"In the 19th century in some Northern Indian high castes, all daughters were killed at birth, because where would they go?"
Absolutely wrong. If "all" daughters were killed at birth there would have been no women in Northern Indian high castes. Which castes specifically are being talked about here? The long standing tradition in India is marriage within caste. The reasons for female infanticide in India has always been (and still is where it is practiced): 1. poverty 2. having too many daughters 3. the first born being a girl
Not all Indian high castes, just some of them. I don't know very much about India and I see from your quotation that I use some terminology a bit vaguely. The point that Sarah Hrdy makes is that women were supposed to always marry upwards. Highest up, there was nowhere to go. European colonists wondered why they saw no girls until they asked and found out that there just were no girls.
"The point that Sarah Hrdy makes is that women were supposed to always marry upwards. "
--- Hundreds, if not thousands, of years, of Indian civilization just does not indicate this.
People arranged marriages within caste and they still do. Each caste comes with it's own sub-culture and it's important for those sub-cultures to be preserved, hence why people marry within caste. Of course there would be some upward caste mobility available to women via marriage but the majority of Indians still marry within caste. Higher caste families in such a system would not be keen on bringing lower caste daughters-in-law into their families and homes. Hrdy's conclusion is absurd. Female infanticide in India is closely linked to the dowry system which can and does financially devastate some families.
"Highest up, there was nowhere to go".
-- Again, brahmins are not supposed to "go" anywhere except to other brahmin families.
"European colonists wondered why they saw no girls until they asked and found out that there just were no girls."
-- European "colonists" came to a lot of faulty conclusions. There are areas in India that have skewed sex ratios due to female infanticide to this day. It is not concentrated amongst the highest caste that has "nowhere to go".
India is a vast country. So I can't se why you and Sarah Hrdy can't be right at the same time. She wrote about some customs in some part of India in the 19th century. I thought those customs were an interesting illustration of how human societies can pull some principles to their extremes. I'm sure those extremes aren't representative of Indian marriage customs as a whole.
I did some digging. Here's where Hrdy got her info. The first thing that jumps out at you, well me, are the caste names. None of them brahmins (highest caste). Several of them low-middle caste. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44143417
Then it might have been technically wrong by me to call them "high castes". As I understood it, those most into sex selective infanticide were warrior guys (that is, not the highest caste). I must admit I don't know what is really considered "high caste" in India. I just reflexively reasoned that it should be something corresponding to "high class" in Europe.
Caste and class are two entirely different things. India has class also. So the entire premise of "having nowhere to go" is tossed out the window into the trash. There are reasons that female infanticide existed, and still does, in India. Having no caste for a daughter to marry into wasn't one of them.
This analysis of male/female bonding entirely through a lens of 'Economics-of-Propagation' is not to be dismissed. And it was obviously a lot of work. But it suffers from a strange combination of over-thinking and under-thinking. Economic self-interest is not the only story here. There's a Shakespeare quote needed here somehow - although I can't just call to mind the one I want.
I don't believe it was economic self-interest that shaped the customs of marriage payments. I think it was cultural evolution. Under certain environmental circumstances, people who founded and followed certain traditions had more socially successful children. Over the generations those traditions became associated with successful people. That made those traditions seem prestigious, which inspired more people to emulate them. Something like that. Most people just followed social conventions and emulated those who seemed the most successful. Few people need to have acted out of explicit economic self-interest.
I think we are misunderstanding each other here. 'Economic self-interest' was my crude (perhaps too crude) broad-brush encapsulation of the thrust of your essay. I was using the word 'economic' in its broadest sense - as in Robbins marvellous definition of it as "the study of human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means....etc"
I was criticising it from the vantage point of 'cultural evolution' which - for me anyway - would need to encompass the evolution of ideas of 'love', desire, 'beauty' masculinity and femininity and so; not just the urge to maximise success in the propagation of your line.
[But also perhaps I did not make clear enough that I was quite impressed by your analysis; just suggesting how it might be broadened]
As I started reading I found myself distracted by a thought so I'll write it now so as to read without distraction. To what extent does the payment transferred with the bride stay with her? ie if she leaves the relationship for another (or else returns to her family of origin) does she take the value of the payment with her or does she leave it behind (or any intermediate division of the resource)?
I read somewhere that societies that practice dowry tend to be societies that do not practice divorce. So women with dowries simply don't leave a relationship for another. In Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy writes that dowries explicitly tends to be reserved for the grandchildren of the dowry-givers. If a married woman dies, for example, her dowry is not supposed to support children her husband has with another woman.
That's interesting. Yes, dowry as a social norm for the sustenance of the woman's children makes sense. I hadn't thought of it that way. So having it tied to the family unit rather than the wife discourages divorce.
You have very interesting things to say about how this applies to western society which I'll have to think more about.
