Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format!
As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal grains (I, II, III, IV) this post is going to briefly discuss some of the key ways that the structures of rice farming differ from the structures of wheat and barley farming. We’ll start with some of the key differences in the mechanics of rice farming itself, before moving into how those differences might motivate different social and economic organization in the countryside, before finally discussing some of the theories as to how rice farming might – or might not – impact larger structures like the state.
As always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click the button below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts, as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or pop-culture thoughts. And if you want to ensure that I can continue to get my rice, you can support me on Patreon.
(Quick bibliographic aside: I relied primary for this on Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (1980) and F. Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986) which were recommended to me by specialists in the field. The latter is a wealth of technical details on rice cultivation, although it is as focused on the transition to mechanization and modern agriculture as to the conditions of pre-modern rice cultivation.)
Rice Cultivation
We want to start with the rice cultivation process. There are a lot of varieties of rice out there, but the key divide we want to make early is between dry-rice and wet-rice. When we’re talking about ‘rice cultures’ or ‘rice agriculture,’ generally, we mean wet-rice farming, where the rice is partially submerged during its growing. Wild rice, as far as we can tell, began as a swamp-grass and thus likes to have quite a lot of water around, although precisely controlling the water availability can lead the rice to be a lot more productive than it would be in its natural habitat. While there are varieties of rice which can be (and are) farmed ‘dry’ (that is, in unflooded fields much like wheat and barley are farmed), the vast majority of rice farming is ‘wet.’ As with grains, this is not merely a matter of different methods of farming, but of different varieties of rice that have been adapted to that farming; varieties of dry-rice and wet-rice have been selectively bred over millennia to perform best in those environments.
Wet-rice is farmed in paddies, small fields (often very small – some Chinese agronomists write that the ideal size for an individual rice field is around 0.1 hectare, which is just 0.24 acres) surrounded by low ‘bunds’ (small earthwork walls or dykes) to keep in the water, typically around two feet high. Because controlling the water level is crucial, rice paddies must be very precisely flat, leading to even relatively gentle slopes often being terraced to create a series of flat fields. Each of these rice paddies (and there will be many because they are so small) are then connected by irrigation canals which channel and control the water in what is often a quite complex system.
The exact timing of rice production is more complex than wheat because a single paddy often sees two crops in a year and the exact planting times vary between areas; one common cycle on the Yangtze is for a February planting (with a June harvest) followed by a June planting (with a November harvest). In other areas, paddies planted with rice during the first planting might be drained and sown with a different plant entirely (sometimes including wheat) in the intervening time.
The cycle runs thusly: after the heavy rains of the monsoons (if available), the field is tilled (or plowed, but as we’ll see, manual tillage is often more common). The seed is then sown (or transplanted) and the field is, using the irrigation system, lightly flooded, so that the young seedlings grow in standing water. Sometimes the seed is initially planted in a dedicated seed-bed and then transferred to the field, rather than being sown there directly; doing so has a positive impact on yields, but is substantially more labor intensive. The water level is raised as the plant grows; agian this is labor intensive, but increases yields. Just before the harvest the fields are drained out and allowed to dry out, before the crop is harvested and then goes into processing.
Rice is threshed much like grain (more often manually threshed and generally not threshed with flails) to release the seeds, the individual rice grains, from the plant. That is going to free the endosperm of the speed, along with a hull around it and a layer of bran between the two. Hulling was traditionally done by hand-pounding, which frees the seed from the hull, leaving just the endosperm and some of the bran; this is how you get brown rice, which is essentially ‘whole-grain’ rice. While it is generally less tasty, the bran actually has quite a lot of nutrients not present in the calorie-rich endosperm. Whereas white rice is produced by then milling or polishing away the bran to produce a pure, white kernal of the endosperm; it is very tasty, but lacks many of the vitamins that brown rice has.
Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
Farmer Terrain
Because rice is such a different crop than wheat or barley, there are a lot of differences in the way that rice cultivation shapes the countryside. We’ll move here from the relatively direct impacts on the organization of farmers and then discuss the more speculative impacts on the organization of whole societies.
The thing to note about rice is that it is both much more productive on a per-acre basis than wheat or barley, but also much more labor intensive; it also relies on different forms of capital to be productive. Whole-grain wheat and brown rice have similar calorie and nutritional value (brown rice is somewhat better in most categories) on a unit-weight basis (so, per pound or ton), but the yield difference is fairly large: rice is typically around (very roughly) 50% more productive per acre than wheat. Moreover, rice plants have a more favorable ratio of seeds-to-plants, meaning that the demand to put away seeds for the next harvest is easier – whereas crop-to-seed ratios on pre-modern wheat range from 3:1 to 10:1, rice can achieve figures as high as 100:1. As a result, not only is the gross yield higher (that is, more tons of seed per field) but a lower percentage of that seed has to be saved for the next planting.
At the same time, the irrigation demands for effective production of wet-rice requires a lot of labor to build and maintain. Fields need to be flooded and drained; in some cases (particularly pre-modern terrace farming) this may involve moving the water manually, in buckets, from lower fields to higher ones. Irrigation canals connecting paddies can make this job somewhat easier, as can bucket-lifts (there’s a picture of a simple one below), but that still demands moving quite a lot of water. In any irrigation system, the bunds need to be maintained and the water level carefully controlled, with also involves potentially quite a lot of labor.
