Familyhood

Introduction

In 1049 a Chinese official who had grown up fatherless and poor used his salary to buy about a thousand mu of land near Suzhou. He gave it to his clan as a common estate and wrote rules for how it would feed, marry, bury and school them. Fan Zhongyan’s estate lasted 901 years.

In 1810 a coin dealer of sixty-six lived in Frankfurt on the narrow street where the city confined its Jews, behind gates that for most of his life had been locked every night and on Christian holidays. As a Jew he was not a citizen of the city: the law still tied him to that street and barred him from owning land beyond it, and he had married under the quota of twelve Jewish weddings a year that the city allowed. He raised ten children in a house on that street. That year Mayer Amschel Rothschild signed a contract binding his sons in Frankfurt to act as one, under rules he wrote himself. He decided that his family would from then on be a house: a family with its own law, its own estate and a line meant to outlast him, things that in his world only princes and nobles had. He died two years later and left a will that set the law of the house. Twelve years after his decision, the princes who had once bought his coins were borrowing from his sons, and the Emperor of Austria made all five of them barons. Everything that followed began with that decision.

In 1961 the government of Egypt began nationalising the contracting firm Onsi Sawiris had founded nine years earlier. For five years he ran it as an employee of the state that had taken it, and he was not allowed to leave the country. In 1966 he left for Libya and started again. He came back in 1976, founded Orascom, and raised three sons who built it out into telecoms, tourism and industry across several countries, from Egypt to Switzerland and the Netherlands.

An official, a coin dealer and a dispossessed contractor, nine centuries apart, made the same decision: that their families would from then on be houses. A family, in the narrow sense of parents and their children, lasts one generation. A house is a family organised to outlive every member it has: it keeps a name, a law, an estate and a record, and each generation hands them to the next. Some houses were created by a state, which granted them a title or an office. Most of the others began with one person who decided to found one, on behalf of descendants he would never meet.

The oldest house on record was created by a state and kept by it. Confucius died in 479 BCE, and his descendants in the male line have held a title from the Chinese state since the Han dynasty. From 1055 it was Duke Yansheng, confirmed by five successive dynasties, and since 1935 it has been Ceremonial Official to Confucius, an office whose duty is to perform the founder’s rites. Its holder since 2009, Kung Tsui-chang, is of the 79th generation, and the family genealogy records about two million people. Houses of that kind, honoured and kept by states, still exist. The houses of Fan, Rothschild and Sawiris are of the other kind: each was made by one person within his lifetime. A house that depends on one state’s favour changes when that state does, and in the last century many states fell, seized property or rewrote their laws within a lifetime.

The houses that lasted had two things in common. They were organised, and their members shared one conviction, pride in what the family was and a duty about what it was there to do. The Kong heir performs his ancestor’s rites. The Rothschild arms of 1822 carry the motto Concordia, Integritas, Industria: unity, integrity, work. Scholarly families, Confucian and Jewish alike, held a pride of lineage that each generation renewed by learning. Money could pay for the organisation, but it could not make a house last, because each generation had to be taught the pride and the duty. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with the largest fortune in America, and within a century his descendants had spent it. History shows what kept past houses together, but not what will work in the next century, and a founder has to choose for descendants he will never meet.

Few people are born into a house. Whoever is born outside one depends on larger bodies for what a house would have given him: the state registers his children, courts divide his estate, an employer supplies his income and an institution cares for him when he is old. The companion essay, Peoplehood, traced the seven structures that have kept peoples themselves for thousands of years, and the same structures appear, at a smaller scale, in the houses that have lasted. Many peoples remember their beginning as a single family, as Israel remembers the sons of Jacob, even where, as A Genealogy of Identities argues for Israel, the family was drawn after the people had formed.

A House

Everyone has a family of parents and children. A house, as defined above, keeps a name, a head, a common estate and its own rules, and admits members by birth, marriage and adoption under those rules. For its own members it records, recognises, arbitrates and defends. For the same services between houses it needs larger bodies, which houses form with one another or live under. A congregation, a merchant league and a state are such bodies, here called protectorates.

Members are born into a house, as they are into a people, and like a state it binds them by rules that someone wrote. A house differs from a company because no one chooses his birth. A company is a voluntary association, and its claim on its members extends as far as their consent. A house binds people who never agreed to it, which is why it can ask what no company can: sacrifice for descendants its members will never meet, and care for members who can give nothing back. Where a state takes these duties over, the family loses them. Sparta took even the decision whether a newborn would live: according to Plutarch, a father carried the child to the elders of the tribe, who inspected it and sent the weak to be exposed.

A member of a house gives up choices that other people make freely. He accepts obligations to kin he did not pick, a head he did not elect, limits on whom he marries and where he works, and a share in an estate he may not take out. Houses have imposed each of these limits. The Mitsui house code of 1722 regulated what each branch family spent. Mayer Amschel’s daughters had no share in the business. In return a member receives what no one could buy alone: capital that outlives him, protection when he fails, a place for his children and care when he is old. Members accept the trade because they are proud of the house. A house that lasts also serves people outside it, and long-lived houses have paid for housing for the poor, hospitals, research and public buildings.

Ordinary families kept houses too. The Basque farmhouse, the etxe, carried a name that served its family as a surname and passed undivided to a single chosen heir. In Catalonia the hereu, or failing a son the pubilla, inherited the whole rural estate. Japanese merchants and farmers kept houses (ie) with main and branch lines, a retired head provided for by the house, and noren-wake, under which a trusted employee opened a branch under the house’s name. When states abolished these arrangements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most of the houses that ended belonged to ordinary people.

Why the line runs through one gender

Early on, a founder decides whether his line will run through the father or the mother. In most houses the line runs through the father, and where the estate was wealth that sons could use to marry and multiply, such as cattle, it moved to the father’s side. Holden and Mace (2003) traced sixty-eight Bantu- and Bantoid-speaking populations, and their results supported the hypothesis that “acquiring cattle led formerly matrilineal Bantu-speaking cultures to change to patrilineal or mixed descent.” David Aberle (1961) had put it in a phrase: “the cow is the enemy of matriliny.” Where land passed through women, as among the Minangkabau of Sumatra, the line ran through the mother, the young men left to trade, and authority usually passed to the mother’s brother.