I perhaps uncharacteristically have nothing to add to this, beyond saying that this insight was new to me and I feel as though reading this has advanced my understanding of the world. I'd actually forgotten about hoe agriculture entirely -- I prefer to imagine the portion of my ancestors' past that involved herds of cattle and bands of armed retainers allowing a man to support a few wives who mostly stay inside and make textiles and leather goods.
There is a section in "Dateonomics" by Birger of a sector of Orthodox Jews in/near New York City where the various customs result in a scarcity of marriageable men relative to women, and there is a definite dowry culture, with the size of the dowry calibrated to the social status (generally occupation) of the groom.
In regard to the general upper-middle-class in the U.S., there are definite tendencies of parents of the couple to contribute large sums to a down-payment on a house and the education of their children. IIUC, the latter is not considered a gift under U.S. tax laws, but the former is, but I'm pretty sure that few such parents pay the required gift tax.
I think the high rate of divorce in modern societies is what has incentivized parents to invest in their children's human capital while keeping economic assets for themselves as long and as much as possible. But as wealth becomes more important relative to salary in order to afford a nice place to live I expect this to be more and more reflected in the mating market as well, and parents increasingly need to use dowries in a more traditional way to boost their offspring's value.
Interestingly, one of the functions of dowries among Indian Muslims and I think many Muslim communities nearby like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq, is the money is specifically the wife's money. During the marriage she controls it and can use it as she pleases (at least hypothetically) and in case of divorce, she takes it back. I recently read an autobiography of a Kashmiri Muslim-American woman (who was actually left in a corner of the room to die as a newborn, until her grandfather rushed in and saved her by giving her to her mom, who was too weak after birth to get up and go get her), "Born With Wings," which talks about how her mother used her dowry money to purchase an almond grove and become a successful businesswoman.
Yes. Parents don't want to pay to a joint household that gets split in two without producing any grandchildren. One way to get around that problem is to wait until any grandchildren are produced. Something I suspect is already happening (grandma and grandpa help new parents buy bigger apartment). Many people divorce after having children. But then at least the supported non-relative will have a stake in a relative (or two or three).
I'm glad that you brought up infanticide which is something that usually gets glossed over when writing about historical family structure. The monogamous marriage which was almost universal in Europe before chrisitanity was combined after Constantine with the christian bans on cousin marriage, divorce and infanticide to create a family structure and a society structure unique to Christendom.
I was surprised to learn from another Substack how widespread brideprice still is in China. This continuous existence makes sense given chinese culture even if the agricultural society that gave birth to this culture has changed.
Confucian traditions place huge value on raising boys, passing the family name and on the son's obligation to care for his elderly parents. The chinese even have different words for grandchildren from their sons and their daughters. These traditions lead to the abortion or infanticide of some of the girls, which in turn leads to an imbalance between sexes (which is apparently awful in rural areas) which leads to continuing the custom of bride price, monies which are often used to pay a bride price for the son or buy him a house.
Thank you! That place causes a lot of guesswork. For example, I had no idea that young women were supposed to spend a month eating chicken (presumably when they get married?) Like a budget version of a honeymoon, but between mother and daughter in law? Interesting stuff, but difficult to understand.
I learned about this custom on that substack, but month sitting is a topic she covers often so she probably didn't add many details on the specific post you mentioned.
Presumably it was https://weibo.substack.com/ which reports on bride price issues on Chinese social media in a big fraction of posts. It's not clear if this obsession with bride price is a feature of Weibo or just an algorithmic quirk, where the profile used by Moly has become focused on this issue due to ongoing engagement with the topic.
Yes. That's the substack I was talking about. Moly's translations have been focused on topics relating to marriage and kids since the beginning so it's not surprising she covers bride price.
I guess Tove's response would be that it produces more calories (from grains) than using a hoe (growing more leafy greens?) enabling a denser population and that this inadvertently shifted the balance of labour from women to men.
Great essay! A lot of this relates to genetic reproductive success, but I am also interested in cultural reproduction. How concerned are people (consciously or unconsciously) with reproducing their cultural/psychological self? Why are Jews culturally matrilineal?
This must have been researched. Go back far enough and the ancient Jews were very patrilineal but at some point transitioned into matrilineality, at least for determining formal Jewishness. Whether/when they've been culturally matrilineal is a different question ...
I recall seeing comment that the Ashkenazi can be traced to 4 (surviving) mitochondrial lineages. With speculation that shortly after destruction of the Temple Jewish men emigrating into Europe married local women.
you say: ‘Plowing with animals is hard work and requires the upper body strength of a man. But it gives more output from a given area’
I don’t think your understanding of plowing is correct. Plows weren’t invented to get higher productivity from a given area of land, they were invented to save labor. I’m not aware of anyone who claims that plows give higher yields per acre. What they do is, they give higher yields per man-hour. Leaving aside the sex difference in upper body strength, plows were invented and spread because most of the work was done by the ox or the mule or the horse rather than the man: ‘A single farmer with an ox team could cultivate ten times or more land than a hoe farmer,’ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-09-18-roots-inequality-traced-back-neolithic-ox-drawn-plows
If your premise was correct, when people struck out into the wilderness, they would have reverted back to hoe farming. But that isn’t what happened. What happened was, they took their plow technology with them. That includes farmers populating the United States in the 1700s and 1800s, moving into areas with no premium on land — for a good part of that period uncleared, uncultivated land was literally free. Land was cheap. They didn’t bring the plow with them because it gave greater productivity per acre. They brought it with them because it save enormous amounts of labor. The exact same thing happen in Europe thousands of years earlier— as ‘the first farmers’ (from Anatolia) gradually spread out across Europe, moving into ‘virgin territory’ populated only with hunter/gatherers, they took their plow technology with them.
