Tag: China

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The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall

Chinese family

Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.

The End of the Chinese Extended Family

Nick Eberstadt  argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.

Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.

I am interested in the Chinese family partly because extended-family patterns may have inhibited a Chinese Industrial Revolution around 1800. In contrast, England, with its nuclear families and a willingness to let young men and women work outside the family, became the source of innovative growth. (For more about the contrast in family patterns, see my post on “Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth.”) Now, back to China. Continue reading “The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall”

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Daring to Revise History: Eamon Duffy and Kenneth Pomeranz

In a sense, all historical writing is revisionist. In their writing, most historians attempt to show that some aspect of history has been slighted, ignored, or undiscovered, and they have come up with a remedy. Sometimes, though, revisionist history is very powerful.

In his 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy offered a revisionist view of the Protestant Reformation in England. His goal was to “contribute a shovelful of history to the burial of the venerable historiographical consensus” about the English Reformation.[1]

That consensus (which echoes the “whig version” of history challenged by Herbert Butterfield) pictured an open-minded, modern religion (Protestantism) replacing a superstitious, populist “folk” religion (Catholicism). Historians, says Duffy, were under the sway of A. G. Dickens, the “doyen of English Reformation studies,” who disdained what Duffy calls “late [Catholic] medieval piety.” Duffy’s 654-page volume (which I am reading for a class this fall) was designed to restore respect for Catholic England, and apparently it did.

Continue reading “Daring to Revise History: Eamon Duffy and Kenneth Pomeranz”