In 1996, André Burguière and Francois Lebrun boldly claimed that the nuclear family never crossed the Oder. They did not explain the basis for this assertion, but it reflects much scholarly opinion concerning family structures in early modern eastern Europe. It is the kind of bold claim that is common in this age of global history, but Mikołaj Szołtysek quietly and effectively demolishes it in this important book, which challenges at every point views about the family in Eastern Europe that are embedded in scholarship on early modern demography.

In eastern Europe, so the standard accounts run, manorial serfdom and traditional inheritance practices based on kinship ensured that Slavic families lived in large, multi-generational households based on early marriage and a patriarchal system in which male household heads wielded considerable power over their extended families. The system contrasted starkly with a west European pattern based on the nuclear family, in which sons married late, and only when they had acquired the means to support themselves and their spouse. This structure, centered round the independent married couple, was linked to the more dynamic and progressive economic development of western Europe.

It is the kind of structural explanation for the development of the modern world that fits well into the sweeping vistas of global history. The problem, as Szołtysek demonstrates in fascinating detail, is that the idea of a uniform family structure from the Oder to the Urals and beyond rests on almost no evidence at all. Anglophone and west European historians have, since the nineteenth century, extrapolated boldly from isolated studies available in accessible languages—overwhelmingly on Russia—to paint a wholly misleading picture. Szołtyszek uses his impressive knowledge of the latest work on historical demography to shatter this myth of the uniform east European family. His findings are based on a highly sophisticated analysis of 26,654 Polish-Lithuanian peasant households from 989 villages, comprising 155,818 individuals. This evidence is drawn mostly from the censuses carried out by the Civil-Military Order Commission in 1790–1792, parish lists assembled by the Roman and Greek Catholic clergy, and the Russian “soul revisions” carried out after the partitions.

Szołtysek is well aware of the shortcomings of this data, which gives a horizontal snapshot, not a dynamic picture. He confronts them at every step, and devotes 126 pages in volume two to a comprehensive, rigorous, and honest analysis of the problems. He applies the latest computer-assisted techniques of historical demography—most notably modelling based on microsimulation—to his data to produce a radically different picture of the family in the last years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Focusing on ten micro-regions within three zones—western, central, and eastern—he convincingly demonstrates that family structures varied substantially across Poland-Lithuania, let alone across eastern Europe as a whole. Family structure in the western territories—mostly Poland proper—was, broadly speaking, similar to the west European pattern. The nuclear family flourished on this side of the Oder, ages of men and women on first marriage were similar to western Europe, and many young Poles spent periods as live-in servants outside the paternal household while they established their economic independence from their parental family. In the eastern Grand Duchy of Lithuania, household structures were closer to the patriarchal, multi-generational household previously seen as the east European archetype, but even here, they differed in many important respects from those found in the Russian Empire. The ten regions displayed intriguing variations in the various aspects of household structure analyzed by Szołtysek, with particularly interesting features apparent in Polesie and Right Bank Ukraine.

A short review cannot do justice to this outstanding book. It is not always an easy read, as it contains a considerable amount of highly technical statistical analysis, but it is well worth persevering. Some will wonder whether, given the complex problems of the source base, computer microsimulation can be relied upon to give anything like an accurate picture. Yet this book contains far more than econometric number-crunching. At every step Szołtysek calibrates his findings against qualitative research on the Commonwealth's rural economy by a new generation of researchers who are building impressively on the work of former greats like Jan Rutkowski and Witold Kula, and suggests reasons for the variations he finds. The book itself is a snapshot, but a compelling one. The author continues to refine his model and his programmes, providing an excellent framework within which new research can develop and test his findings. His book is a magnificent achievement, one of the best works on Poland-Lithuania published in the last decade.