“The ard first appears in the mid-Neolithic and is closely related to the domestication of cattle. It probably spread with animal traction in general across the cereal-growing cultures of the Neolithic Old World. Its exact point of origin is unknown, but it spread quickly throughout West Asia, South Asia and Europe in the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic.
Evidence appears in the Near East in the 6th millennium BC. Iron versions appeared c. 2300 BC both in Assyria and 3rd-dynasty Egypt. In Europe, the earliest known wooden ard (at Lavagone in Italy) dates from around 2300-2000 BC, but the earliest scratch marks date from 3500-3000 BC.” [.P. Mallory & D.Q. Adams, eds., Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, s.v. "Plough" (London: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1997)]
“We have a quarter acre to plough with our horses. It’s heavy clay soil and still wet from the winter, but reasonably level and well worked over the years. It took us two hours in total to plough which equates to an acre a day - which is what the books tell you a ploughman/woman and their horse could plough in a day. “
“an acre was the amount of land that 1 man could plow in 1 day with 1 ox”
so if you had 40 acres and a mule, you’d probably be able to get it all ploughed and planted in a couple of months— if optimal time to plant is day x, back up 60 days and start ploughing. when it is time to plant the ground is ready
I couldn’t even find any serious sites talking about how many acres you can hoe up by hand in a day, or a week. I expect some historical anthropology web sites have info on it. This is what popped up for me:
If you decide to farm medieval style, meaning with little to no equipment, the number of acres you’re able to farm is going to be very limited.
One person can farm approximately one to three acres medieval, though that would depend on the crop and the climate.”
“How Much Land Does It Take To Feed One Person for a Year?
It takes around 5-10 acres to feed one person a year.”
You do the math. To colonize non-tropical areas, ploughs were needed to increase labor efficiency. I’m sure if guys could have gotten away with it they would have kept lounging around, but once you move out of the tropical zone it takes much more labor to grow any given amount of calories.
The only type of subsistence activities that were viable in the ‘heavy soils’ of Europe were hunting and gathering. Agriculturalists couldn’t spread to Europe nor to Northern China until animals had been tamed and plough technology developed.
I don’t know if I have any references to back it up but I believe it is literally impossible to feed yourself by farming ‘by hand’ ie, ‘by hoe’ in northern Europe. The energy requirements of digging in the heavy soil are greater than the return in calories. Northern Europe couldn’t be colonized by farmers until cattle were domesticated, and could be used to plow the ground. Until then, hunter/gatherers were the only people that could survive in that environment— at very low population densities of course. And I think that was true, literally, until potatoes were introduced to Europe from America. Potatoes are much more ‘calorie dense’ both per unit acre and per unit man-hour. They brought about a situation in Europe similar to that seen in Africa, where a single person could support themselves and a family on a couple of acres, with not too much effort.
This is a wonderfully well-researched comment. Thank you for it.
However, I do not think the conclusions can be completely correct. If plows were only labor-saving devices they should have been operated by women while men continued their labor-free warrior lifestyles. I know of no cultures where this has happened.
Also, agriculture is by no means dependent on plows, even in non-tropical areas. In Sweden/Scandinavia the first archeological traces of ards (including scratch marks) are from the Bronze Age, meaning that several thousand years of agriculture passed with only hoe agriculture. Probably, this was possible due to opportunistic use of the very best soils, when population pressure increased one had to use marginal lands which could only be farmed successfully with labor-saving devices like plows.
Finally, there is a linguistic component. In Swedish, and reasonably in Ester Boserup's native Danish as well, there is a strict separation between a plow and an arder. In English an ard seems to be regarded as a type of plow. In Swedish (and hopefully Danish) a plow is a tool with an iron bill and a mouldboard, something that turns over the soil instead of just scratching it lite the arder. The ard is in practice nothing more than an efficient hoe. A plow is something entirely different. By turning over the soil you effectively kill off most weeds and you effectively mix the soil with manure and plant residues. The result is a superior seedbed which should enable higher yield per area than hoe/ard agriculture (although I have no data to back this up).
I recall seeing ard ploughing, in the Middle East in the late '60s. Indeed it simply broke up the ground surface. It was used for preparing the ground for sowing grain crops not for 'gardening'. In rural villages gardens were small with most vegetables simply gathered.
