Farming Societies and the exceptionalism of city states, recorded history
By Ian Morris in 'Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels'
Ian Morris wrote:
Chapter 3 Farmers
… Even Chekhov’s miserable Tchikildyeevs had a cottage, and inside it a samovar, with tea to put in it and a stove to heat it on. But while farming societies were more prosperous than those of foragers, they were also much more hierarchical … [Under] certain conditions (like those prevailing in the eighteenth-century Pacific Northwest, or prehistoric Japan or the Baltic region) wealth can be quite unequally distributed in foraging societies, but this is dwarfed by what happens in farming societies. The earliest case for which we have actual statistics is the Roman Empire, and here some people were astonishingly rich … the historian Chris Wickham suggests that by the fourth century AD, the greatest families—the Anicii, Petronii, and Caeonii—“may have been the richest private landowners of all time.” By the best estimate, the Roman Empire’s Gini wealth coefficient in the first century AD was somewhere between 0.42 and 0.44, which, given Rome’s level of technology and productivity, means that the Roman elite (comprising something like 10 percent of the population) was extracting wealth from the rest of the Romans at roughly 80 percent of the theoretical maximum possible rate of exploitation.
Such societies—more crowded and prosperous than those of foragers, but less equal—were only possible because farming simultaneously enabled and required a huge leap in the complexity of the division of labor. The most obvious feature of this was the creation of economic enterprises far bigger than the family … [but we] need to emphasize that the family did remain the basic building block in farming economies, just as it had been in foraging societies. The internal structure of families, however, changed beyond all recognition.
Two main forces were at work. The first was the nature of labor itself. In foraging societies, women usually did most of the plant gathering and men most of the hunting. This sexual division of labor did not usually change very much in horticultural societies, where hunting and gathering remained important and farmwork was fairly light. Land that could be used for gardens was in many places quite abundant while labor was relatively scarce, and horticulturalists would work large areas lightly, with men and women hoeing and weeding together. But as population grew, making land scarcer relative to labor, people worked it more intensively, squeezing more output from each acre through the heavy labor of plowing, manuring, and even irrigating. The further that a society went in this direction, the more men’s upper body strength became a plus in farmwork, and the more people began to define outdoor activities as men’s work.
This long-term shift must have been important in pushing women out of the fields, but a second force, demography, was probably even more important in pulling women into the home. Before the invention of farming, population had on average doubled every ten thousand years, but after agriculture began, the doubling time fell to less than two thousand years. Farmwives had a lot more babies than female foragers—so many more that some prehistorians speak of a “Neolithic demographic transition.” The typical woman in a farming society carried seven babies to term, spending most of her adult life pregnant or minding small children, and since these activities would be very difficult for women who were pushing plows, demography and the patterns of labor conspired to separate male/outdoor and female/indoor spheres.
Because (1) the foods produced by farmers often required more processing (threshing, sifting, grinding, baking, and so on) than those brought home by foragers; (2) the increasingly permanent homes that farmers built required a lot more upkeep and cleaning than foragers’ temporary shelters; and (3) these activities could be done in the home by women supervising small children, the logic of farming pointed toward a new sexual division of labor and space. The conclusion that farmers all over the world apparently reached was that men should go out to work in the fields while women stayed home to work in the house. So obvious did this decision seem, in fact, that no farming society that moved beyond horticulture ever seems to have decided anything else. …
… Foragers share their knowledge with the young, teaching them how to find ripe plants, wild game, and safe campsites, but farmers have something much more concrete to pass on: property. To flourish in a farming world, people need a house, fields, and flocks, not to mention wells, walls, and tools, and improvements such as weeding, watering, terracing, and removing stones. Inheriting property from older generations literally becomes a matter of life and death, and with so much at stake, peasant men want to be sure that they are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property. Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to ferocious policing of daughters’ premarital virginity … and wives’ extramarital activities. Peasant men tended to marry around the age of thirty, after they had come into their inheritance, while women generally married around fifteen, before they had had much time to stray. We cannot be certain that these patterns go back to the dawn of agriculture, but there are several hints that they do. Many early farming societies seem to have been obsessed with ancestors, and even to have worshipped them as supernatural beings. …
… Farming societies found many ways to organize work above the household level. Some farming societies organize kin groups larger than the family to provide big workforces to meet ritual obligations … As a system for staffing permanent, large-scale organizations, though, kinship seems to have had strict limits, and those farming societies that have left written records seem to have relied more heavily on two other institutions.
