Hans Medick – författare

Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there developed in many rural regions of Europe a domestic industry, mass-producing craft goods for distant markets. This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization', and considers the question whether it constituted a distinct mode of production, different from the preceding feudal economy and from subsequent industrial capitalism, or was part of a process of continuous evolution characterized by the spread of wage labour and the penetration of capitalism into the process of production. It is a full-scale attempt to take a look at the place of proto-industrialization in the genesis of capitalism, and will interest economic and social historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and others concerned with the development of capitalism.

Bringing together the work of anthropologists and historians, this volume, first published in 1984, challenges the notion that interests and emotions are polar opposites, and questions how far the history of the family in Europe and America can be organized around the central trend of 'sentimentalization'. Individual chapters examine in a comparative perspective the use of kin; property relations inheritance; family exploitation of labor; claims, demands, and expectations with respect to kin; the emotional economy of familial obligations; and family and the reproduction of social and class relations. Several chapters discuss relations among close family members, examining the ways in which property and labor organization are related to conflicts, personal interest, and the patterning of emotional response.