1. Introduction: The history of the family Peter Laslett; 2. Some demographic determinants of average household size: An analytic approach Thomas K. Burch; 3. The evolution of the family Jack Goody; 4. Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century Peter Laslett; 5. Mean household size in England from printed sources Richard Wall; 6. A note on the household structure of mid-nineteenth-century York in comparative perspective W. A. Armstrong; 7. Household structure and the industrial revolution; mid-nineteenth-century Preston in comparative perspective Michael Anderson; 8. A southern French village: the inhabitants of Montplaisant in 1644 Jean-Noel Biraben; 9. Size and structure of households in a northern French village between 1836 and 1861 Yves Blayo; 10. Household and family in Tuscany in 1427 Christiana Klapisch; 11. Structure of household and family in Corsica, 1769–71 Jacques Dupaquier and Louis Jadin; 12. Variations in the size and structure of the household in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A. M. van der Woude; 13. Size of households before the industrial revolution: the case of Liege in 1801 Etienne Helin; 14. The zadruga as process E. A. Hammel; 15. Houseful and household in an eighteenth-century Balkan city. A tabular analysis of the listing of the Serbian sector of Belgrade in 1733–4 Peter Laslett and Marilyn Clarke; 16. Town and countryside in Serbia in the nineteenth century, social and household structure as reflected in the census of 1863 Joel M. Halpern; 17. Small families, small households, and residential instability: town and city in 'pre-modern' Japan Robert J. Smith; 18. Size of household in a Japanese county throughout the Tokugawa era Akira Hayami and Nobuko Uchida; 19. An interpretation of the size and structure of the household in Japan over three centuries Chic Nakane; 20. The average size of families and households in the Province of Massachusetts in 1764 and in the United States in 1790: an overview Philip J. Graven, Jr; 21. Demography and psychology in the historical study of family-life: a personal report John Demos; 22. Rhode Island family structure: 1875 and 1960 Edward T. Pryor, Jr.

This is an extremely important collection of essays in historical social structure. The volume represents the first attempt to examine in historical and comparative terms the general belief that in the past all families were larger than they are today; that the nuclear family of man, wife and children living alone is particularly characteristic of the present time and came into being with the arrival of industry.