The first was the market, through which workers sold their labor for wages, whether in coin or in kind … That said, entrepreneurs in farming societies (whether based in the countryside or in the city) complained constantly about the difficulty of drawing reliable labor into the market solely through wages. On the whole, they found, anyone who had enough land to support a family preferred to make a living by working it rather than by selling labor. …
… The basic problem was that the low output per premodern farmhand meant that the marginal product of labor—that is, the gain to an employer from hiring an extra worker—was often too small to make wages attractive to people who had any alternative means of supporting themselves. Hence the appeal of the second great alternative to kinship as a method to mobilize more workers than the family could supply: forced labor. Using violence to depress the costs of labor to the point that its marginal product became positive for employers made slavery and serfdom the obvious answers to the labor market’s failures …
… Farming societies seem to have shifted toward forced labor because they had to: neither kinship nor the market could generate the labor needed to build the ships, harbors, roads, temples, and monuments without which their (relatively) huge populations could not have fed themselves or maintained their societies. In a classic paper published in 1959, the ancient historian Moses Finley asked “Was Greek civilization based on slave labor?” The answer, he concluded, was yes, and, if we broaden the question to include forced labor of all kinds, Finley’s answer applies (to varying degrees) to all farming societies. In extreme cases, of which classical Athens was one, as many as one person in three was a chattel slave, and few if any farming societies did without slavery or serfdom altogether. Forced labor, like patriarchy, was functionally necessary to farming societies that generated more than 10,000 kcal/cap/day.
A sunnier side of the increasing division of labor, though, was the professionalization of intellectual life, which massively expanded the stock of knowledge. … The key to [the] success [of cultural elites of farming societies] was literacy, itself largely a side effect of the increasing professionalization of management. Anthropologists continue to argue over whether writing enabled people to think in entirely new ways, but the specialized educational systems and huge investments in human capital behind the extraordinary academic advances that the Old World made in the age of farming would have been impossible without it.
The increasingly elaborate division of labor in farming societies ultimately depended on one more kind of specialist: the masters of violence, who converted a comparative advantage in killing to control over politics. In each of the areas where agriculture was invented, people seem to have got by for a good three or four millennia without the help of governments that monopolized legitimate violence, but in every case, by the time that energy capture rose above about 10,000 kcal/cap/day and towns grew past about 10,000 souls, a few people had taken charge. This happened somewhere around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, 2500 BC in the Indus Valley, 1900 BC in northern China, and 100 BC in Mesoamerica and the Andes.
[the usual ‘type’]
Almost always, one member of the new elite made himself king over all the others, but to hang on to his throne, he invariably had to form broader coalitions, turning would-be rivals into supporters. To coopt these near-peers, the ruler normally confirmed them as aristocrats with legal title to huge estates, and to make themselves indispensable to the ruler, his noblemen normally repackaged themselves as useful specialists in religion, law, letters, or war. Working together, these different kinds of elites could coordinate the larger society’s activities by raising taxes, enforcing laws, performing rituals, fighting neighbors, suppressing uprisings, and all of the other government activities that fill the annals of ancient and medieval history …
[the ‘exceptions’]
“The state” [in these farming societies] [Ernest] Gellner observed, “is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace, and not much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral communication between its subject communities” … “The Agrarian Age”, he suggested, “was basically a period of stagnation, oppression, and superstition,” and yet, he added, “Exceptions do occur, but we are all inclined, as in the case of classical Greece, to call them ‘miracles’”.
The miraculous exceptions, as Gellner observed, were mostly city-states. In the farming societies of later prehistory, networks of such city-states were probably common: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus and Ganges Valleys, the Yellow River Valley, Peru, Yucatan, and the Valley of Mexico, city-state networks seem to have flourished until one city-state outgrew the others, conquered them, and swallowed them up into a larger Agraria. In some cases, though, particularly in Europe and the Mediterranean (ancient Phoenicia, Greece, and Italy; medieval Italy, Flanders, and the Baltic) and the oases of central Asia and the Sahara, city-state systems survived and even flourished into historically documented periods around the edges of the great empires.
Nearly all these textually documented city-states shared one important feature: a commercial, and usually maritime, orientation. This eased some of the constraints imposed on other societies by the limits of agricultural energy capture. Athens, for instance, imported most of its food in the fourth century BC, using its position at the center of extensive trade networks to increase dramatically the energy available per person. This not only made possible the high population densities mentioned earlier in this chapter but also sustained economic growth (per capita consumption may have doubled between 800 and 300 BC), leading to real wages that would rarely be matched until the age of fossil fuels. Literacy rates were also extraordinarily high, and Athens enjoyed a cultural explosion that earned it the label “classical”.
