This book is not a work of scholarship in the usual sense. I am not an expert in the societies which I discuss; I have read a little about them but what I know is derived mainly from field studies that others have made, the results of intensive research which exhaust neither the spatial nor the historical dimensions. Part of my original interest stemmed from an attempt to understand why the particular groups I first studied in Africa differ in certain definite ways from pre-industrial Europe. Reading the accounts presented by my colleagues of the domestic domain in the major civilisations of Asia to extend the contrast to that vast region I was led to wonder whether there too, certain general differences might not be related, among other factors but in some significant way, to differences in the productive systems.

The development of the analysis of social organisation in Africa meant that many conceptual clarifications have been made in the study of family, kinship and marriage. Models based on those societies have often been adopted in the examination of Asian societies. While these models were sometimes more appropriate than those of European historians and sociologists, they created problems for the analysis of Asian domestic systems, which tended to be seen as more ‘primitive’ than they really were and therefore as more of an obstacle in the onward march of ‘modernisation’ than was actually the case, thus reinforcing the ethnocentric notions of Marx and Weber about the place of oriental societies in world history.