A line through men can also grow faster. A woman can have only as many children as pregnancy and nursing allow, while a man is limited only by his number of partners. Abdulaziz Al Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, fathered forty-five sons, six of whom became king. A single male lineage traced to Genghis Khan is carried by about half a percent of men alive today (Zerjal et al., 2003). The male line is also fragile, since one generation without a son ends it. In 1873 Francis Galton asked why aristocratic surnames kept dying out, and the mathematics he and Henry Watson built to answer it in 1875 became the study of branching processes.

Several things tied the line to men, and most of them have gone. One was the risk of childbirth: in Sweden and Finland in 1800 it killed about one mother in every hundred births, and today it rarely kills. Another was force. Capital is now held in banks and registers more than in land, and the state that keeps those registers also keeps the peace around them; where its reach is thin, a house hires guards and no longer raises an army. When a daughter runs the family’s business, the line can pass through her: the designated heir of Hōshi Ryokan, founded in 718, is a daughter, and the Antinori wine house, founded in 1385, is led by three sisters. Jewish law has long split descent between the parents, passing membership through the mother and tribe and priesthood through the father. Houses led by women across many generations are still rare in the record. More often a widow or a daughter ran a house until it could pass to a man again, as Gracia Mendes Nasi, a banker’s widow, did for the Mendes house in the sixteenth century.

Whichever parent a house traces its line through, it has to keep to that choice in every generation. A line is a claim that a group descends from one founder, and the claim binds only while no member can contest it. The line is most exposed when a woman heads a house that runs through fathers, because the man she marries brings a line of his own. When Maria Theresa married Francis Stephen of Lorraine, the house became Habsburg-Lorraine, and its male line since has been Lorraine’s. When Isabel of Brazil married Gaston d’Orléans, the imperial line passed to the Orléans-Braganza, Orléans in the male line. In Japan a son-in-law who takes his wife’s family name, the mukoyōshi, kept the line inside her house.

The Oldest Houses

The longest-documented houses can be grouped by what each held. Each date is the earliest the record supports. The record favours survivors: many houses as well organised left no documents, and the only failures anyone can list are those that did.

Some of these houses held an office granted by a state, such as a throne, a regency, a sharifate or a title, and ended or changed when that state did. Others held something of their own, such as a bank, an inn, a craft or a vineyard, and lasted as long as the family kept its business, rules and records together. A few of those have outlived every state they traded in.

Status lasts longer than the proverb “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” allows. Gregory Clark, tracing rare surnames across several countries, estimated that an elite surname takes ten to fifteen generations, three to four and a half centuries, to fall back to the average (The Son Also Rises, 2014). Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti matched the taxpayers of Florence in 1427 with those of 2011 by surname and found that the descendants of the richest still earned somewhat more, and held more property, six centuries later. The figure most often quoted to families, that seventy percent of wealth transitions fail, has a weaker basis. James Grubman traced it to John Ward’s 1987 study of about two hundred Illinois manufacturing firms and found no other published evidence behind it.

Founding a House

Most of the oldest houses that held a business or an estate of their own began the way those three did, with one person’s decision. The founder named the line, wrote its law, placed his sons, set aside an estate no single heir could spend, and gave the next generation a reason to keep all of it. Few of them began rich.

Fan Zhongyan lost his father as an infant and studied in poverty, living, the story goes, on cold millet porridge cut into portions for the day. He rose by examination to high office in the Song dynasty and never had a business. His estate paid rice rations to every member, cloth for winter clothes, a sum for each daughter’s wedding and each funeral, a subsidy for those sitting the civil-service examinations, and a clan school. It could not buy land from clansmen or lease its land to them. It held about 5,300 mu by the end of the Qing and lasted until the land reform of 1950. Lineages across China copied it.

Mayer Amschel’s house took its name from a sign: the red shield that hung on a house his ancestors had lived in on the Judengasse. Of his sons, Nathan had gone to England in 1798; James went to Paris in 1811, Salomon to Vienna and Carl to Naples in 1820–21, and Amschel stayed in Frankfurt. The brothers wrote to one another in German set in Hebrew characters, a script few outsiders could read, and the family archive holds more than twenty thousand of their letters from 1811 to 1868.

When the men of the Mendes house died, Gracia Mendes Nasi kept it going. Born in Lisbon in 1510 to a family of converted Jews, she married the banker Francisco Mendes, who died in 1535. She joined his brother Diogo in Antwerp, and when Diogo died in 1542 he left her control of the Mendes trading house. Under pressure from the emperor’s officials, who tried to force her daughter into a Catholic marriage, she moved the house and its capital to Venice in 1544, to Ferrara in 1549, where she could live openly as a Jew, and to Constantinople in 1553. From each city she ran a network that carried hundreds of conversos, Jews forced into Christianity and their descendants, out of Spain and Portugal. Soon after she reached Constantinople she married her daughter to her own nephew, Joseph Nasi, who had worked beside her in the business, and the house passed back to the men of the family.

In Japan the Mitsui family built a house the way Mayer Amschel did. Mitsui Takatoshi opened a cloth shop in Edo in 1673 and built the house through his sons. In 1710 the family placed all its shops and businesses under one central office, the Ōmotokata, as common property. In 1722 his eldest son Takahira wrote the house code, the Sōchiku Isho: the families were to hold their businesses and assets as one, under one head, with a reserve kept in a vault and limits on lending to feudal lords. Eleven families, six descended from sons and five from daughters’ lines, carried the house through the fall of the shogunate, the Meiji state and the dissolution of the zaibatsu in 1946.

In West Africa, Alhassan Dantata began as a trader in kola nuts in Kano, and from 1918 he bought groundnuts for a British firm, the Niger Company, through a network of agents. He was widely described as the richest man in West Africa when he died in 1955. His sons built companies under the family name, among them Alhassan Dantata & Sons, which continues, and his great-grandson through his mother’s line is Aliko Dangote, founder of the Dangote Group.