In many ways, classical Athens, medieval Venice, and several other city-states can seem more modern than agrarian. The contrast between figure 3.7 (my own attempt to squeeze—or fail to squeeze—classical Athens into Gellner’s format) and figure 3.6 is strong. Athens, like most other prosperous, commercial, maritime city-states, lacked Agraria’s small, highly distinct stratified elite, rigidly separated from a great mass of peasants. Instead, it had only a weakly stratified upper class, marked off by wealth but not by legal distinctions from equally weakly laterally insulated groups of fellow-citizens. In Athens and dozens of other Greek examples, stratification was so weak that the state was run not by a king or even by a commercial oligarchy, but by what Greeks called a dêmokratia, a democracy of the entire male citizen body. Not surprisingly, wealth hierarchies were relatively low. By my calculations, the Gini score for landholding in fourth-century BC Athens was just 0.38–0.39, and the ancient historian Josiah Ober estimates that overall Athenian income inequality (for the whole resident population, including slaves) in the late fourth century BC stood at 0.40–0.4598—comfortably below the average of 0.48 that [others have] calculated for income inequality in agrarian societies. Wealth was generally seen as good in a way that it was not in foraging societies. Some Athenians were very rich indeed by Greek standards, but the average real wage was also unusually high, and the remains of excavated houses suggest that classical Greeks lived much better than most people in farming societies.
Even so, Athens still had much in common with Agraria. Athenian citizens were the top group in a profoundly hierarchical system, and below the weakly stratified and weakly laterally insulated citizenry was another world, that of the highly laterally insulated chattel slaves, who, as mentioned earlier, probably made up one-third of the population in the fourth century BC. In spite of the energy bonanza unleashed by Mediterranean trade, forced labor remained functionally necessary to Athens and all other Greek city-states. Athens in fact had one of the strictest slave systems on record, with very low rates of manumission and a requirement that the state’s top decision-making body (the citizen assembly) must vote on every single attempt to confer citizenship on a freed slave. It also had one of the steepest systems of gender inequality in the ancient world. No woman ever held citizenship in a classical Greek city.
Rather than abolishing the boundaries within Agraria, the city-state miracle consisted of broadening the elite. In classical Athens, which was probably the extreme case, roughly one-third of the resident population (the free adult male citizens plus their sons) belonged to this ruling elite. Depending on the precise questions they are asking, historians can choose to focus on this extraordinary achievement (the “cup half full” view of Athens, as Josiah Ober calls it) or on the dispossession and oppression of non-elite Athenians (the “cup half empty” view).
For the question being asked here, we should perhaps see Athens and other city-states as a historically important exception to the larger agrarian pattern, qualifying but not falsifying the model in figure 3.6—much as the sedentary, affluent, and complex hunter-gatherer societies found in the Pacific Northwest and prehistoric Baltic and Sea of Japan qualify without falsifying the model of forager society … On the one hand, the Kwakiutl and the Athenians both found ways to raise energy capture well above the norm and moved toward unusual social systems that capitalized on this. But on the other hand, sedentary foragers and commercial city-states could flourish only in very specific ecological zones—for the former, coastal zones rich in marine food sources, such as the prehistoric Baltic and Sea of Japan or the historic west coast of North America; for the latter, positions astride trade routes (usually maritime, sometimes riverine, and occasionally overland) supplying bigger empires.
