While the current discussion of ethnic, trade, and commercial diasporas, global networks, and transnational communities constantly makes reference to the importance of families and kinship groups for understanding the dynamics of dispersion, few studies examine the nature of these families in any detail. This book, centered largely on the European experience of families scattered geographically, challenges the dominant narratives of modernization by offering a long-term perspective from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, transnational families are to be found long before the nation-state was in place.

Francesca Trivellato is Professor of History at Yale University.

List of Figures Preface

Introduction: Rethinking European Kinship: Trans-regional and Transnational FamiliesDavid Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher

Chapter 1. The Historical Emergence and Massification of International Families in Europe and its DiasporaJose C. Moya

Section I. The Medieval and Early Modern Experience

Chapter 2. Mamluk and Ottoman Political Households: An Alternative Model of Kinship and FamilyGabriel Piterberg

Chapter 3. From LocalSignori to European High Nobility: The Gonzaga Family Networks in the Fifteenth CenturyChristina Antenhofer

Chapter 4. Property Regimes and Migration of Patrician Families in Western Europe around 1500Simon Teuscher

Chapter 5. Trans-dynasticism at the Dawn of the Modern Era: Kinship Dynamics among Ruling FamiliesMichaela Hohkamp

Chapter 6. Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency: Trans-regional Sephardic (and Armenian) Families in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century MediterraneanFrancesca Trivellato

Chapter 7. Those in Between: Princely Families on the Margins of the Great PowersThe Franco-German Frontier, 1477-1830Jonathan Spangler

Chapter 8. Spiritual Kinship: The Moravians as an International Fellowship of Brothers and Sisters (1730s-1830s)Gisele Mettele

Section II. Modernity

Chapter 9. Families of Empires and Nations: PhanariotHanedans from the Ottoman Empire to the World Around It (1669-1856)Christine Philliou

Chapter 10. Into the World: Kinship and Nation-Building in France, 1750-1885Christopher H. Johnson

Chapter 11. German International Families in the Nineteenth Century: The Siemens Family as a Thought ExperimentDavid Warren Sabean

Chapter 12. The Culture of Caribbean Migration to Britain in the 1950sMary Chamberlain

Chapter 13. Exile, Familial Ideology, and Gender Roles in Palestinian Camps in Jordan since 1948Stéphanie Latte Abdallah

Chapter 14. Mirror Image of Family Relations: Social Links between Patel Migrants in Britain and IndiaMario Rutten and Pravin J. Patel

Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index