Joseph Henrich

The church becomes the largest landowner in Europe because you can do it by testament.

So those are just some of the examples of the ways it transforms the family structure, and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families, which are basically unheard of around the world, at least if you look at the anthropological record.

And you can really see this when you can compare.

Individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families.

In China, when you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village, and people flow back and forth, and you get these –

Little enclaves of different clans and stuff in the cities and the connections.

And this is really important because you're ancestors and there's rituals that have to be done back in the home community.

But Christianity does away with all those ancestor rituals.

Well, there are certainly some interesting things going on in Greece and Rome.

But I don't think there's good evidence that you had the kinds of monogamous nuclear families that you would find later.

I mean even European law is built around patrilineage.

So if your father is still alive, you are not a full citizen.

You are under – you're in the patra house.

So these large families.

Definitely intensive kinship for sure, patrilineal, patrilocal.

Women, of course, don't have any rights.

And, you know, republicanism, but the formation of Rome is built around a series of elite families.

So it's a clan operation.

And they call it republican because the clans all have some say in what's going on.

So people sometimes see representative government where it's not really individuals being representative, but families.