Exchange marriages as a family partnership strategy in the Barcelona area, 16th–19th centuries

Exchange marriages refer to arrangements in which two families simultaneously reciprocate spouses, either through the marriage of two pairs of siblings or through unions linking two widowed parents alongside the marriage of their respective children, thereby establishing dense and interlocking networks of affinal kinship between the families. Rather than stemming primarily from geographic isolation or a shortage of eligible partners, exchange marriages appear to have been driven by deliberate efforts to safeguard patrimonial assets and maintain equilibrium between lineages. However, long-term quantitative research on this practice in preindustrial settings remains scarce. This article investigates the prevalence as well as the social and structural determinants of simultaneous exchange marriages in the Barcelona area between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It draws on the unique Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD). The main findings show that the most common forms were cross-exchanges between sibling pairs and parallel exchanges involving widowed parents and their children. These marriages were more likely to occur in smaller communities and among families with adequate economic resources. In this regard, they were concentrated primarily among the farmers, where it constituted a particularly effective strategy within Catalonia’s system of impartible inheritance. In this context, it helped to limit dowry expenditures, preserve the integrity of family holdings, and secure marriage opportunities for non-inheriting children under a single-heir regime. Urban and professional groups, by contrast, made more limited use of such alliances. Over time, their incidence declined, in tandem with the rise of consanguineous unions and the gradual weakening of the single-heir system in the 19th century.