The consequence of all of this is that while the rice farming household seems to be roughly the same size as the wheat-farming household (that is, an extended family unit of variable size, but typically around 8 or so members), the farm is much smaller, with common household farm sizes, even in the modern period, clustering around 1 hectare (2.47 acres) in comparison to the standard household wheat farms clustered around 4-6 acres (which, you may note with the yield figures above, lands us right back at around the same subsistence standard).
Moreover, rice cultivation is less soil dependent (but more water dependent) because wet-rice farming both encourages nitrogen fixation in the soil (maintaining the fertility of it generally without expensive manure use) and because rice farming leads naturally to a process known as pozdolisation, slowly converting the underlying soil over a few years to a set of characteristics which are more favorable for more rice cultivation. So whereas with wheat cultivation, where you often have clumps of marginal land (soil that is too wet, too dry, too rocky, too acidic, too uneven, too heavily forested, and so on), rice cultivation tends to be able to make use of almost any land where there is sufficient water (although terracing may be needed to level out the land). The reliance on the rice itself to ‘terraform’ its own fields does mean that new rice fields tended to under-produce for the first few years.
The result of this, so far as I can tell, is that in well-watered areas, like much of South China, the human landscape that is created by pre-modern rice cultivation is both more dense and more uniform in its density; large zones of very dense rice cultivation rather than pockets of villages separated by sparsely inhabited forests or pasture. Indeed, pasture in particular seems in most cases almost entirely pushed out by rice cultivation. That has very significant implications for warfare and I have to admit that in reading about rice farming for this post, I had one of those “oh!” moments of sudden understanding – in this case, how armies in pre-modern China could be so large and achieve such massive local concentrations. But as we’ve discussed, the size of an army is mainly constrained by logistics and the key factor here is the ability to forage food locally, which is in turn a product of local population density. If you effectively double (or more!) the population density, the maximum size of a local army also dramatically increases (and at the same time, a society which is even more concentrated around rivers is also likelier to allow for riverine logistics, which further improves the logistical situation for mass armies).
But it also goes to the difficulty many Chinese states experienced in maintaining large and effective cavalry arms without becoming reliant on Steppe peoples for horses. Unlike Europe or the Near East, where there are spots of good horse country here and there, often less suited to intensive wheat cultivation, most horse-pasturage in the rice-farming zone could have – and was – turned over to far more productive rice cultivation. Indeed, rice cultivation seems to have been so productive and suitable to a sufficient range of lands that it could push out a lot of other kinds of land-use, somewhat flattening the ‘ideal city‘ model that assumed wheat and barley cultivation.
Labor Relations
Moving to the next level of abstraction, pre-modern rice cultivation also relies to different degrees on labor as compared to capital inputs (like work animals) compared to wheat cultivation, which in turn seems to lead to different patterns in the status of farmers and their relationship to large landholders (I say seems because I’d like to see more studies, but I should note that what I am laying out here is a key argument of Bray, op. cit.).
We’ve discussed how wheat (and barley) cultivation is pretty dependent on the availability of work animals to draw plows and provide manure, both of which can significantly increase the productivity of the farm. As discussed above, rice cultivation, while it can benefit from fertilizer (especially more modern ‘fast growing’ rice varieties), but isn’t nearly as dependent on manuring as intensive wheat cultivation can be. At the same time, deep plowing could actually be counter-productive in a rice paddy, because the plow could break up or cut through the hardpan at the base of the soil which prevents the water from simply draining out into the water-table. Consequently, while effective plows emerge in China in the fourth century AD, they tend to be shallow and thus less reliant on animal traction (which consequently caused Westerners seeing Chinese agriculture to assume it was ‘primitive,’ which seems more than a little silly given that those shallow plows were managing higher yields than contemporary pre-modern or early-modern Western agriculture); hoe-farming is also common, especially because the extensiveness of rice farming discussed above often means that pasture for traction animals was scarce, but manpower was abundant.
On top of this, while both rice and cereal grains have to be threshed and winnowed in fairly similar processes, the subsequent processing is quite different. Where wheat and barley are milled down to a powder (flour), rice is generally pounded and sometimes polished. Rice processing of this sort seems generally to have been done with much smaller rice pounders made of common materials available to poorer farmers. Consequently while the pre-modern wheat farmer might be reliant on a mill owned by a local miller, large landholder or even the state, the rice farmer was less reliant on this form of outside capital.
At the same time, the high productivity of rice production meant that labor was relatively abundant in the countryside, as households could subsist on much smaller farmers. But this in turn seems to have shaped the development of rice farming techniques. Wheat- and barley-farming technologies (plows, mills, mechanization) tend to act as labor substitutes, allowing a given amount of labor to farm more land and thus produce more food. In effect, the goal here is to substitute scarce labor and sometimes scarce land with capital. In contrast, increasingly sophisticated rice-farming technologies (and I do want to stress – rice farming gets quite sophisticated in the pre-modern, especially with complex irrigation systems) focused on ways that more labor can be employed to produce more food out of the same amount of land and capital.