Other heads of houses built their power through marriage. Maximilian I of Habsburg married Mary of Burgundy in 1477, married his son Philip to Joanna of Castile in 1496 and his daughter Margaret to the heir of Spain in 1497, and in 1515 arranged the double wedding in Vienna through which his grandson Ferdinand later took Bohemia and Hungary. Abdulaziz Al Saud did the same with the tribes of Arabia: many of his twenty-two consorts came from clans he needed as allies.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. made a fortune and then used it to turn his family into a house. He set up trusts for his wife and children in 1926 and 1936 and for his grandchildren in 1949, and raised his sons for public office. John D. Rockefeller Jr. did the same with a fortune he had inherited. In 1934 he placed most of it in trusts for his children; the family office on the fifty-sixth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza served the family from 1933 to 2015; and in 1940 his five sons founded the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Cornelius Vanderbilt left about $105 million in 1877, about ninety-five percent of it to one son, and left his descendants no house law, no common estate and no shared task. According to Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, when about 120 of his descendants met at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for their first reunion, none of them was a millionaire.

The first assets of a house cost time more than money: a written record of the family’s births, marriages and deaths; a name given to each child with its story; a family meal on a fixed day; the education of the children in the family’s history and rules; and a common fund, however small, that no single member may spend. Fan Zhongyan’s estate began with one official’s salary. The meal and the record have old models. At Qingming, Chinese families clean their ancestors’ graves and eat together beside them; a Jewish family gathers for prayer on the anniversary of a death. Chinese lineages held that a genealogy should be revised lightly every thirty years and fully every sixty, and each revision required every branch to report to the whole. Richer houses later added a family seat, a foundation or an annual assembly, which served the same purpose with more money.

Pillar 1: Name and Arc

The first thing a founder gives his house is a name and a story: where it came from, and what it holds for those not yet born. The other nine pillars exist to keep these two alive, so that a descendant generations away can still say which house he belongs to and what it is for.

The name tells everyone who carries it that they descend from one founder. The Kong name is Confucius’s own, and every holder of the title has been able to recite the line back to him. The story tells members what the name stands for. When the Rothschild brothers were made barons in 1822, their arms carried five arrows bound together, one for each of the five brothers, who by then had settled in five cities. According to the family archive, the bundle told the brothers that their strength as a family lay in their unity.

The story has the shape described in Peoplehood: a fixed origin in the founder, an open middle in which each generation’s trials take their place, and an unfinished project the living hold for the unborn.

Pillar 2: Principles and Symbols

Then the founder writes the house’s law. A house belongs to larger bodies, a people, a faith, one or more states, and most of the law it lives under comes from them. It becomes a house by writing part of that law itself: who belongs, who inherits, who decides, and which allegiance comes first when two conflict.

Mayer Amschel’s will of 1812 is the clearest example that survives: “I will and ordain that my daughters and sons-in-law and their heirs have no share in the trading business existing under the firm of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Sons … and [that it] belong to my sons exclusively.” That one sentence decided who belonged to the business, who inherited it and where it ended, and his sons applied it in all five countries where they had banks.

The most important symbol is the family’s written genealogy, the book of the house. The Kong genealogy has been revised several times, and its 1937 edition listed about 560,000 people and its 2009 edition about two million. The Andong Kwon genealogy, printed in Korea in 1476 and the oldest surviving there, lists about nine thousand people, of whom only a few hundred bear the Kwon name, because it followed daughters’ lines as well as sons’. A house that keeps its own genealogy does not depend on a state or a church to prove who its members are. Children’s names, a crest, the family meal and the objects set out at every gathering remind members of the family’s rules in daily life.

A documented genealogy can also give members rights in other countries. Several states grant citizenship to the descendants of their emigrants, so a family that can document its line may hold a second protectorate by right of birth. The terms change: Italy, which had recognised descent without limit of generations, restricted it in March 2025 to those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy.

This pillar fails when the house law leaves a question open. In 1908 Pedro de Alcântara, eldest son of Isabel of Brazil, renounced his rights in order to marry a Bohemian countess his mother judged unequal. He renounced for himself and his descendants. Whether a renunciation can bind descendants was a question the house law had never settled, and the Brazilian imperial family has had two rival branches ever since.

Pillar 3: Protectorates

No founder can protect his house alone. A house cannot enforce a contract with a stranger, validate a marriage beyond its own walls, or settle a dispute with an equal. For these it needs a larger body, formed with other families or set over them, that all of them accept. Such a body may be a state, which is bound to a territory, or a network without one, such as a congregation, a merchant assembly or a court of arbitration.

The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam built such a body in 1639, when three congregations merged under a single governing board. Its founding rules gave it “authority and superiority over everything,” enforced by excommunication. No member could marry without its consent or sue another member in the city’s courts without its permission, disputes went to its arbitration, and no book could be printed in Hebrew or in Ladino, the community’s Spanish, without its consent. The same community ran poor relief and buried its dead, and its society for dowries, founded in 1615, married off poor and orphaned girls. For the Sephardic families trading from Amsterdam to Livorno and Recife, that board and its sister congregations made their marriages valid and settled their disputes with one another, whichever state they lived under; for contracts with strangers they used the notaries and courts of each state they traded in.

Two men expelled by that community show why a house needs more than one protector. Uriel da Costa was banned by the rabbis of Venice in 1618 and by Amsterdam in 1623, and kept seeking readmission to the only community he had. In 1640, after a public penance of thirty-nine lashes, he killed himself. Baruch Spinoza was expelled by the same congregation in 1656. He found another community among the Collegiants, a circle of Dutch dissenting Protestants, and his friends, and lived for twenty more years in Rijnsburg, Voorburg and The Hague under a Dutch Republic that tolerated him, though it jailed his friend Adriaan Koerbagh and banned the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which Spinoza had published anonymously in 1670.

