Pre-Industrial Societies

Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

Patricia Crone

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780748047
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eminent historian Patricia Crone defines the common features of a wide range of pre-industrial societies, from locations as seemingly disparate as the Mongol Empire and pre-Columbian America, to cultures as diverse as the Ming Dynasty and seventeenth-century France. In a lucid exploration of the characteristics shared by these societies, the author examines such key elements as economic organization, politics, culture, and the role of religion. An essential introductory text for all students of history, Pre-Industrial Societies provides readers with all the necessary tools for gaining a substantial understanding of life in pre-modern times. In addition, as a perceptive insight into a lost world, italso acts as a starting point for anyone interested in the present possibilities and future challenges faced by our own global society.

1

Introduction: What is a Complex Society?

Industry is a mode of production which first appeared in late eighteenth-century England and which proceeded utterly to transform the world at large. Most human societies today are either industrial or engaged in the process of industrializing; such wholly non-industrial societies as still exist are archaic pockets doomed to disappear in so far as they have not been placed under preservation order. Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are thus born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them. Human history is not very long. The genus Homo emerged about 2.5 million years ago in Africa, from where it proceeded to colonize Eurasia some time before 1 million years ago. But the species Homo sapiens (or H. sapiens sapiens) to which all humans alive today belong descends from an ancestor who flourished as recently as c. 200,000 years ago, probably also in Africa, from where the descendants spread to the rest of the world about 50,000 years ago, as the first fully modern human beings in both anatomical and behavioural terms. Of those 50,000 years only some 200 years in one part of the world, elsewhere far fewer, have been lived under industrial conditions. We all take the world in which we were born for granted and think of the human condition as ours. This is a mistake. The vast mass of human experience has been made under quite different conditions.

The present work is an attempt to summarize those conditions, or rather some of them. It does not deal with the entire pre-industrial past, partly because there is too much of it and more particularly because primitive (or simple) and civilized (or complex) societies are too different to be treated together.This book is about the latter, and I shall henceforth use the word ‘pre-industrial’ as a shorthand for ‘pre-industrial of the civilized kind’. (Economic historians sometimes distinguish societies on the eve of industrialization from other societies without industry by labelling the former pre-industrial and the latter agrarian; in this book, however, the terms pre-industrial and agrarian will be used synonymously.)

The civilized societies of the past resemble those of modern times, but in some ways the similarity is deceptive. One cannot come to grips with them without thinking away modernity and working out the consequences of its absence. This is precisely what we shall be doing in the following chapters, but before we start, we need to know what a ‘civilized’ society is. I should like to answer this question by inviting the reader to participate in a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that you and some friends and relatives of yours are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with no hope of ever getting back. What would you do? Obviously, you would have to start by finding something to eat. The ecology of the island might be such that you could feed yourselves by gathering fruit, berries and other edible plant material, supplementing your diet by hunting or fishing. But if you could, you would start growing things, for agriculture makes for a more dependable food supply than hunting and gathering: cereals such as wheat, rice and millet can be stored; and your sedentary mode of life would enable you to store both these and other things on a scale impossible to those who have to move to wherever prey and plants happen to be available in a particular season. (You might of course still engage in some hunting or fishing from time to time.)

Having solved the problem of food, what sort of organization would you need? Given that you would be both few (indeed friends and relatives) and devoid of external enemies, you obviously would not need much organization at all. You might have to meet from time to time for decisions on issues affecting all of you (such as whether or not to set up a granary for use in years of shortage) and also for the settlement of disputes threatening to disrupt the general peace (such as your claim that your neighbour had stolen part of your harvest); and no doubt the opinions of some would carry greater weight than those of others: some would be leaders and others would be led. But you would hardly need a formal leader. Your society would be stateless, or indeed acephalous, ‘headless’. It would also be extremely primitive, that is to say lacking in social, economic, political and other differentiation on the one hand and poor in culture, both material and intellectual, on the other.

But now imagine that a very large number of you are shipwrecked on that island, or that the island is not uninhabited, but on the contrary full of hostile natives. If there were thousands of you, you might split up into several small acephalous societies, but then you might start quarrelling over land, boundaries, noise or whatever. If so, you would need more in the way of political organization. You might also find that some societies had access to commodities that others lacked (such as salt, precious stones or metals), in which case you would start exchanging goods with each other, or in other words trading; some might then get very much richer than others, both within each community and between them, and some people might stop growing food altogether, earning enough by trade to buy it from others. Your internal homogeneity would be lost, meaning that disagreements between you would intensify; and the balance of power between the various communities would also be affected, meaning that some might try to dominate others. Under such circumstances, too, you would need much more in the way of organization. On the other hand, if the island were full of hostile natives, you would not be able to split up: you would have to stick together and co-ordinate your activities. And this would also force you to become more organized.

