Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

For more than a quarter of a century, Sean O’Casey enjoyed living in what he called the ‘delightful county’ of Devon. O’Casey remained newsworthy in Ireland until his death, but he lived in relative anonymity in this English seaside area, and today the county does little to remember the writer. This chapter examines the way that O’Casey interacted with the local area of Devon, and the chapter also illustrates how his writing was shaped by the personal events that happened in this geographical location, such as the death of his son Niall from cancer in 1956, his interaction with Devon neighbours, and the contact he enjoyed with visitors who travelled to meet him, such as the Irish playwright Denis Johnston.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

Italy and Germany experienced a decrease in religiosity during the twentieth century. How did Catholicism deal with these challenges? The Catholic family vision and the male breadwinner model had been the fundamental backbone of the Christian welfare states. Italian and German Christian Democratic parties implemented similar family policy regimes in the 1950s. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, these male-breadwinner–centered family policies resulted in low shares of working mothers, low fertility rates, and a low woman voting for the Christian Democrats. Only Germany responded to these challenges with reforms. Why did both countries follow so different developments? In Germany Protestants had changed their ideas on early childhood education from conservative to progressive from the 1970s onward. The Catholics had stayed put on a very conservative interpretation. With reunification a new electorate became available for the Christian Democrats. The East-German electorate was secular but from a Protestant cultural heritage. The Christian Democratic party was after reunification no longer constrained on relying on the Catholic core voters but could now compensate them with secularized Protestants electorate in Eastern Germany. This allowed them to reform early childhood education and parental leave. In Italy instead, the absence of Protestantism allowed the Catholic Church to block all family policy reform attempts.

In this chapter, we define a family cult as a cult that either mainly consists of one family or a cult whose doctrine specifically defines or exerts control over the family structures of its members. We examine the unique dynamics of family cults, as well as the characteristics of leaders and followers of family cults by discussing six family cults: The Branch Davidians, The Children of God cult (later known as The Family International), The Manson Family, The Peoples Temple, The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints, and The Church of the Lamb of God. We explore the added degree of difficulty of maintaining loyalty to a cult leader above family, and the dynamics that appear in the resulting complex relationships. Future considerations include the redefining of family structure in the age of the Internet. As people develop connections with others across the world and the concept of family changes with time, it will be interesting to see the evolution of our concept of family cults.

Infants and toddlers are immersed in the social culture of their family, community and society from before they are born. Every family has distinct social practices and ways of interacting which shape very young children’s holistic physiological, cognitive and emotional learning, development and wellbeing. These practices reflect the values, beliefs, norms and expectations of their community and culture. Over time, through repeated social encounters and experiences, the social culture of their family and community is passed on as infants and toddlers become socialised into these specific ways of engaging with others. Social practices and interactions thus form the basis of the relationships that infants and toddlers form with significant others. As a result, the social opportunities that very young children experience and participate in during their everyday existence have far-reaching consequences for their sense of identify and belonging.

German men and their collaborators perpetrated sexual violence during the Holocaust and throughout the war, during pogroms, in ghettos and labor-camps, as well as in concentration and extermination camps. They committed this violence against women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people as well as against minorities, such as Roma. Sexual coercion and abuse also occurred within the societies of those persecuted, for example in ghettos, camps, or partisan groups. In hiding or during liberation, people also experienced sexual violence at the hands of protectors, allies, or liberation soldiers. This chapter focuses on the experiences of women, but importantly also addresses those of male victims. It also addresses how sexual violence was part of Nazis’ and their collaborators’ acts of genocidal violence against Jews.

This chapter analyzes difficult to impossible attempts to flee the Nazi juggernaut, starting with early emigration from Germany, to later escapes from occupied lands. It discusses how class, age, and gender influenced Jewish chances for flight and addresses helping organizations and destinations.

Second-wave feminism arrived late to economics. It initially permitted criticism of how Gary Becker positioned gendered inequalities in families as rational choices, not as injustices. Methodologies were heterogenous. ‘Equity’ approaches, like Barbara Bergmann’s, engaged statistical analysis and extended Becker-style rational choice theory to reposition gendered inequalities as effects of unfair decision constraints. ‘Critical’ approaches, like Nancy Folbre’s, focused on deficits in the valuation of women’s care, quantifying the full economic worth of care-work, with policies for provisioning in response to needs. Quickly, feminist economists recentred poverty, focusing on ‘lone motherhood’ in the US in its connection with race, and on empowering global South development consistent with justice for women and girls in poor families. Methods developed by Esther Duflo and the ‘poor economists’ included institutional descriptions of poverty traps, with randomised controlled trials studying how incentives affect family agency. However, local knowledge could not easily apply to larger regions. As for the US, just as Becker mobilised controversial 1970s sociobiology against women’s liberation to rationalise women’s specialisation in household labour as an effect of biological comparative advantage in bearing children, categories of binary gender and binary biological difference initially prevented feminist economists from studying injustices experienced by queer families.

