The American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan wrote Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family in 1871, grouping the world’s languages into six general categories according to how they approach family organisation or kinship. The ‘Eskimo system’, to which the English language belongs, is unusual for how vaguely it allows us to talk about our family relationships. In many languages, it is not possible to talk of one’s ‘cousin’ or ‘uncle’ or ‘aunt’: one has to specify whether one is talking about one’s father’s sister’s daughter or one’s mother’s brother’s son.

Under such regimes, ‘each speaker’, as Alan Macfarlane put it in his classic study The Origins of English Individualism (1978), has to ‘carry in his head an accurate map of the genealogical links in his neighbourhood’. That speakers of English have never had to bother themselves with such mental exertions is a point in favour of Macfarlane’s overall thesis that the ‘extended family’ has never been the basic unit of English society – or at least that it hasn’t been for a very long time.

Macfarlane was well-positioned to make this argument, being both an anthropologist and a distinguished historian of early-modern England. The subject of his Oxford DPhil was ‘Witchcraft Prosecutions in Essex, 1560-1680’, but he pivoted to social anthropology, with a focus on societies in the Himalayas (he was born in Assam).

The contrast between these two worlds, pre-modern England and the contemporary Himalayas, set his thought in motion. The witches of Essex, he noted, were strikingly different from their continental counterparts: with no talk of covens or group meetings, they were a distinctly individualistic menace. In the introduction to The Origins, he describes the experience of moving from a 17th-century English diary to an anthropological survey of the contemporary Himalayas. Most works on pre-modern English society proceeded from the assumption that there wouldn’t be too much of a difference between the two: England was supposed to have been a ‘peasant society’, characterised by immobility, early and universal marriage, intergenerational households, and a value system according to which the kin-group was always more significant than the individual. It was supposed to be analogous in its outlines to the ‘peasant societies’ of the 20th-century Himalayas. But not everyone saw it that way, and Macfarlane embarked on his ambitious historical project of debunking the myth of English ‘peasant society’ emboldened by a remark of F.W. Maitland’s, to the effect that England had ‘long ago’ chosen her ‘individualistic path’.

‘Long ago’, indeed. The Origins does not exactly do what it says on the tin; Macfarlane argued simply that the origins of English individualism must lie before the 13th century, much earlier than practically anybody, Maitland excepted, had believed. England, on Macfarlane’s telling, is an individualistic society principally because it always has been. Medieval English women tended to marry late, and enjoyed more property rights than women elsewhere; intergenerational households were so unusual that, when they did exist, an entire legal apparatus of maintenance agreements and written contracts had to spring up to make them work; children quite often lived in different towns to their parents.

‘The majority of ordinary people in England from at least the 13th century’, Macfarlane concluded, ‘were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically “rational”, market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life.’ In debates over continuity or change in English social history, Macfarlane thus comes down firmly in favour of the former, going as far as to argue, at one stage, that the burden of proof ought to be on historians who prefer the latter.

Macfarlane also demonstrated that English exceptionalism had always been understood by contemporary onlookers. The penultimate chapter of The Origins is a whistle-stop tour through the history of the idea that England is, as Montesquieu put it, ‘a country which hardly resembles the rest of Europe’. If Macfarlane was correct, the stereotype of medieval England as a ‘peasant society’, which had penetrated into scholarship as much as popular culture, turns out to have been a mirage all along. Clannishness, the opposite of individualism and the system of social organisation that is still dominant in so much of the world, is alien to English culture and has been at least for close to a thousand years. The individualist strain in English culture, responsible for so much of England’s development and achievement, was a contingent, precarious, and exceedingly unusual thing, regarded with some envy by those who did not have it.