The appearance of a large, expensive, collective book on the history of household and family needs neither apology nor defence. This is a new, or a newly defined, area of study and its importance to human behaviour in the present as well as the past is manifest. The burgeoning subject stands in evident need of a body of comparative data and of an assemblage of techniques for their analysis. All twenty-two of the following chapters are intended to meet these requirements, whilst the first of them, the Introduction, also proposes a model of classifying and comparing forms of household and family over time and between countries. Deliberate aim has been taken at the object of opening out a new field of enquiry. But there has been no attempt at codification.

It is doubtless both inevitable and desirable that a work of this kind published at this time should be controversial. The issues which will arise may go very deep. A question might even be raised as to whether the form of the family has in fact played as important a role in human development as the social sciences have assigned to it. It is possible to wonder whether our ancestors did always care about the form of the families in which they lived, whether they were large or small, and even whether they contained kin or servants or strangers.