I don't know much about historical farming implements, but as far as I know, the metal plow is a very recent invention--late 1800s. Before that everyone used wooden plows. I'm not sure what an arder is, but Google images suggests it's that it's a wooden plow of the sort that everyone used before metal plows were invented. ("Hoe" in english is a stick with a sharp, flat bit at the end. You have to swing it up and down to use it.) So I don't think the distinction between ard and plow is the one being used here, because the metal plow was introduced way too late.
Obviously there were probably many small, incremental improvements on plowing technology between the first people scratching holes with sticks and dropping in seeds and the modern tractor plow. (The metal plow + tractors caused massive ecological devastation by turning over too much soil and triggering the Dust Bowl, btw.)
I would never have invented the hoe agriculture/plow agriculture distinction myself. Essentially, what it is all about is extensive, opportunistic agriculture that picks the low-hanging fruit versus intensive agriculture that also picks higher-hanging fruit. The technology in use differs with soil types and geographical circumstances, but the principle remains the same. For that reason I find it a bit unlucky that the concepts established in the 20th century focus on certain technologies.
I think Apple Pie is entirely correct: When a community transitions from opportunistic agriculture of the best land to more intensive agriculture, the sport is not only to increase the output of the land already under cultivation. The sport is to increase the output of all land the community controls. Whether the solution is to increase the amount of soil under cultivation, like in northern Europe, or to use land more efficiently, like in rice growing areas, it always implies more male labor. Which affects the usefulness of wives.
There are two good reasons why colonists never reverted to female-fuelled non-plow agriculture:
1. Culture. Once the idea that men should work to support their families was established, not doing so was seen as immoral. For good reason. If colonist men had started to misbehave (in relation to their own cultural norms), their families and communities would have been much worse off under their already harsh living conditions.
2. Sex ratios. Colonists were typically male-biased. Women were rare and very sought-after. Men were not in a position to bully them. To the contrary, they needed to work very hard to compete for the too few women. Colonist women didn't have to accept to live in huts and work until exhaustion only to scrape together enough grain for their families. They could choose the most hard-working man with the nicest cabin.
Yes, the hoe/plough distinction doesn't seem to capture the divide to me either. Apart from anything else, ploughing is typically less land efficient than hoeing because you also need to feed the animals pulling the plough, also China is an example of a high population density -> monogamy society that barely made any use of draught animals.
You'd expect the same dynamics of difficulty for the male in providing for wives/children -> monogamy to occur among hunter-gathers that rely on hunting over gathering. Wikipedia says the Inuit practice "female infanticide [at rates] ranging from 15 to 50% to 80%."
Also, it's not a polite observation to make, but purely as a matter of academic interest, monogamous societies should also select for women that are more attractive visually, which seems like it might have taken place.
Monogamous societies that allows as many females as males to grow up select more for all possible properties on the female side, including visual attractiveness. The amount of selection pressure on the male and female sides (among adults) should differ enormously between empty polygynoys societies and crowded monogamous societies (at least those that do not practice infanticide). In empty polygynous societies, all women who manage to survive until adulthood breed to their maximum. In crowded monogamous societies, more or less the same share of males and females breed, and their breeding success mostly depends on the same economic factors. The implications of all this on the female side of evolution should be huge.
Really nice comment here. I was already aware of some of it, but it was interesting to see some sources given and numbers run. I will say, though, that all land is not equal, so scratch gardening could definitely be productive in key areas. This would explain how early Eurasian tribes were able to develop without ploughs; they would find a good area, work the land, forage and hunt while the crops grew, then harvest and move on. Horticultural, "hoe" gardeners could be remarkably advanced compared to foragers, while people who reached the level of plough agriculturalists generally invented few new technologies.
"In the 19th century in some Northern Indian high castes, all daughters were killed at birth, because where would they go?"
Absolutely wrong. If "all" daughters were killed at birth there would have been no women in Northern Indian high castes. Which castes specifically are being talked about here? The long standing tradition in India is marriage within caste. The reasons for female infanticide in India has always been (and still is where it is practiced): 1. poverty 2. having too many daughters 3. the first born being a girl
Not all Indian high castes, just some of them. I don't know very much about India and I see from your quotation that I use some terminology a bit vaguely. The point that Sarah Hrdy makes is that women were supposed to always marry upwards. Highest up, there was nowhere to go. European colonists wondered why they saw no girls until they asked and found out that there just were no girls.
"The point that Sarah Hrdy makes is that women were supposed to always marry upwards. "
--- Hundreds, if not thousands, of years, of Indian civilization just does not indicate this.
People arranged marriages within caste and they still do. Each caste comes with it's own sub-culture and it's important for those sub-cultures to be preserved, hence why people marry within caste. Of course there would be some upward caste mobility available to women via marriage but the majority of Indians still marry within caste. Higher caste families in such a system would not be keen on bringing lower caste daughters-in-law into their families and homes. Hrdy's conclusion is absurd. Female infanticide in India is closely linked to the dowry system which can and does financially devastate some families.