Most of the long-lived houses stood under several protectors at once, states and communities both, so that when one state failed them the others remained. The Kong house is the exception. It depended on one state at a time: its title came from whichever state ruled China. It passed through the Song, Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing, three of them foreign conquests, and changed in 1935 when the Republic did away with titles. The genealogy it kept for itself carried the house through.

For about three centuries many states protected the houses that served them. Castile let a family bind its estate to a single heir through the mayorazgo, regulated by the Laws of Toro in 1505. The Italian and German lands used the fideicommissum, a trust that tied an estate to the family line, and English landowners developed the strict settlement in the seventeenth century. The terms were loyalty in exchange for permanence. After 1789 states withdrew them one after another. Revolutionary France abolished entails in 1792. Spain abolished the mayorazgo in 1820 and, after a reversal, for good in 1841. Italy’s civil code of 1865 prohibited the fideicommissum, and Germany’s constitution of 1919 ordered the remaining ones dissolved. England kept its settlements longest, until laws of 1882 and 1925 let the holder sell the land. Houses that had relied on one state’s protection lost it.

Houses that had never had such protection, such as the Protestant bankers exiled from France and the Sephardic merchants, had long stood in several states at once, and after the revolutions every house was in their position. The Rothschild partnership of 1810 was formed in the middle of that change. In the twentieth century the Sawiris family learned the same lesson: after Egypt took its firm, it rebuilt in several states at once.

States as protectorates

Since the civil codes of the nineteenth century, the state has been the protectorate a house meets most often. States answer to the living, through a reign or an electoral term, and their horizon is shorter than a house’s for that reason. Within a single lifetime a state can rewrite its succession law, its taxes and its courts, or decide that a common estate held for the unborn is no longer lawful, as the states that abolished entail did after 1789. Houses have answered by moving, as the Protestant bankers and the Sephardic merchants did in the seventeenth century and the Sawiris family did after 1961, and the houses that stood in several states could move without starting again.

Disputes within the house

A modern house is most likely to face a dispute among its own members, and what that costs depends on where it is heard. Rupert Murdoch’s family trust gave his four eldest children equal votes after his death. In 2023 he asked a probate court in Reno, Nevada, to amend it in favour of his son Lachlan. In December 2024 the probate commissioner found that the two had acted in bad faith and called the plan a “carefully crafted charade.” The ruling was sealed, and the New York Times obtained and reported it. The dispute ended in September 2025 with a settlement of $3.3 billion, under which three of the children left the trust.

The Agnelli estate became a contest between jurisdictions. In 2004, in Geneva, Margherita Agnelli accepted about €1.2 billion and renounced any claim on her mother’s estate. Her mother, Marella, died in 2019 and left her estate to Margherita’s three children by her first marriage, John, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann. Whether the renunciation holds depends on where Marella lived. Swiss law upholds it; Italian law forbids contracts over the estate of a living person and reserves a share of every estate for children, so it may not. Cases have run in parallel in Geneva and Turin. Margherita’s complaint led Italian prosecutors to a tax investigation, and in 2025 the three Elkanns paid €183 million to the Italian tax authority.

Some families settled their disputes privately. When Mukesh and Anil Ambani could no longer run Reliance together, their mother, Kokilaben, divided the group between them in June 2005, and the division was made within the family, though a dispute over its terms later reached India’s Supreme Court. When LVMH disclosed a large stake in Hermès in 2010, every family shareholder except Nicolas Puech pooled their shares in a holding company, H51, formed in 2011, which locks just over half the capital for twenty years. Religious communities kept courts of their own: Jewish communities sent disputes between members to a rabbinic court instead of the courts of the state, and courts today enforce its awards as arbitration. The Hanseatic merchants in London, Bruges and Bergen took their disputes to the aldermen of their own trading post, the Kontor, instead of to local courts.

A family’s own forum holds only where courts recognise it. States that reserve fixed shares of every estate for children can set aside a trust made abroad, and the Agnelli estate shows two states claiming one succession. A house under a single state has one court above it. One that stands in several has more than one forum, and that is what lets its own arbitration hold.

Pillar 4: Economic Sources

A house lives on its income, which pays for marriages, the upbringing of children and care for the weak. The houses that lasted differed from the short-lived ones in what kind of income they had, how many sources, and where those sources lay.

A cut of the state’s revenue lasted as long as the state did and could end in an afternoon. The farmers-general of France collected the king’s taxes for profit and were among the richest families of the eighteenth century. On 8 May 1794 twenty-eight of them were guillotined in a single afternoon, the chemist Lavoisier among them.

Salaries have founded houses as well as trade. The Kong line lived by serving successive states, Chinese scholar-official lineages joined office to lineage estates such as Fan Zhongyan’s, and each samurai family of Tokugawa Japan drew a stipend from its lord according to its rank. A modern salary ends with the person who earns it, so a salaried house is founded on what it sets aside and on the education it gives its children.

A single source of income can last a very long time and then fail all at once. Kongō Gumi, the longest-lived company on record, built Buddhist temples from 578 under forty heads in succession. In the 1980s it borrowed heavily to invest in property, and when the bubble burst and temple commissions fell it could not carry the debt; in 2006 it was absorbed by a construction company. Its one attempt at a second source of income was made with borrowed money. The Rothschilds added wine to banking: Nathaniel bought the estate that became Mouton Rothschild in 1853, and James bought Lafite in 1868.

Houses that traded across several jurisdictions could lose one market and keep the rest. A craft house lasts as long as its market, and some markets, such as temples, inns and wine, have lasted a thousand years. The Sephardic merchant houses of the seventeenth century traded across the Dutch, English, Portuguese and Ottoman worlds at once, with no single territory to lose.

After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Protestant banking families of French and Swiss origin such as the Mallet, Delessert, Thellusson, Necker and Hottinguer worked across Geneva and Vaud, Paris, London and Amsterdam, a network the historian Herbert Lüthy called the Protestant bank. Isaac Mallet opened his bank in Paris in 1713, and it continued under the family’s name until a merger in 1966. Banque Hottinguer, founded in Paris by a banker from Zurich (in 1786, by the bank’s own date), is controlled by the family after seven generations. British merchant houses spread into Asia: John Swire’s firm, founded in Liverpool in 1816, opened in Shanghai in 1866 and is still private, led by the sixth generation.

