Book Review

Asia

David Wakefield's book is a detailed, interdisciplinary, empirical study of an important phenomenon whose nature has heretofore been mostly assumed rather than documented: the processes of household division and inheritance in Qing and Republican China. As such, it should quickly become the standard work on the topic.	1
Wakefield has used rare collections of household division documents from several regions in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries. These documents are very detailed records of the composition of the family at the time of division and of the shares of property given to each of the heirs. Although the total sample contains only 166 cases and thus is unimpressive statistically, Wakefield makes the best of the data at hand and is able to discover both general principles and specific class and regional "orientations," or variations on these general principles.	2
Wakefield's findings are not surprising: they tend to verify what we had projected backward from ethnographic findings in the twentieth century. The majority of households waited to divide until after they had reached the phase of the patrilocal developmental cycle when married brothers, each with wife and some or all with children, formed joint households with their parents or surviving parent. Only about a third of households, however, waited until after both parents were dead before dividing. Wakefield speculates productively on what this tells us about the tension between economic incentives, which in certain circumstances tended to hold joint households together, and psychological tensions, which inevitably constituted a force for division.	. . .