"Highest up, there was nowhere to go".
-- Again, brahmins are not supposed to "go" anywhere except to other brahmin families.
"European colonists wondered why they saw no girls until they asked and found out that there just were no girls."
-- European "colonists" came to a lot of faulty conclusions. There are areas in India that have skewed sex ratios due to female infanticide to this day. It is not concentrated amongst the highest caste that has "nowhere to go".
India is a vast country. So I can't se why you and Sarah Hrdy can't be right at the same time. She wrote about some customs in some part of India in the 19th century. I thought those customs were an interesting illustration of how human societies can pull some principles to their extremes. I'm sure those extremes aren't representative of Indian marriage customs as a whole.
I did some digging. Here's where Hrdy got her info. The first thing that jumps out at you, well me, are the caste names. None of them brahmins (highest caste). Several of them low-middle caste. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44143417
Then it might have been technically wrong by me to call them "high castes". As I understood it, those most into sex selective infanticide were warrior guys (that is, not the highest caste). I must admit I don't know what is really considered "high caste" in India. I just reflexively reasoned that it should be something corresponding to "high class" in Europe.
Caste and class are two entirely different things. India has class also. So the entire premise of "having nowhere to go" is tossed out the window into the trash. There are reasons that female infanticide existed, and still does, in India. Having no caste for a daughter to marry into wasn't one of them.
This analysis of male/female bonding entirely through a lens of 'Economics-of-Propagation' is not to be dismissed. And it was obviously a lot of work. But it suffers from a strange combination of over-thinking and under-thinking. Economic self-interest is not the only story here. There's a Shakespeare quote needed here somehow - although I can't just call to mind the one I want.
Ah Yes....There are more things in heaven and earth..... than can be viewed entirely through an economics lens. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
I don't believe it was economic self-interest that shaped the customs of marriage payments. I think it was cultural evolution. Under certain environmental circumstances, people who founded and followed certain traditions had more socially successful children. Over the generations those traditions became associated with successful people. That made those traditions seem prestigious, which inspired more people to emulate them. Something like that. Most people just followed social conventions and emulated those who seemed the most successful. Few people need to have acted out of explicit economic self-interest.
I think we are misunderstanding each other here. 'Economic self-interest' was my crude (perhaps too crude) broad-brush encapsulation of the thrust of your essay. I was using the word 'economic' in its broadest sense - as in Robbins marvellous definition of it as "the study of human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means....etc"
I was criticising it from the vantage point of 'cultural evolution' which - for me anyway - would need to encompass the evolution of ideas of 'love', desire, 'beauty' masculinity and femininity and so; not just the urge to maximise success in the propagation of your line.
[But also perhaps I did not make clear enough that I was quite impressed by your analysis; just suggesting how it might be broadened]
Terrific post. Lots to think about as our kids come into marrying age.
As I started reading I found myself distracted by a thought so I'll write it now so as to read without distraction. To what extent does the payment transferred with the bride stay with her? ie if she leaves the relationship for another (or else returns to her family of origin) does she take the value of the payment with her or does she leave it behind (or any intermediate division of the resource)?
I read somewhere that societies that practice dowry tend to be societies that do not practice divorce. So women with dowries simply don't leave a relationship for another. In Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy writes that dowries explicitly tends to be reserved for the grandchildren of the dowry-givers. If a married woman dies, for example, her dowry is not supposed to support children her husband has with another woman.
That's interesting. Yes, dowry as a social norm for the sustenance of the woman's children makes sense. I hadn't thought of it that way. So having it tied to the family unit rather than the wife discourages divorce.
You have very interesting things to say about how this applies to western society which I'll have to think more about.
I perhaps uncharacteristically have nothing to add to this, beyond saying that this insight was new to me and I feel as though reading this has advanced my understanding of the world. I'd actually forgotten about hoe agriculture entirely -- I prefer to imagine the portion of my ancestors' past that involved herds of cattle and bands of armed retainers allowing a man to support a few wives who mostly stay inside and make textiles and leather goods.
Considering some aspects of this ...
There is a section in "Dateonomics" by Birger of a sector of Orthodox Jews in/near New York City where the various customs result in a scarcity of marriageable men relative to women, and there is a definite dowry culture, with the size of the dowry calibrated to the social status (generally occupation) of the groom.
In regard to the general upper-middle-class in the U.S., there are definite tendencies of parents of the couple to contribute large sums to a down-payment on a house and the education of their children. IIUC, the latter is not considered a gift under U.S. tax laws, but the former is, but I'm pretty sure that few such parents pay the required gift tax.
I think the high rate of divorce in modern societies is what has incentivized parents to invest in their children's human capital while keeping economic assets for themselves as long and as much as possible. But as wealth becomes more important relative to salary in order to afford a nice place to live I expect this to be more and more reflected in the mating market as well, and parents increasingly need to use dowries in a more traditional way to boost their offspring's value.