Land is the least movable source. A house can own it but cannot carry it anywhere: it is registered, taxed and, when a state so decides, redistributed by the state in which it lies. In 1945 the Soviet occupation authorities expropriated every estate larger than a hundred hectares in eastern Germany, ending the Junker houses east of the Elbe. Mexico’s constitution of 1917 opened the great haciendas to redistribution. Fan Zhongyan’s estate ended the same way, in 1950. After such a reform, a landed family kept only what it held outside its land and outside that country.

Many houses let one member earn so that another could study. Chinese lineage estates paid examination subsidies to the clan’s candidates for the civil service, and Fan Zhongyan’s estate ran a school for the purpose. Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator on the Hebrew Bible, describes the same pact between the tribes of Zebulun and Issachar: Zebulun “would dwell at the seashore and go out in ships, to trade and make profit,” and provided for Issachar, who studied.

Pillar 5: Marriage and Alliance

Whom a founder’s children marry decides what his grandchildren inherit. Marriage brings members into the house and binds it to other houses; it also secures paternity, without which a line through fathers cannot be verified. Long-lived houses controlled whom their members married, and they married their daughters to make allies.

Some houses married outward. The Habsburgs did, and a motto later attached to them says so: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube, “let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry.” The phrase is first recorded in the seventeenth century, and the policy is older. When the male line ended with Charles VI in 1740, the house continued through his daughter Maria Theresa.

The Medici, bankers from Florence, did the same through the Church and the crowns. Two sons of the house became pope, Leo X in 1513 and Clement VII in 1523, and two daughters became queens of France: Catherine, married in 1533 to the future Henry II, and Marie, married in 1600 to Henry IV.

Other houses married inward, keeping the estate and the alliances within the kin. In some regions this is the norm: consanguineous marriage accounts for between a fifth and a half of all marriages in Arab societies, and a national survey in Saudi Arabia in 1995 put it at 57.7 percent.

Pillar 6: Generation and Affiliation

A founder can do everything else right and still see his house end for want of heirs. Members enter a house in two ways. Generation is birth within a marriage the house recognises. Affiliation is entry by adoption, sponsorship or marriage. A son born to the house can leave it or be set aside, and an adopted son can lead it. Each gate had its own rules, and the rules decided how large a pool of heirs the house could draw on.

The size of that pool depended on where a founder lived. Civilisations differed widely on this, and the difference shows in where old houses are found.

Japan widened the pool by adoption. It registers more than 80,000 adoptions a year, and most of those adopted are adults. The mukoyōshi marries the daughter, takes the house name and leads. Osamu Suzuki, born Matsuda, married the founder’s granddaughter and was the fourth adopted son to run Suzuki Motor. Mehrotra, Morck, Shim and Wiwattanakantang (2013) found that Japanese family firms run by adopted heirs outperform those run by blood heirs and roughly match those still run by their founders. Keiunkan, the oldest inn in the world, was run by fifty-two generations “including adopted heirs.” Japan holds about two-thirds of the world’s companies older than two hundred years (Nikkei BP, 2020).

Islamic law gave a house a wide pool. A man could marry up to four wives (Qur’an 4:3), and historically the children of concubines were also free and legitimate heirs. Most Ottoman sultans were born to concubines. The Ottoman line ran unbroken through the male descendants of Osman from about 1299 to 1922.

Ashkenazi Judaism narrowed the pool to monogamy without adoption. Around the year 1000 a ruling attributed to Rabbenu Gershom banned polygyny for the Jews of the German and French lands, while Jews in Islamic lands could still take a second wife. Jewish law has never had an adoption that transfers lineage: a convert joins the people as a child of Abraham, but tribe and priesthood follow birth. It honours the one who raises another’s child as if he had fathered him, without changing the child’s line. The Jewish people have lasted longer than almost any other, yet between expulsions, bars on owning land and the conversions of the nineteenth century, few of its merchant families lasted as houses. Its longest-lived houses are scholarly: rabbinic lines such as the Soloveitchiks, and the Hasidic dynasties, have kept name, learning and headship for two centuries and more. Their purpose was religious study, and commerce paid for it: a wealthy merchant supported his scholar son-in-law for years and married his daughters into learned lines, so that merchant wealth flowed into scholarly houses and the merchant’s own line dissolved into them.

The Western Church closed the pool. It forbade polygyny, gave adoption little place in canon law, and widened its ban on marrying kin step by step until, by the eleventh century, it reached sixth cousins and in-laws. Jack Goody (1983) argued that these rules closed the strategies by which families found heirs, and that the Church became heir to the property instead. Schulz, Bahrami-Rad, Beauchamp and Henrich (2019) measured the effect on kinship: each additional five hundred years under the Western Church is associated with a 91 percent decline in cousin marriage, and with weaker extended kinship in the ethnographic record. England had no legal adoption until 1926. The French Civil Code of 1804 allowed only adults to be adopted, by adopters over fifty with no children of their own.

Rome used adoption to pass on the throne. Roman law allowed a man to adopt an heir, even an adult. In 4 CE Augustus adopted his stepson Tiberius on condition that Tiberius adopt Germanicus, Augustus’s great-nephew by blood, and the throne later passed to Germanicus’s son Caligula. The emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (96–180) each adopted his successor, and the chain ended when Marcus Aurelius left the empire to his own son, Commodus.

The pool can also be cut from outside. In 1947 eleven collateral branches of the Japanese imperial family, fifty-one people, left the imperial house, and Taishō, who reigned until 1926, was the last emperor born to a concubine. The succession now rests on a single young man of the next generation.

Across these civilisations houses kept four kinds of line: through the father, through the mother, through both, and by name and oath. Each proves membership by a different test and has its own weakness.

