Why dowries follow the plough and bride prices follow the hoe
Whether a marriage moves wealth from the bride's family or towards it may depend on how the fields are farmed. The anthropologist Jack Goody found dowries clustered in Eurasian societies using intensive plough agriculture, from Japan to Ireland, while bride price went with hoe farming elsewhere.
A dowry is property, money, land, livestock or a business that the bride's family hands to the groom or his relatives at marriage. It is the reverse of bride price, paid by the groom's side, and distinct from dower, which the groom settles on the bride herself. In effect it passes a daughter her share of family wealth while her parents are alive rather than at their death, creating a fund that might support her as a widow or protect her from a careless husband. The custom goes by many names, from jahez in Urdu and dahej in Hindi to çeyiz in Turkish and jiazhuang in Mandarin.
Goody, working from the Ethnographic Atlas, argued that dowry belongs to societies practising diverging devolution, handing property to children of both sexes. Scholars have pushed back. Sylvia Yanagisako cited counterexamples in regions of China, Japan and the Italian south, and Stanley Tambiah found that in North India much of the dowry goes straight to the groom's joint family rather than serving as the bride's own fund. Schlegel and Eloul, reanalysing the same atlas, argued instead that what matters is the kind of property a household controls.
The custom is ancient. The Code of Hammurabi already treats it as established: Babylonian daughters normally did not inherit, but received a dowry that the husband managed yet could not dispose of, which returned to her family if she died childless. Herodotus described yearly auctions of maidens in Babylonia. Archaic Greeks paid a bride price, called hédnon, but by the fifth century BC dowries, pherné, had taken over. Romans called it dos and distinguished gifts from the bride's father or grandfather from those of anyone else.
Its history in India is disputed: Tambiah reads the Code of Manu as sanctioning it, while Michael Witzel finds it insignificant in the Vedic period, when women could inherit property. Modern Greece removed dowry from family law in 1983.
Source: Dowry
