Rethinking Eastern Europe: household-formation patterns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and European family systems

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses family patterns in the vast territories of historical Poland and Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on pre-industrial rural settings, and applies a variety of methodologies to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Three regional family patterns have been distinguished in the historical Polish territories, differing both in terms of household structure and household formation rules and in terms of their marriage patterns. Analysis of the dataset on these spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated the preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the data presented here suggest that the impact of second serfdom on family structure was by no means uniform, and that factors other than purely economic ones may actually have accounted for the diversity of family systems prevailing in historical Poland and Lithuania.