Beshara Doumani, David Warren Sabean

We would like to set up four panels at the 2010 ESSHC meeting in Ghent to explore the problem of family “foundations” and collective property strategies on a broad world-wide comparative basis, including Asia, Europe, the Near East, Africa, North and south America, and over a broad tikme perspective, from the ancient world to the present. Historians have long been concerned with processes of family property devolution, but most work has been done on rules and forms of intergenerational partition: partible and impartible inheritance, inheritance vs. succession, dowries, gender inequalities, and postmortem and premortem forms of wealth distribution. Among other things, current historical work has begun to emphasize differences in practices within the same cultural zones, legal frameworks, and political structures. And recent critical social history has started to probe older literature on patrilineal family structures, traditional Islamic and Roman law, or Asian clan familial and kinship structures. One fascinating innovation in this direction is recent work on the Near Eastern “waqf,” a legal foundation that mixes religious and pious elements with familial property ownership. The point of this institution was to “alienate” property in favor of a religious institution, while leaving the actual use of the property in the hands of family members. The legal maneuverings behind this were closely tied to family strategies aimed at providing both structure and flexibility. Work in this direction offers a challenge for European historians, certainly for the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, but probably also for modern Western societies as well. It is time to consider ways in which families could create foundations or put their property into forms that could support family members without recourse to standard practices of devolution or allowing the same form of family authority over resources as we are familiar with in most accounts of inheritance practices. For a dramatic example, Cardinal Richelieu got his start by occupying a benefice essentially “owned” by his family. With a relatively open definition of the topic, there is a great deal for medievalists here. Most monasteries in the high Middle Ages were founded in order to preserve the property of a family (Hausklöster); the very notion of dynastic family probably developed within the relationship to a monastery. We might also want to look at possession “zur Gesamten Hand” of castles, that is a collective kind of property sometimes involving dozens of family members. The fideicommissum, where really the family as such becomes collective owner of goods is primarily early modern. But there are medieval predecessors, including the Italian consorteria, and the history of all forms of entail could be explored. For nineteenth-century Germany, there was a vigorous interest in establishing family foundations and legal associations with the hope of building up substantial wealth--all for supporting the elderly with a suitable living, youth with education, and channeling wealth strategically for business startups and cash flow problems, and the like. There are all kinds of attempts to create family wealth tied up in complex legal forms in contemporary America that may have deeper roots than historians have yet examined. Besides the obvious challenge for European history, the general set of issues provides interesting comparative perspectives for Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well. It might be useful to look at how wealth is controlled at home for international families dispersed across space--from the European medieval banking families, early modern colporteurs, to Armenian and Gujarati diasporas and Chinese migrant populations.

Please send an abstract before April 15, 2009, to David Sabean: dsabean@history.ucla.edu