Interestingly, one of the functions of dowries among Indian Muslims and I think many Muslim communities nearby like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq, is the money is specifically the wife's money. During the marriage she controls it and can use it as she pleases (at least hypothetically) and in case of divorce, she takes it back. I recently read an autobiography of a Kashmiri Muslim-American woman (who was actually left in a corner of the room to die as a newborn, until her grandfather rushed in and saved her by giving her to her mom, who was too weak after birth to get up and go get her), "Born With Wings," which talks about how her mother used her dowry money to purchase an almond grove and become a successful businesswoman.
Yes. Parents don't want to pay to a joint household that gets split in two without producing any grandchildren. One way to get around that problem is to wait until any grandchildren are produced. Something I suspect is already happening (grandma and grandpa help new parents buy bigger apartment). Many people divorce after having children. But then at least the supported non-relative will have a stake in a relative (or two or three).
I'm glad that you brought up infanticide which is something that usually gets glossed over when writing about historical family structure. The monogamous marriage which was almost universal in Europe before chrisitanity was combined after Constantine with the christian bans on cousin marriage, divorce and infanticide to create a family structure and a society structure unique to Christendom.
I was surprised to learn from another Substack how widespread brideprice still is in China. This continuous existence makes sense given chinese culture even if the agricultural society that gave birth to this culture has changed.
Confucian traditions place huge value on raising boys, passing the family name and on the son's obligation to care for his elderly parents. The chinese even have different words for grandchildren from their sons and their daughters. These traditions lead to the abortion or infanticide of some of the girls, which in turn leads to an imbalance between sexes (which is apparently awful in rural areas) which leads to continuing the custom of bride price, monies which are often used to pay a bride price for the son or buy him a house.
Could you give me a link to that Substack about contemporary bride prices in China? That sounds like something interesting to read about.
It is Moly’s Substack https://weibo.substack.com/
Thank you! That place causes a lot of guesswork. For example, I had no idea that young women were supposed to spend a month eating chicken (presumably when they get married?) Like a budget version of a honeymoon, but between mother and daughter in law? Interesting stuff, but difficult to understand.
Mothers sit the month after they give birth.
Ah, thank you. I should probably go for something more basic before I read too much of that site.
I learned about this custom on that substack, but month sitting is a topic she covers often so she probably didn't add many details on the specific post you mentioned.
Presumably it was https://weibo.substack.com/ which reports on bride price issues on Chinese social media in a big fraction of posts. It's not clear if this obsession with bride price is a feature of Weibo or just an algorithmic quirk, where the profile used by Moly has become focused on this issue due to ongoing engagement with the topic.
Yes. That's the substack I was talking about. Moly's translations have been focused on topics relating to marriage and kids since the beginning so it's not surprising she covers bride price.
Snip. "Plows weren’t invented to get higher productivity from a given area of land, they were invented to save labor."
Plows allow the farmer to get more land under cultivation.
I guess Tove's response would be that it produces more calories (from grains) than using a hoe (growing more leafy greens?) enabling a denser population and that this inadvertently shifted the balance of labour from women to men.
Great essay! A lot of this relates to genetic reproductive success, but I am also interested in cultural reproduction. How concerned are people (consciously or unconsciously) with reproducing their cultural/psychological self? Why are Jews culturally matrilineal?
This must have been researched. Go back far enough and the ancient Jews were very patrilineal but at some point transitioned into matrilineality, at least for determining formal Jewishness. Whether/when they've been culturally matrilineal is a different question ...
Yes. A little search turned up this paper: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/56074971/005._Shaye_J.D._Cohen_-_The_Matrilineal_Principle_in_Historical_Perspective-libre.pdf?1521182817=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DShaye_J_D_Cohen_The_Matrilineal_Principl.pdf&Expires=1690752618&Signature=F2uglMcld6P2JD1Qtz-SM9neesEn6NxJSlNrTibNjFs53wQwLulOpQbu06J11u68HAprtYfFEePz~aDyg9sal7GMmwJKWpz0PrdmU3PyiS27MxmREDuPSDJLkqhNHv1wYPGcVUaI1cjXMlzcQoNuVsVLa52PTdBwKFmM4IaVDHJjkJVKFydAuSWqyLcs6F2eiEdFYE3PJz2nQ0jcIXBsDxyqynVx1yK4VMCQNQv5-PZzrtFHswukQxrmoRLCjbx0zfwMPVA78CvJg-2VIiEO987KrYdZqK5wUBtgSVMTlacdyHP4dpempX1SNr13qZEEAnALU8eQK4nEhCOTBuAd6w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA
I believe the matrilineality comes out of ancient Roman law. Most of the Ashkenazi maternal DNA comes from ancient Roman women.
So, is the matrilinial norm an Ashkenazi thing or also seen in eastern Jews not impacted by the Roman Empire.
At least some studies say that the vast majority of mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi Jews is of European origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews
That suggests that at some point, the Jews of Europe were a bit flexible with their matrilineal lineage rules.