Why and how economists have historically studied families is not well understood, neither by those in the discipline, nor by scholars studying families in neighbouring fields like sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. This lack derives from a mistaken view that family economics began in the 1960s when price theory was applied to family behaviour. It is also due to the narrowing of economics from the 1940s in the US, when social reform and advocacy work shifted to the discipline’s periphery. Affirming a contemporary need for gender-inclusive language, while using terms that access historical understandings, the book’s first goal is to show that economists developed methodologies for studying families as a function of how they conceptualised family poverty in different periods. Four historical phases are identified, with economists studying nineteenth-century deficits in family labour productivity in Britain and Europe, inadequacies in low-income family consumption in interwar America, underinvestment in human capital by a post-war ‘underclass’, and gendered injustices in resource distribution experienced by lone mothers, by women and girls in poor global South families, and by queer families. The book’s second goal is to show how family economists prioritised some social problems over others, allowing certain injustices to remain uncontested.

From the 1960s onwards, New Household economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker shifted focus onto the poverty-alleviating impacts of family investment in human capital. This move was informed, first, by increased cultural and political awareness of what Becker referred to as an impoverished ‘underclass’ (1964/1993); second, by the social movements, including civil rights challenges to racial discrimination in schools and labour markets; and third, by government debates during the War on Poverty about the causes of Black family instability. Becker explained family instability as a rational response to price changes in the goods – including children – that families wanted. Given a set of preferences for basic commodities, and facing a defined range of choices, families were conceptualised as maximising utility, subject to constraints of income and time. This permitted hypotheses about how wages and human capital investment affected the cost of children, with effects on family formation and dissolution, fertility, and care-provision by women. As for poverty-alleviation, Becker favoured low-interest education loans. He rejected progressive income taxation and family welfare for incentivising underinvestment in education. Compensatory education programmes would fail by being offset. These policy positions were described by Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda as a War on the Poor.

The story of Shelley’s life is inextricably linked with the stories of the women who influenced his work, and of the children for whom he was responsible. This chapter explores the ways in which this superficially least domestic of men produced a body of work shaped in fundamental ways by his relationships with the women and children in his family, as well as by those with a small number of other women who existed beyond its boundaries. It traces Shelley’s relationships with Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Teresa Viviani, and Jane Williams in and out of his biography and his poetry, arguing that although neither these women nor the children in their care could always live up to Shelley’s vision of ideal, uncircumscribed companionship, they were no less important to either his life or his art because of their complicated, flesh-and-blood reality.

The chapter discusses regulations and legal reform in medical law, in particular assisted reproductive technology (ART). A combination of Iranian state law, Shiʿi rulings, and national, medical, and clinical guidelines govern access to ART. In 2003, parliament enacted a law allowing the use of embryo donation for treating infertility in married couples. The law also implicitly recognized the permissibility of embryo-carrying and surrogacy arrangements. In comparative terms, this made Iran the most progressive country in the Muslim world regarding ART regulations and has resulted in the phenomenon of medical tourism. The chapter discusses the many ways in which Shiʿi Islamic legal rulings are mobilized to respond to medical and ethical concerns of different constituencies, illustrating the dynamism and adaptability of Shiʿi fiqh. Taking family as a legal concept, the chapter argues that Iranian family beliefs and values play a crucial role in shaping Iran’s permissive reproductive policy. Genealogical continuity and legal parenthood are central to these beliefs and values.

The introduction situates the old merchant homes of Gujarat between the Indian Ocean region and South Asia. Setting the stage for the rest of the book, the introduction demonstrates that havelis were embedded within British free-trade capitalism across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though havelis were framed as domestic and private sites outside of the colonial economy, they were linked to slavery and indentured labor, plantation agriculture, and the mass production of commodities. The rich and unsettled grounds of Gujarat’s havelis reveal that the dislocations of colonial capitalism impacted merchant communities’ sense of place and belonging. While Indian Ocean histories of capitalism have placed an inordinate emphasis on paper records, this book argues that old houses suggest that space was not the background of capital’s history but a primary site of its articulation. Drawing the spaces of homes into relation with a range of textual colonial and vernacular archives, this book challenges our static ideas of belonging and argues for reimagining Gujarat through Muslim and Parsi mercantile communities, their itineraries, and their histories.

A speech by Isaeus allows us to observe in detail a family chorus caught up in the turmoil of the Athenian civil war. It is at its heart that the heroine of this chapter, Hegeso, lived for most of her life. “Hegeso (daughter) of Proxenus”: her name is engraved on a beautiful funerary monument located in the Kerameikos Cemetery. A woman alone, whose portrait is on display in a public space, without any male presence: It’s a rare enough occurrence that we may be tempted to think this stele is an exceptional document testifying to a particular form of recognition not of womankind, but of an individualized woman. However, this would be wrong. For the very name of Hegeso can only be established through interaction with the other funerary monuments nearby, and this tends to erase the singularity of her presence by confining her to the role of the model wife. Above all, Hegeso finds herself at the crossroads of a family feud between two branches of the family of Proxenus, her father, caught up in the events of 404/3. Far from constituting a zone of withdrawal and intimacy, families were rife with political conflicts. The memorial of Hegeso nevertheless exhibits the harmony of the family sphere in the form of two half-choruses singing in tune: the regulated game of exchanges from which marriage proceeds, as well as the regulated gender divisions within it. Celebrating the fixity and the permanence of family lineage, this portrayal masks, or staves off, political turbulence by presenting the oikos as existing in an unchanging temporal space: that of its cyclic reproduction from one generation to the next.