Arranged marriage was the global default until the 1700s
In an arranged marriage a third party, usually the parents and sometimes a marriage broker, picks the spouse, and the couple normally agrees. Forced marriage lacks consent, and child marriage rules it out by age. Arrangement was the worldwide norm until the eighteenth century and is still widespread from South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa.
Marriages without consent are condemned by the United Nations. Historically, parents, grandparents, other close relatives or trusted friends made the match, with rare exceptions such as courtship and betrothal customs in Renaissance Italy and Gandharva Vivah in Vedic India. The practice has faded markedly in Europe and East Asia since the nineteenth century; in France arranged unions were normal until the Second World War, and in Russia they were standard, mostly within the same community, before the early twentieth century.
In China, so-called blind marriages were the rule until the mid-twentieth century: elders of two families negotiated the deal, and bride and groom were told to wed with no right to object, sometimes meeting for the first time at the ceremony. Japanese-American immigrants knew picture-bride marriages, where the couple had only swapped photographs beforehand, and relatives in the home country usually arranged such matches for migrant families in the United States until the mid-1900s.
Over generations those immigrant families moved first to quasi-arranged marriages, with parents or friends making introductions before the couple met, and then to self-chosen partners, dating and more marriage outside their ethnic group. Decline came where forced marriage was banned, as in Imperial Russia and Japan, and in wealthy, mobile, individualist societies, yet royals, aristocrats and some religious minorities still arrange matches, including placement marriage among fundamentalist Mormon groups.
Scholars sort unions into four kinds: fully arranged, which by definition is forced; consensual arranged, where the pair may refuse, as in the Orthodox Jewish shidduch; self-selected with parental veto; and autonomous. Gary Lee and Lorene Stone place most recent adult marriages between consensual arranged and autonomous, and Broude and Greene found elements of arrangement in 130 of 142 cultures they studied.
Source: Arranged marriage
