Two concepts that are helpful in making connections between the history of the family and global history are “domestication” and “biopolitics.
” Domestication most often comes up in global histories as the process whereby humans asserted increasing control over the natural world in the era of the post-Ice Age “Neolithic Revolution,” which began around 10,000 bce.
Control over animal species through herding and over plant species through agriculture assured a steadier, if not necessarily better, average diet; settlement and civilization followed. More recent work by feminist archaeologists and social archaeologists has broadened the notion of domestication to call attention to the “domus" - the cultural invention of human domestic life - that was essential to early human societies.According to Ian Hodder, “interest in control over nature was not new in the Neolithic. But the focus of this interest was newly located in the ‘domus’.”1 In this revision, human domestic life becomes a motor of early human history. Again according to Hodder: “the domus was not only the metaphor for change. It was also the mechanism of change, and it was through this dual role that what we normally talk about today as domestication and the origins of agriculture in the Middle East came about.”[282] [283] Clive Gamble argues that domestication was most significant in terms of its impact on human cognition and culture, which in turn grew from and with new patterns of child nurturance in the context of domestic group life. Indeed “the world’s earliest village communities were also the first to develop fully modern minds and a fully symbolic culture.”[284]
Expanding the concept of domestication to include not only the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry, but also and more importantly the cognitive, social, and cultural processes that characterized early human settlement, has sparked exciting new research linking family history with the history of early human societies.
The domestic realm has continued to be a site of history ever since the Neolithic, even as its nature has evolved historically. Reconsidering global history from this perspective highlights various and important connections between domestic and family-historical dynamics, on the one hand, and global-historical dynamics, on the other. The exercise and transmission of political power through dynastic inheritance, the creation of global business networks that relied on ties of intimacy and trust based in merchant “houses,” the various forms of intimate domestic relations that were always a critical element of imperial control, the place of household labor organization in both agricultural and industrial economies, the use of laws and norms to regulate aspects of family in the name of the state or the cause - all of these are examples of close connections between family and global history.The nature of biopolitics - the state exercise of control over the bodies of its population - has also shifted over time. When Michel Foucault defined biopower, he indeed had modern Western states in mind:
By [bio-power] I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.[285]
Techniques of rule thus expanded to include routine demographic measures and projections such as fertility rates or measurements of a population's health such as accident or STD rates.
Foucault argued that biopolitics in this sense is a modern invention, but it had its precedents. Although Foucault suggested that earlier state strategies focusing on the realm of the family and reproduction etc. relied on techniques of control over individuals rather than over “populations,” thinking backwards from biopolitics also allows us to see important connections between the family and global history. A large proportion of the provisions of the earliest known legal codes focused on family matters - who might marry whom, what sorts of transactions accompanied marriage, who could claim inheritance, and so forth. In imperial settings across time rulers paid careful attention to sexual relations and reproduction well ahead of specific notions of race or “population growth.” And of course once we enter into the temporal regime of biopolitics proper, such interventions have multiplied. In the contemporary world, biopolitical programs have become standard techniques of rule.