I recall seeing comment that the Ashkenazi can be traced to 4 (surviving) mitochondrial lineages. With speculation that shortly after destruction of the Temple Jewish men emigrating into Europe married local women.
This was a brilliant read!
you say: ‘Plowing with animals is hard work and requires the upper body strength of a man. But it gives more output from a given area’
I don’t think your understanding of plowing is correct. Plows weren’t invented to get higher productivity from a given area of land, they were invented to save labor. I’m not aware of anyone who claims that plows give higher yields per acre. What they do is, they give higher yields per man-hour. Leaving aside the sex difference in upper body strength, plows were invented and spread because most of the work was done by the ox or the mule or the horse rather than the man: ‘A single farmer with an ox team could cultivate ten times or more land than a hoe farmer,’ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-09-18-roots-inequality-traced-back-neolithic-ox-drawn-plows
If your premise was correct, when people struck out into the wilderness, they would have reverted back to hoe farming. But that isn’t what happened. What happened was, they took their plow technology with them. That includes farmers populating the United States in the 1700s and 1800s, moving into areas with no premium on land — for a good part of that period uncleared, uncultivated land was literally free. Land was cheap. They didn’t bring the plow with them because it gave greater productivity per acre. They brought it with them because it save enormous amounts of labor. The exact same thing happen in Europe thousands of years earlier— as ‘the first farmers’ (from Anatolia) gradually spread out across Europe, moving into ‘virgin territory’ populated only with hunter/gatherers, they took their plow technology with them.
Per W. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ard_(plough)#History :
“The ard first appears in the mid-Neolithic and is closely related to the domestication of cattle. It probably spread with animal traction in general across the cereal-growing cultures of the Neolithic Old World. Its exact point of origin is unknown, but it spread quickly throughout West Asia, South Asia and Europe in the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic.
Evidence appears in the Near East in the 6th millennium BC. Iron versions appeared c. 2300 BC both in Assyria and 3rd-dynasty Egypt. In Europe, the earliest known wooden ard (at Lavagone in Italy) dates from around 2300-2000 BC, but the earliest scratch marks date from 3500-3000 BC.” [.P. Mallory & D.Q. Adams, eds., Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, s.v. "Plough" (London: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1997)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lxxNCt5Zo
“We have a quarter acre to plough with our horses. It’s heavy clay soil and still wet from the winter, but reasonably level and well worked over the years. It took us two hours in total to plough which equates to an acre a day - which is what the books tell you a ploughman/woman and their horse could plough in a day. “
https://www.reddit.com/r/farming/comments/6wua0o/how_long_would_it_take_a_standard_yoke_of_oxen_to/
“an acre was the amount of land that 1 man could plow in 1 day with 1 ox”
so if you had 40 acres and a mule, you’d probably be able to get it all ploughed and planted in a couple of months— if optimal time to plant is day x, back up 60 days and start ploughing. when it is time to plant the ground is ready
I couldn’t even find any serious sites talking about how many acres you can hoe up by hand in a day, or a week. I expect some historical anthropology web sites have info on it. This is what popped up for me:
https://preservingsweetness.com/how-many-acres-can-one-person-farm-by-hand-2-key-factors/
some quotes:
“How Many Acres Can One Person Farm Medieval?
If you decide to farm medieval style, meaning with little to no equipment, the number of acres you’re able to farm is going to be very limited.
One person can farm approximately one to three acres medieval, though that would depend on the crop and the climate.”
“How Much Land Does It Take To Feed One Person for a Year?
It takes around 5-10 acres to feed one person a year.”
You do the math. To colonize non-tropical areas, ploughs were needed to increase labor efficiency. I’m sure if guys could have gotten away with it they would have kept lounging around, but once you move out of the tropical zone it takes much more labor to grow any given amount of calories.
The only type of subsistence activities that were viable in the ‘heavy soils’ of Europe were hunting and gathering. Agriculturalists couldn’t spread to Europe nor to Northern China until animals had been tamed and plough technology developed.
I don’t know if I have any references to back it up but I believe it is literally impossible to feed yourself by farming ‘by hand’ ie, ‘by hoe’ in northern Europe. The energy requirements of digging in the heavy soil are greater than the return in calories. Northern Europe couldn’t be colonized by farmers until cattle were domesticated, and could be used to plow the ground. Until then, hunter/gatherers were the only people that could survive in that environment— at very low population densities of course. And I think that was true, literally, until potatoes were introduced to Europe from America. Potatoes are much more ‘calorie dense’ both per unit acre and per unit man-hour. They brought about a situation in Europe similar to that seen in Africa, where a single person could support themselves and a family on a couple of acres, with not too much effort.
This is a wonderfully well-researched comment. Thank you for it.
However, I do not think the conclusions can be completely correct. If plows were only labor-saving devices they should have been operated by women while men continued their labor-free warrior lifestyles. I know of no cultures where this has happened.