In the final analysis, sedentary foragers could not escape the constraints imposed by hunting and gathering, and commercial city-states were equally confined by those imposed by tilling the earth. “Although the size and density of sedentary foraging populations went well beyond what was normal in more mobile foraging groups, none ever broke through to the kind of levels normal in farming societies, and although commercial city-states also supported populations that were large and dense by the standards of farming societies, none ever broke through to the kind of levels common in fossil-fuel societies. In the case of Athens, we can even see that scaling up made the city look more and more like Agraria. As Athens brought other Greek cities under its control in the fifth century BC, the Athenian citizen body started functioning like the stratified elite in figure 3.6, and as the subject cities that had previously looked much like figure 3.7 in their own right were brought under Athenian rule, they began looking like the laterally insulated communities in figure 3.6 … [The] only way to escape Agraria was by having an industrial revolution …
[the ‘values’]
The explanation is, once again, that each age gets the thought it needs. In the absence of fossil fuels, the only way to push energy capture far above 10,000 kilocalories per person per day is by moving toward Agraria, where economic and political inequality are structurally necessary, and in the face of necessity, we adjust our values. Moral systems conform to the requirements of energy capture, and for societies capturing between 10,000 and 30,000 kilocalories per person per day, one of the most important requirements is acceptance of political and economic inequality.Only as these requirements changed, with the rise of large-scale maritime trading systems that pushed some farming societies away from the Agrarian center toward either the city-state or the early-modern point … did attitudes begin to shift. In sixth- and fifth-century BC Greece, for instance, anger against incompetent and corrupt rulers was increasingly redirected from replacing them with better rulers toward a generalized critique of political inequality. Extraordinarily strong ideas about male equality took shape, and more and more cities began making the key decisions in one-man-one-vote assemblies of all free male citizens. Small groups of talented and motivated men continued to make most of the speeches and design most of the policies, but even such outstanding leaders as Pericles and Demosthenes had to appear to accept the idea that they were the same as any other citizen. For much of the fifth century, wealthy Greeks avoided building lavish houses or tombs that would attract charges of upstartism, and the richest of the rich insisted that they were in fact perfectly average. Athenians began to speak of finance and trade as an immoral “invisible economy,” where the rich hid their ill-gotten gains from public scrutiny.
I will have more to say [in another chapter] about the rise of large-scale maritime commerce in early-modern Western Europe. For the moment, though, I will just observe that by the seventeenth century, as energy capture climbed well beyond 30,000 kilocalories per person per day, both the Eastern and Western ends of the Old World began seeing highly unusual demands to do away with political and economic hierarchy altogether, rather than just rearranging people’s positions within the system. The most famous of these levelers were in England …
… [If] farming turned high rates of violence into a problem, it also provided the solution. Foragers living in a relatively empty landscape always had the option of running away from aggression and hunting and gathering in a new place, but farmers, trapped in increasingly crowded landscapes, did not. As a result, farmers who won wars against their neighbors sometimes ended up incorporating the losers into a larger society. This was a brutal process, usually involving rape, pillage, and enslavement, but over time, it created bigger societies, whose rulers—as Gellner said of Agraria—“are interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace, and not much else.” Rulers had strong incentives to pacify their subjects, persuading them to work hard, render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, and not to kill one another or destroy each other’s productive assets. Rulers who succeeded in pacification tended to flourish at the expense of those who did not, and, over the course of ten thousand years, the net effect was that rulers gradually drove down rates of violent death.
To accomplish these goals, rulers needed to convince their subjects that government alone had the right to use violence—that, as Weber put it, “only certain political communities, viz, the ‘states,’ are considered to be capable of ‘legitimizing,’ by virtue of mandate or permission, the exercise of physical coercion by any other community”. The main tool available to a government trying to persuade its subjects that it is the only group permitted to act violently is law, but the legitimacy of law itself ultimately rests on the government’s comparative advantage in force …
Premodern states did less well than modern ones at monopolizing the legitimate use of force, but the further they went in this direction, the less their subjects felt that it was right to use violence to solve their own problems. The injunction to turn the other cheek, shared by most Axial Age belief systems, surely helped in this process, and in the Roman Empire and again in early-modern Europe we can trace in some detail how elite males gradually surrendered the right to pursue vendettas. In the process, the idea of the “man of honor” shifted from describing someone ready to use violence to describing a man who restrained himself.
The scope for legitimate violence remained wider in farming societies than it is in smoothly functioning fossil-fuel societies, if only because forced labor—so fundamental to Agraria—depended on the ability of masters to coerce dependents …
“Farming society” is a huge category, embracing almost the whole of recorded history, but we can nevertheless identify … [at] their heart … the idea that hierarchy is good. Hierarchy reflects the natural/divine order, in which some were put on this earth to command, and most to obey. Violence is valued according to the same principle: when legitimate rulers demand it, it is a force for good; otherwise, it is not.
… Farmers and foragers lived in different worlds. Capturing energy from domesticated sources imposed different constraints and created different opportunities than capturing energy from wild resources. Farmers could survive only in a hierarchical, somewhat pacified world, and they therefore came to value hierarchy and peace.
The Source:
Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, Princeton 2015 [parts of Chapter 3]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.