Joseph Henrich

Charter towns are on the rise.

Universities pop up.

New kinds of monasteries pop up.

And then Europe begins to urbanize and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual contract law.

And then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the industrial revolution.

So that's the argument in a nutshell.

Yeah.

So the church outlaws polygyny.

And so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot and creating kind of a giant family through that.

It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth cousins at some point.

And that included spiritual kin and other kinds of sort of non-genetic relatives as well as the cousins.

It frees up inheritance, so it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal patrilineal inheritance.

A simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land.

It might be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father's brother.

And so you can't sell it.

You can't move it around.

And you're also tied to it.

It's where your ancestors are buried.

And so there's this big importance of land.

So the church allows people to give land to the church.