Let us assume that you have retained your internal homogeneity, but need a formal leader to co-ordinate your activities vis-à-vis dangerous outsiders: you elect a chief. Your chief might be able to go on producing his own food. (In fact, one would scarcely call him a chief, as opposed to a king or the like, if he did not.) But if his official duties were too time-consuming for him to engage in food production, how would he be able to live? Obviously, you would have to grow his food for him. But your chief might also need some people to help him on a full-time basis. For example, the natives might be so dangerous that it would be a good idea for some of you to form a standing army. If so, the rest of you would have to grow food for these soldiers too. But how much extra food should each of you produce, how should it be collected, how much should the recipients receive, and who should keep accounts of what is due and what has been handed over? Some of you would have to become administrators, and the rest of you would have to produce food on their behalf on top of everything else. But then you might find that you needed buildings for the quartering of the soldiers, the filing of administrative records, the storage of grain handed over, and so on; and the soldiers would need arms, clothes and cooking pots, while the administrators would need their pens and writing paper. So some of you would start producing buildings, pots, pans, clothes, arms, writing material and so on over and above your own needs, or indeed specialize in such production in return for some of that food which the soldiers and administrators have received from the rest of you; some would start trading in all these goods, and no doubt others would start specializing in the transmission of skills (e.g. teaching the administrators to read and write). The burden of feeding the artisans, traders and teachers would ultimately also fall on those of you who have remained cultivators. By this stage it is unlikely that you would still be thinking in terms of food and goods rather than a symbolic notation for such things, that is money. And since the ruler (the former chief) and his top military and civil servants would ultimately dispose of all the produce and/or money you hand over (that is, your taxes), they would also have acquired the habit of spending a great deal of it on all those goods and services which, though not directly required by their official functions, nonetheless enhance their status as well as sweeten their lives: sumptuous palaces, beautifully crafted furniture, utensils and instruments, pretty pictures, sculpture, music, poetry and other literature, medical attention and so forth. So some of you would have become artists, poets, musicians, dancers, doctors and other kinds of professionals, and the rest of you would indirectly have to pay for their detachment from the food production too. By now few of you would remember what primitive conditions were like. You would have acquired a state, and political organization would have caused your society to change beyond recognition. By now it would indeed be characterized by social, political, economic and institutional differentiation; and both material and intellectual culture would have become highly developed too. In short, your society would now be described as civilized.

You may well ask at precisely what point your society would be described as civilized rather than primitive, but this is a question to which there can be no one answer: different scholars will choose different cut-off points depending on the use to which they wish to put their definitions. As far as this book is concerned, the question can simply be ignored: the analysis will focus on societies so complex that they have passed the cut-off point by any definition. However, even the most complex version of your island society was an agrarian society rather than an industrial one: agriculture was the source of most of its wealth, manufacture supplying only a little and modern industry being completely absent. The end-product of your second shipwreck, in short, was a pre-industrial society of the civilized kind.

I had better emphasize that the thought experiment should not be taken as an account of how the first civilizations in history arose. For one thing, we landed on our island fully aware of such things as agriculture, writing, administration and government. We reconstituted them in our new setting, but we did not invent them from scratch, and it is by no means obvious that we would have invented them if we had not known about them. With hindsight it is easy to see what needs they fulfil, but needs can be met in different ways, or left unfulfilled, and it is clear from the historical record that special circumstances had to come together in order for the elements of complex organization to emerge. For another thing, the thought experiment completely fails to account for one element of fundamental importance in all human societies (and in the emergence of complex organization too), that is religion. No story in the style of Robinson Crusoe or Lord of the Flies can highlight the factors behind the emergence of religion because humans have religion (or at least a disposition for it) regardless of the type of society in which they live. Obviously, they do not have the same kind of religion in different societies, but there is no way in which we could have varied the conditions on our island so as to explain why they have religion at all: they had religion even before the present human species had evolved. Why this should be so is a fascinating question which cannot be properly discussed in this book, though I shall revert to the subject in chapter 7.

Whatever the circumstances behind the emergence of the first civilizations, however, it is by division of labour that primitive societies develop into complex ones, and this is the point which the thought experiment is meant to illustrate. We assumed that you needed someone to co-ordinate your activities for purposes of defence against outsiders, no more and no less: so some of you undertook to go on cultivating and others undertook to become co-ordinators. This was your first division of labour and its consequences were immense; your society continued to change, and all the subsequent changes were further divisions of labour: more and more people went into special occupations.

In historical fact, some measure of internal differentiation has usually preceded the arrival of state structures, not just followed it; and the arrival of state structures has not always sufficed to push a society through the entire evolution from primitivity to civilization: many have stopped at intermediary points. But the fact remains that rulers are the outcome of specialization (they specialize in power, largely meaning violence) and that this specialization is a crucial ingredient in the development of complex organization. On the one hand, there is a limit to the amount of differentiation a society can undergo without either disintegrating or else arranging for overall co-ordination of its members. The more people differ from one another, the more they come to depend on formal rules for peaceful interaction; and the greater the importance of such rules, the greater the need for an agency capable of enforcing them. States are thus a precondition for all that social, cultural and institutional complexity that we are in the habit of calling civilization. On the other hand, the very fact that rulers are specialists in power means that they are apt utterly to transform the society in which they emerge: states are not just a precondition for, but also an active element in the evolution of civilization. Let us look a bit more closely, then, at precisely what their emergence entails.