Adoption by name and oath kept the character of a house only when the adoptee had been living as part of the family before anyone made it formal. A child raised at the house’s table, or a companion who joined it out of attachment, as Ruth joined Naomi, was adopted into a bond that already existed, and the oath recorded it. Ruth’s oath, “your people shall be my people, and your God my God,” followed years of shared life, and she became the great-grandmother of David. Where the adoptee was chosen for his usefulness, the bond began as a bargain, and a house that recruited its heirs that way became more like a business partnership, whose members stay while it pays them. The Japanese merchant houses that adopted capable men succeeded as businesses and became less like families.

Houses with a wide pool of heirs outlasted houses with a narrow one, and every way of widening the pool was tried. The houses that lasted longest kept a blood line, mostly through fathers, and used adoption and marriage to fill its gaps: the adoptee took the name, married the daughter or served the heirs of blood, and in the next generation the founder’s blood returned to the headship. Even systems built against inheritance drifted back to it. The Mamluks, a regime of purchased soldiers who were not meant to found dynasties, were ruled for more than a century by the descendants of one of them, Qalawun.

Plural marriage and concubinage belong largely to history. Both depended on women who relied on a household for their living and protection, and that dependence has largely ended.

Pillar 7: Formation

A founder’s work lasts only if his grandchildren want to continue it and are able to. Formation is how a house raises such members: from childhood it teaches them its law, its story and its craft, alongside whatever schooling the society around it provides.

The Zildjian family has made cymbals since 1623, first in Constantinople and since 1929 in Massachusetts. In interviews its members describe practices rather than a written charter. Family members earn a degree and work elsewhere before joining, no family member reports directly to another, spouses have not worked in the business, and the present heirs were told the alloy formula only in their mid-thirties. The Wallenberg family, in its fifth generation, runs a formal programme for about thirty members of the sixth. Amish fathers prosecuted by Wisconsin over their children’s schooling after the eighth grade won at the Supreme Court in 1972, defended by outsiders, since the Amish do not go to law.

Keiunkan shows what happens when formation fails. It was the oldest continuously operating hotel in the world, run by the same family since 705. In 2017 no member of the family wished to continue, and the inn passed to its general manager. The building, the springs and the guests remained.

Every house produces members who refuse it, and the houses that lasted planned for them. Some gave the dissenter a place in their rituals. The Passover script gives a part to a son who asks “what is this rite to you?”, setting himself outside it, and gives the father an answer to say to him every year. The Torah’s law of the stubborn and rebellious son was read by the rabbis so narrowly that, in one view, it was never applied. Roman law gave a father power of life and death over his sons; it was seldom used, Constantine had a father who killed his son punished as a parricide, and by 365 fathers were allowed only moderate correction. The Amish let their young leave for a season, rumspringa, and about 85 percent are baptised into the church, so that the house they stay in is one they have chosen. That is the test The Cult and the Agency sets for any group, whether membership leaves a person more able to leave or less.

Pillar 8: Stewardship

Once a house holds more than one generation can spend, someone has to manage it. Stewardship covers four tasks: keeping the common estate, assigning members to roles, caring for those who will not lead, and overseeing the managers the house hires.

The houses that outlived their founders by centuries held their capital undivided, beyond the reach of partition among heirs. The modern form is the foundation. The Carlsberg Foundation, set up by J.C. Jacobsen in 1876, calls itself the first enterprise foundation in the world, and it holds about three-quarters of the votes in Carlsberg. The Tata trusts own about two-thirds of Tata Sons. The three largest of the sixteen Wallenberg foundations hold half the votes of Investor AB, through which the family’s industrial holdings are controlled. A foundation cannot be divided among heirs and does not die.

Families without a foundation have built the same thing by contract. Merck, a pharmacy in Darmstadt bought by Friedrich Jacob Merck in 1668, is 70 percent owned by the family partnership E. Merck KG, whose shares pass only within the family. The Association Familiale Mulliez, founded in 1955 by the descendants of one couple in northern France, holds the family’s companies, among them Auchan, Decathlon and Leroy Merlin, under the rule tous dans tout: every family shareholder holds a stake in every company.

A house also assigns its members to different callings: the heir, the managers, the scholars, those who serve the faith, those who are provided for. Japanese merchant houses placed younger sons in branch houses (bunke) in related trades, beside the main house (honke). The French crown gave younger royal sons an apanage, a portion of royal land that returned to the crown when their line died out. In the houses that lasted, the headship of the house and the running of its enterprises were often held by different people. The Wallenberg foundations hold control while the companies are run by their managers: the family holds the house, and hired managers run the companies.

Research on family firms measures the same division. Belén Villalonga and Raphael Amit (2006) found that among Fortune 500 firms, family ownership added value when the founder was chief executive, or chairman with a hired chief executive, and destroyed value when descendants ran the firm. Danish data show the cost: Morten Bennedsen and his co-authors (2007) found that handing the chief executive’s post to a family member cut operating profitability by at least four percentage points. Francisco Pérez-González (2006) found the loss concentrated among family heirs who had not attended a selective college.

A house also provides for members who cannot or do not lead: the young, the ill, the elderly, the heirs set aside, and those not yet born. Some houses carried that care beyond their own members. In 1521 Jakob Fugger signed the deed of the Fuggerei in Augsburg, housing for the Catholic poor of the city. Its rent is still one Rhenish guilder a year, now €0.88, together with three daily prayers for the founders. Bombs destroyed more than half of it in 1944, and it was rebuilt; five centuries after the deed, it is still inhabited.

Every house that grew past what its members could run hired stewards. A hired manager answers only to the head of the house. He brings skill the family may lack, and he also has the chance to take control or to lose what the family owns. The Merovingian kings left the government of the Franks to their mayors of the palace, and in 751 the mayor Pepin the Short deposed the last of them and took the crown. In Japan the Fujiwara regents, and after them the shoguns, governed in the emperor’s name for most of a millennium. Barings, a London bank founded in 1762 by a family of Bremen origin, collapsed in 1995 after one trader in Singapore lost £827 million that the bank had failed to supervise; it was sold to ING for one pound.

Pillar 9: Authority and Succession

Every founder dies, and his house meets its first test at his death. It must pass its headship on at every death that follows, and most of the houses that ended did so at a succession. Houses have used five methods of succession, and each has a known result.

