.
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de Pleijt, A.M., van Zanden, J.L., Carmichael, S. (2019). Gender Relations and Economic Development: Hypotheses About the Reversal of Fortune in Eurasia. In: Diebolt, C., Rijpma, A., Carmichael, S., Dilli, S., Störmer, C. (eds) Cliometrics of the Family. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99480-2_7
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