Wikipedia page about this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Human_Marriage

Release date is 2019-04-28

Introduction -- The origin of marriage -- A human pairing season in primitive times -- The antiquity of human marriage -- A criticism of the hypothesis of promiscuity -- Marriage and celibacy -- The courtship of man -- Means of attraction -- The liberty of choice -- Sexual selection among animals -- The sexual selection of man: typical beauty -- The law of similarity -- Prohibition of marriage between kindred -- Sexual selection as influenced by affection and sympathy, and by calculation -- Marriage by capture and marriage by purchase -- The decay of marriage by purchase; the marriage portion -- Marriage ceremonies and rites -- The forms of human marriage -- The duration of human marriage -- Summary.

E-text prepared by Turgut Dincer, Les Galloway, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/)

"The history of human marriage" by Edward Westermarck is a work published in 1891. This monumental anthropological study attempts a grand synthesis of marriage as a social institution across world history. Westermarck argues that marriage rests on biological foundations, evolving through human needs for companionship, economic cooperation, and child-rearing. The work also introduces what became known as the Westermarck effect—a theory explaining sexual desensitization among those raised in close proximity and the origins of incest taboos. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Original publication data not identified