The Rise of the Western Nuclear Family and the “European Miracle”
It’s now been nearly 35 years since E.L. Jones first published his watershed book The European Miracle. Jones’s history of Europe’s economic development examined the reasons why Europe—a comparatively poor and backward part of the world in the Middle Ages—somehow became the wealthiest and most productive place on earth in the nineteenth century. The fundamental question remains: why did Europe surpass other civilizations1such as Islam and China—which had once been much richer than the west?
According to Jones, a major factor in Europe’s drive to economic prominence was the high degree of economic freedom. As Jones puts it: “Economic development in its European form required above all freedom from arbitrary political acts concerning private property.” Or, as historian Ralph Raico concluded, Europe’s industrialization was closely connected to the fact that “the economy achieved a degree of autonomy unknown elsewhere in the world except for brief periods.”
This, of course, raises the question of why Europeans enjoyed higher levels of economic freedom. As Raico shows in his work on late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Europe’s political institutions were different from anywhere else, thanks largely to the unique position of the Western Church as a rival and competitor against the civil power. Consequently, no single state or polity was able to consolidate power across the region. Ongoing rivalries between the Church, various kings, and countless private “corporate” organizations further solidified a decentralized political structure in which various groups jealously guarded their property and economic interests from the grasping hands of princes and legislators.
But there’s even more to it than that. Another institution at the core of the story of the European miracle is the family, and specifically the European nuclear family. We find that specific European factors led to growing numbers of nuclear families which, in turn, supported the rise of Europe’s private “corporate” organizations that fueled Europe’s ecosystem of decentralized, diverse, and private organizations.
The Historical Origins of the Nuclear Family
One notable characteristic of Western Europe after the Early Middle Ages is an unusually high proportion of nuclear families. Outside Western Europe, so-called “stem families” and “joint families” were more common. In these two family types, grown children and elderly adults more commonly lived together, and the creation of new households was less common than in areas with nuclear families. In joint families, large extended families could be found living together in close proximity or even on a single estate.(One variation of this model is the Roman ideal of the “pater familias.”)
In the case of stem families, most of the grown children leave to start new households while one of the children—often the oldest son—remained living with the elderly parents in anticipation of inheriting the parent’s land or business.
The historical extended families, and the clan structures that accompanied them, went into relative decline during the Middle Ages in
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