The first is division, in which the estate is split among the sons. In 843, at Verdun, the grandsons of Charlemagne divided his empire by the Frankish custom of equal inheritance, and it was reunited only once, briefly, under Charles the Fat from 884 to 887.

Under primogeniture the eldest son takes everything. The estate stays whole and the pool shrinks to one person, who may be unfit. The Torah gives the firstborn only a double portion, and, as Peoplehood recounts, its stories set the firstborn aside in generation after generation.

Under seniority the headship passes among brothers before it passes to sons, so the head is always an adult. Six sons of Abdulaziz Al Saud have reigned in turn since 1953. From 1617 the Ottoman throne passed to the eldest male of the dynasty, often the late sultan’s brother, and the princes were kept confined in the palace until their turn, so the killing of brothers faded. Many historians blame the weak sultans of the next century on that system, because princes reached the throne with no experience of governing.

In election within the line, a body of the house chooses among eligible kin. In 1964 the senior princes, the ulama and the cabinet deposed King Saud in favour of his brother Faisal, and since 2007 an Allegiance Council of the founder’s line votes on the crown prince. Venice, from 1268, elected its doge through alternating rounds of lot and vote with no more than one member of any family on each committee, and no family captured the office until the Republic ended in 1797.

The last method is open contest. Among the Turks and Mongols the heir was not fixed, and the ablest son won, by force. The historian Joseph Fletcher called it “bloody tanistry”, succession by the strongest kinsman. It produced strong rulers and split the Mongol empire. One rule held throughout: for centuries after Genghis Khan, only his male-line descendants could be khan. The Ottomans let the sons compete and still kept one ruler, through Mehmed II’s law permitting a new sultan to kill his brothers.

The Qing emperors found a way to keep the contest without the killing. After a violent struggle among the sons of the Kangxi Emperor, the Yongzheng Emperor (reigned 1722–1735) wrote his heir’s name twice, sealed one copy in a box behind a plaque in the Palace of Heavenly Purity and kept the other on his person, and the two were compared only at his death. Every prince competed through conduct and merit for years, and no one could know the result in time to act against it.

The houses that lasted combined three things: competition within one line, a headship that passed whole to the winner, and provision for those who lost. They also needed a plan for a child heir. When the heir was a minor, an uncle or a council governed until he came of age. Philippe d’Orléans ruled France for the young Louis XV. The danger is a regent who takes the throne for himself, as Richard III did.

Pillar 10: Telos

Last, a founder gives his house something to serve, its telos, from the Greek word for an end or aim. The long-lived houses served it in four circles, from the nearest to the widest. The first is the house’s own continuity. The second is the other families around it: the families it marries into, trades with and arbitrates beside. The third is its people. The fourth is the protectorates that shelter it.

Several of the longest-lived modern houses gave their estate to a foundation that serves their purpose. The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, founded in 1917 to support Swedish science, is the largest of the foundations through which the family holds control. The Carlsberg Foundation funds research and art from the brewery it owns, and the Tata trusts fund hospitals and institutes from Tata Sons.

The telos that held was one that could never be completed. Science, a people, the needy of a city and the rites of a sage can always be served further. Peoplehood made the same argument about peoples: a people held together by waiting for redemption stays together only while it still waits. The telos gives a house its reason to keep its name, and gives its members a duty to those not yet born.

How Houses Were Removed

States weakened houses by abolishing, one at a time, the legal tools houses relied on: the large household, adoption, cousin marriage, the undivided estate, the legal household itself and the private genealogy. Each state did it for its own ends: faith, peace, equality or revenue.

In the fourth century BCE the state of Qin, under Shang Yang, doubled the tax on any household in which two or more adult sons lived together, to break clans into nuclear households. Members of the ruling clan without military merit were struck from the clan register.

The early Tokugawa shogunate forbade daimyo to adopt an heir on their deathbed, and a domain whose lord died without an heir was confiscated. Many daimyo houses became extinct this way before the rule was relaxed in 1651. In Europe the Church’s bans on cousin marriage and polygyny, and the small place it gave adoption, had closed the same strategies centuries earlier.

Revolutionary France abolished primogeniture in 1790 and entails in 1792, and the Civil Code of 1804 required estates to be shared among children. On 5 June 1806 Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph, newly king of Naples: “Establish the Civil Code in Naples; everything not attached to you will fall apart within a few years, and what you wish to keep will be consolidated.” He meant that equal inheritance would break up the estates of families not bound to the new king. Britain introduced a graduated estate duty in 1894, and by a contemporary estimate, repeated by the historians F. M. L. Thompson and David Cannadine, about a quarter of the land of England changed hands in the years after the First World War. Japan’s Civil Code of 1947, in force from 1948, abolished the ie, the legal household with its head and its inheritance by the eldest son.

From the Statute of Toledo in 1449, and widely in the sixteenth century, Spanish corporations barred descendants of converted Jews from office and made every family’s genealogy a matter for their investigators to certify. According to Julius Africanus, quoted by Eusebius, Herod burned the Jewish genealogical records so that no one could trace a nobler line than his own, though Josephus shows that some records survived. In 1787 Joseph II required the Jews of the Habsburg lands to take fixed German surnames.

Tocqueville described the cumulative result in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). The French monarchy took from the nobility its local functions and left it only its privileges. With no intermediate houses left to lean on, the state fell at a single blow in 1789.

Each of these measures answered a need of its state and was accepted by the generation that lived under it. The state looked no further than that generation, and the costs fell on descendants who had no say. The Church’s marriage rules worked over centuries, the death duties over two generations, the Japanese code within one.

Discretion

Many houses survived by putting substance before display. In 1931 Marcus Wallenberg Sr. took as his personal motto Esse, non videri, Latin for “to be, not to seem”.

