Borrowed from Your Grandchildren

CHAPTER 3The Social History of Family Dynasties

Family business, or more broadly, family enterprise, has always been at the core of human society. Their form and nature shifted as society evolved from villages and agriculture to global trade and commerce. Millennia ago, nomadic families began to ally to form clans, villages, communities, and then states. The engine of social and economic development was always the family. At its core, a community is a network of interconnected enterprising families that help and care about one another. Society is made up of connected families, not isolated individuals. Families form the bridge between, on the one hand, intimate life and livelihood and, on the other, communities, nations, and trading networks.

While much is new and unique about how generative families function in our postindustrial world, many continuities arise from the sociobiological heritage of families as the building block of society. This chapter contains a brief, impressionistic journey through social evolution, with snapshots from several stages of emergence of global family enterprise:

• Prehistory of Extended Family Formation
• Asian Origins of Thousand-Year Family Enterprises
• Traders and Financiers: Accumulating and Sustaining Vast Family Fortunes
• Paternalistic Industrialization: The Company Town
• The Gilded Age in the New World
• Managerial Capitalism: The Rise of the Modern Corporation and the Eclipse of Family Business
• Hidden Champions: Family Business Quietly Enters ...