The appearance of rulers or, in impersonal terms, the state, means that hitherto dispersed power is concentrated, be it in one man, several or a set of offices adding up to a ruling institution. There were no concentrations of power in our stateless society: we did not even have a chief. Nobody could coerce anyone else, or rather nobody could do so for long. Some might have more forceful personalities, or more relatives and friends, than others, and some might reap good harvests in years of general crop failure; but such advantages were too transitory to make for permanent accumulations of power.

By the same token, nobody had the ability to impose order on everyone else. Enforcement of the rules thus rested on self-help. If you had run away with my water-skin on that island, it would have been up to me to get it back, be it by running after you and beating you up or by persuading friends and relatives to do so. Actually, given that we were so few, it is unlikely that I would have used force: everybody would have tried to persuade the two of us to stop quarrelling, and we would have found it difficult to hold out against everyone else. But if our numbers had multiplied to the point where disputes ceased to be in the nature of family quarrels, I would undoubtedly have had recourse to violence. Naturally, there would have been rules regarding its use: otherwise our society would have collapsed. Primitive societies generally regulate the use of self-help with reference to kinship: who should help whom, under what circumstances and when, turns on how people are related. If we had multiplied on our acephalous island, we would probably have evolved some form of tribal organization too. But primitive societies are never against the use of self-help; on the contrary, they rely on it. They merely try to mitigate the disruptive effects of its use.

By contrast, states necessarily curtail the use of self-help. What we did on our island was essentially to pool our power in a special agency manned by our ruler. In other words, we renounced the use of self-help and empowered someone else to keep order among us: if we disagreed, or if action was needed against the natives, then he had the right to decide what should be done and to coerce us into doing it. If you run away with my computer now on our modern British island, I am neither expected nor allowed to beat you up, and the only people I may ask to use force against you are the police. In fact, the state has been defined as an agency for the maintenance of internal order and external defence distinguished by its monopoly on the right to use force; and this is a helpful definition even if it is not quite correct: feudal states, for example, did not claim such a monopoly, let alone possess the means to enforce it; and states of other kinds have also tolerated self-help on a considerable scale. Other definitions accordingly single out acceptance of a final authority as the essence of statehood: though self-help may persist, the state has the ultimate right to decide what should be done; and though it may not monopolize the use of force, it can mobilize enough means of violence to retain its position as ultimate arbiter. Most definitions specify other features too (notably territoriality: states are demarcated in territorial terms even though they may be, and indeed mostly have been, defined with reference to dynastic, personal or religious loyalties). But whatever the best definition of the state may be, rulers would usually prefer their subjects to be disarmed, except by special licence, and forbidden to use force, except in self-defence (narrowly defined).

The division of labour between producers and maintainers of order is thus one conducive to a highly unequal relationship. Specialization does not always have this effect. If I grow cotton and you grow wheat, the chances are that I will be no more dependent on you than you are on me: the relationship between us will be one of complementarity and interdependence, not simply dependence. And in principle, of course, the same is true if I produce food and you keep order: where would you be if I stopped paying taxes? Where would I be if you let the hostile natives in? But in practice I have specialized in the production of wealth and you in the exercise of power, so that if I stop paying taxes you will react by forcibly extracting them; and if you decide to let the natives in there is little I can do about it. In practice our relationship is thus one in which you are the boss and I am the dependant.

All we wanted, back on our primitive island, was to defend ourselves: we set up some of us as rulers to preserve all of us. But in so doing we have exposed ourselves to what one might call the dilemma of the golden goose: one cannot specialize in the production of wealth (or for that matter children) without becoming both highly desirable and defenceless; the very fact that labour is divided up dictates that gold-bearing creatures are weak. Industrialization greatly modifies this dilemma, and there were occasional societies in pre-industrial times in which food producers retained a measure of political power. To this must be added that there are many different types of power in all human societies (military, economic, political, ideological and many more), so that history never reduces to a simple story of food producers versus rulers; the thought experiment is highly simplistic in its disregard of this fact. But even so, the division of labour from which the state ensued almost invariably transformed the free agriculturalists of primitive society into miserable peasants, that is to say rural cultivators whose surplus was forcibly transferred to a dominant group of rulers. (‘Surplus’ should not be envisaged as something left over or going spare: whatever the state and/or landlords could extract from the peasants in the form of taxes and/or rent is defined as surplus as long as the transfer did not kill off the peasants altogether.)

The sheer emergence of rulers thus differentiates society in terms of power and wealth alike: some are forced to pay and others are empowered to receive in return for political services which may or may not be performed. Contrary to what our thought experiment may suggest, rulers have not commonly owed their existence to social contracts whereby some undertook to grow food for others in return for political services, as opposed to a combination of internal developments and external pressures which caused some to come up on top and the rest to have no choice but to pay. Either way, however, the rulers’ control of the agricultural surplus was crucial for the institutionalization of their power. It was a regular supply of wealth (be it in cash or kind) which allowed them to buy all those military and administrative services which they needed to make their dominance permanent. And it was precisely because their dominance was permanent that society typic...