Also, agriculture is by no means dependent on plows, even in non-tropical areas. In Sweden/Scandinavia the first archeological traces of ards (including scratch marks) are from the Bronze Age, meaning that several thousand years of agriculture passed with only hoe agriculture. Probably, this was possible due to opportunistic use of the very best soils, when population pressure increased one had to use marginal lands which could only be farmed successfully with labor-saving devices like plows.
Finally, there is a linguistic component. In Swedish, and reasonably in Ester Boserup's native Danish as well, there is a strict separation between a plow and an arder. In English an ard seems to be regarded as a type of plow. In Swedish (and hopefully Danish) a plow is a tool with an iron bill and a mouldboard, something that turns over the soil instead of just scratching it lite the arder. The ard is in practice nothing more than an efficient hoe. A plow is something entirely different. By turning over the soil you effectively kill off most weeds and you effectively mix the soil with manure and plant residues. The result is a superior seedbed which should enable higher yield per area than hoe/ard agriculture (although I have no data to back this up).
I recall seeing ard ploughing, in the Middle East in the late '60s. Indeed it simply broke up the ground surface. It was used for preparing the ground for sowing grain crops not for 'gardening'. In rural villages gardens were small with most vegetables simply gathered.
I don't know much about historical farming implements, but as far as I know, the metal plow is a very recent invention--late 1800s. Before that everyone used wooden plows. I'm not sure what an arder is, but Google images suggests it's that it's a wooden plow of the sort that everyone used before metal plows were invented. ("Hoe" in english is a stick with a sharp, flat bit at the end. You have to swing it up and down to use it.) So I don't think the distinction between ard and plow is the one being used here, because the metal plow was introduced way too late.
Obviously there were probably many small, incremental improvements on plowing technology between the first people scratching holes with sticks and dropping in seeds and the modern tractor plow. (The metal plow + tractors caused massive ecological devastation by turning over too much soil and triggering the Dust Bowl, btw.)
I would never have invented the hoe agriculture/plow agriculture distinction myself. Essentially, what it is all about is extensive, opportunistic agriculture that picks the low-hanging fruit versus intensive agriculture that also picks higher-hanging fruit. The technology in use differs with soil types and geographical circumstances, but the principle remains the same. For that reason I find it a bit unlucky that the concepts established in the 20th century focus on certain technologies.
I think Apple Pie is entirely correct: When a community transitions from opportunistic agriculture of the best land to more intensive agriculture, the sport is not only to increase the output of the land already under cultivation. The sport is to increase the output of all land the community controls. Whether the solution is to increase the amount of soil under cultivation, like in northern Europe, or to use land more efficiently, like in rice growing areas, it always implies more male labor. Which affects the usefulness of wives.
There are two good reasons why colonists never reverted to female-fuelled non-plow agriculture:
1. Culture. Once the idea that men should work to support their families was established, not doing so was seen as immoral. For good reason. If colonist men had started to misbehave (in relation to their own cultural norms), their families and communities would have been much worse off under their already harsh living conditions.
2. Sex ratios. Colonists were typically male-biased. Women were rare and very sought-after. Men were not in a position to bully them. To the contrary, they needed to work very hard to compete for the too few women. Colonist women didn't have to accept to live in huts and work until exhaustion only to scrape together enough grain for their families. They could choose the most hard-working man with the nicest cabin.
Yes, the hoe/plough distinction doesn't seem to capture the divide to me either. Apart from anything else, ploughing is typically less land efficient than hoeing because you also need to feed the animals pulling the plough, also China is an example of a high population density -> monogamy society that barely made any use of draught animals.
You'd expect the same dynamics of difficulty for the male in providing for wives/children -> monogamy to occur among hunter-gathers that rely on hunting over gathering. Wikipedia says the Inuit practice "female infanticide [at rates] ranging from 15 to 50% to 80%."
Also, it's not a polite observation to make, but purely as a matter of academic interest, monogamous societies should also select for women that are more attractive visually, which seems like it might have taken place.
Monogamous societies that allows as many females as males to grow up select more for all possible properties on the female side, including visual attractiveness. The amount of selection pressure on the male and female sides (among adults) should differ enormously between empty polygynoys societies and crowded monogamous societies (at least those that do not practice infanticide). In empty polygynous societies, all women who manage to survive until adulthood breed to their maximum. In crowded monogamous societies, more or less the same share of males and females breed, and their breeding success mostly depends on the same economic factors. The implications of all this on the female side of evolution should be huge.
Really nice comment here. I was already aware of some of it, but it was interesting to see some sources given and numbers run. I will say, though, that all land is not equal, so scratch gardening could definitely be productive in key areas. This would explain how early Eurasian tribes were able to develop without ploughs; they would find a good area, work the land, forage and hunt while the crops grew, then harvest and move on. Horticultural, "hoe" gardeners could be remarkably advanced compared to foragers, while people who reached the level of plough agriculturalists generally invented few new technologies.