Families that displayed their wealth to rulers often lost it. On 17 August 1661 Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances to Louis XIV, gave a fête at his new château of Vaux-le-Vicomte that outshone the king’s own houses. The king, urged by Colbert, had already decided to ruin him over the state’s finances, and the fête showed the court why. On 5 September he was arrested at Nantes. He died in prison at Pignerol in 1680. Jacques Cœur, the richest merchant in France, was arrested in 1451 on charges brought by courtiers who owed him money, and his fortune was confiscated. In 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, was arrested at Novosibirsk airport after he had funded parties opposed to the Kremlin, and his company was broken up for the benefit of a state firm.

A state that removes houses finds the visible ones first. Among the oldest houses, those that lasted longest either held an office the state needed or did not depend on that state alone.

Houses that hid well left few records, so the known examples are mostly of those that did not. Many of the states that dissolved houses were ruled by houses themselves: the Qin, the Tokugawa, the Bourbons. Modern states are different. They are run by bureaucracies that track money closely, report accounts across borders and register every person and company. Since the civil codes of the nineteenth century their law has recognised persons, companies, trusts and foundations, and almost never a family line. No register records that those people and companies belong to one house across four generations and several countries. The exceptions are states still ruled by a family, among them the Gulf monarchies, whose law recognises houses because their own rulers are one.

For a modern house, discretion means distribution: a house compliant in every state where it stands, declared in each and dependent on none. Economists have described the same logic. Harry Markowitz (1952) showed that spreading assets across sources whose risks do not move together lowers the risk of the whole, and the same logic applies to political and legal risk. Charles Tiebout (1956) described residents choosing among local governments by their taxes and services, what later came to be called voting with one’s feet. Albert Hirschman (1970) argued that easy exit can weaken voice, but that the credible possibility of exit is what gives voice its force. David Hume made the reverse point in 1748, about a man who cannot leave: “Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?” Within one state, every route to dissent runs through that state’s own institutions. A house with standing in several can decline one state’s terms without breaking any law, and so its obedience to each is a choice.

Cases Compared

Each house is scored on each pillar as present (●), partial (◐) or absent (○); the scores are judgments from its record.

Houses holding an office from one state lasted as long as that state valued the office, and the ones that outlasted the state did so through their own genealogy and their own supply of heirs. Houses with a single source of income or a single craft ended when the source failed, even with a wide pool. And the Rothschilds, standing under the most protectorates at once, with several sources of income, lost branches to states and to the lack of heirs, and kept their line through the branches that remained. Among the modern cases, Vanderbilt’s fortune, among the largest of its age, left no house, because nothing bound its heirs to one another. And the modern houses that lost their unity lost it in court, where the house’s own law had no forum.

Pistomechanical Implications

In pistomechanics a belief is installed when it runs without being chosen. A house lasts only while its members, who did not choose it, hold such a belief: that they are one line, from one founder, with a shared estate and a shared task.

A house had to make its claim to descend from its founder uncontestable. Some houses made the claim hold by proof, keeping one line and a record that could be checked. Others made it by an act, adopting an heir by name and oath or marrying a son-in-law into the house’s name, so that the descent existed because the house had declared it. In the terms of Constitutive Trumps Constative, the first kind of claim describes a fact that can be checked, and the second creates the fact by declaring it, as a signature does.

In pistomechanics’ terms, every hearing of the family’s name is a signal each member’s mind values as it lands, a mana, and a childhood of such signals, at the table, in the record and in the stories, is what installs the pride; duty is the part of the same belief that points past the living, to the shared task and the unborn. Each of the two has failed on its own. Pride without duty turned to display: Fouquet’s fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and the Fifth Avenue mansions of Vanderbilt’s heirs. Duty without pride became a weight that someone finally put down: Keiunkan’s last generation inherited fifty-two generations of duty and no one who wished to carry it. Pillars 2 to 9 are the organisation that keeps pride and duty together.

The pillars depend on one another: an estate pays for formation, formation supplies heirs worth choosing between, and the law decides who may choose. The houses that ended or divided failed at one pillar first, Kongō Gumi at its source of income, Keiunkan at an heir willing to continue, the Orléans-Braganza at a question its law had left open.

The founder has to hold this conviction first. Before anyone else believes the family will outlast him, he has to believe it and arrange his affairs as though it will. From him it passes by three routes: from parent to child, from the head of the house (in some societies the mother’s brother) to all its young, and between branches through marriage. Money pays for meeting places, the estate and schooling. The will to use them comes from the family meal, the genealogy and the stories, and these cost little. They work for a house the way gathering works for a people in Peoplehood: each meal and each revision of the record produces fresh evidence that the house exists, whatever any one member believes.

The account can be tested. It is wrong if, among families of similar wealth, those that kept no record, no common estate and no shared task lasted as long as those that kept all three. The cases here point the other way, but they are a record of survivors, and a fair test would need the families that failed as well.

Conclusion

The official in Suzhou, the coin dealer of Frankfurt’s Jewish street and the contractor who started again in Libya made the same decision, and the Kong house shows the same pillars kept for seventy-nine generations. All of them taught their children pride in the family and a duty to it. Because it kept its own genealogy, the Kong house outlived every dynasty that granted its title, and the change to its office in 1935. The Rothschild house lost its banks in Naples, Frankfurt and Vienna and saw its Paris bank nationalised in 1981, and it continued through the banks it still had in other countries.

Peoplehood treated peoples. A third essay, Protectorates, will treat the bodies houses form together. Many peoples remember themselves as the descendants of a single family, and many protectorates were formed by houses acting together. What a protectorate owes the houses under it, and what happens when its terms can no longer be negotiated or left, is its subject.

None of the clansmen who drew rice from Fan Zhongyan’s estate under the Qing had met him, and none of Mayer Amschel’s great-great-grandchildren met him either. They knew the founder’s name, his rules and his story. The same will hold for anyone who founds a house today. Four generations later a descendant will carry the founder’s name and know little else about him. He will not know the obligations the founder carried, the negotiations he closed or the nights he lost over them; all of that ends with the founder. What reaches the descendant is what the founder built to run without him: a name with its story, a record, an estate no single heir can spend, a table where he is expected, and a task larger than his own life. His descendants will see that part of his work, and can be proud of it.