As a consequence of this, Bray argues, we see different patterns of relationships between the landholding elites and the small farmers. Because the small rice farmer was less reliant on the capital of the large landholder (in the form of plow-teams, manure and mills), while the large landholder was more reliant on the labor of the small farmer (because rice cultivation was so labor intensive), rice farmers tended to get a somewhat better deal. While we see the same range of farming relationships, from smallholding free-farmers to non-free farmers, Bray notes that systems of tenancy dominate the rice-farming countryside in the great majority of places where rice cultivation has long predominated. That’s not to say that being a small rice farmer was fantastic – fewer rice farmers seem to have been serfs or slaves, but at the same time, fewer rice farmers seem to have owned their own farms. And landlords in rice economies were still in a commanding position, in no small part because all of that labor went into what were essentially capital improvements (irrigation and the paddies) to land that they, not the farmer, owned.
Nevertheless, tenancy conditions tended to be more favorable in rice-farming areas than in wheat-farming ones, with a lower portion of the total harvest going to the landlord. Thus the irony that precisely because labor was so abundant, rice farming tended towards labor-intensive methods and solutions, which in turn improved returns to labor (compared to returns to capital), putting the small farmers, despite their abundance, in a marginally better bargaining position.
Hydraulic Empires?
Now we reach the more speculative end of the discussion and I know that at least some of you reading that section title cringed a little bit. Let’s indulge in some intellectual history (or the fancy term ‘historiography’ which is the history of the history, as it were).
Writing in 1957, Karl August Wittfogel published Oriental Despotism, which argued that the common thread between ‘oriental’ states (which was to include Egypt, Mesopotamia, Alexander’s Empire, the Abbasids, all of freakin’ China, among others) was that they were systems of “total” state power and control (thus ‘despotic’) and that this total power was a consequence of “hydraulic despotism” with certain definable characteristics. Moreover, he argued that these systems of power were functionally impervious to internal disruption or fragmentation (only to outside invasion). it is a basic thesis that still seems to crop up from time to time in the popular imagination and even among intellectuals who should know better. Naturally, the assumption here is that if irrigation-oriented agriculture leads to ‘hydraulic despotism’ then rice (particularly wet-rice, being by far the most common and most productive form), the quintessential irrigation-only-crop, ought also to be associated with ‘despotism.’
This thesis, influential in its day, has not stood up well at all to improved study of many of these places. Perhaps most notably, scholarship on almost all of the supposed ‘hydraulic despotisms’ has tended to draw their despotic nature into question. For one example, Achaemenid rule, often presented as the paradigmatic example of ‘Eastern Despotism’ (which is certainly how the Greeks viewed it, but no one thinks well of their imperial neighbors), on closer inspection seems if anything to have allowed quite a significant degree of local autonomy. The Great King was often a less ‘despotic’ overlord than the Athenian Assembly, if one had to choose who to be a subject to. Likewise, the study of pre-Achaemenid economic systems in Egypt and Mesopotamia over the last 50 years have tended to peel back the idea that the state dominated the economy and society to the exclusion of all other factors; in many ways this is a steady series of victories for the archaeologists whose efforts allow us to ‘see’ the commoners and their activities more clearly. And in almost all of the supposed ‘hydraulic’ societies, the last several decades have seen quiet revolutions in the scholarship brought on by increased exposure to the local sources, rather than reliance on what European-language sources said about these societies from the outside.
Moreover, our better understanding of the chronology of these states has tended to undermine Wittfogel’s assertion that state formation itself was caused by the demands of canal-building and irrigation (I discuss what I consider a far more compelling model of state-formation-through-agrarian-warfare here). And the supposition that supposed hydraulic empires never crack up from the inside or fragment is one that can only be made at great remove; close inspection of almost any of these societies show them as doing exactly that thing, often several times. China, in particular, is both Wittfogel’s key paradigmatic example and also a real problem for his model: no dominating established priesthood, frequent peasant rebellions and multiple periods of significant fragmentation. And to top it off, not clearly ‘despotic’ in any particular sense (in many cases the supposed essential ‘despotism’ of China relies on assuming the great antiquity of things which were peculiar to the Qing Dynasty – themselves not an indigenous ‘hydraulic’ dynasty but an ethnically distinct foreign one – or the modern Chinese state). Thus key parts of Wittfogel’s argument about supposed ‘hydraulic societies’ engaging in ‘the Asiatic mode of production’ (as an aside – any theory which asserts an ‘Asiatic’ mode of anything is pretty much guaranteed to be nonsense; Asia is, as veteran Risk players will know, very big and consequently extremely diverse) seem more premised on outdated exoticizing stereotypes about ‘despotic easterners’ and less on the actual history of the many societies of Asia.
Which isn’t to say that I think the changes brought on by rice cultivation have no effect at all. Once we dispense with simplistic, outdated stereotypes about ‘despotism’ (which has more to do with state behavior than state capacity), it is still possible to note that rice cultivation can create areas of much higher population density with a greater degree of agricultural surplus. For pre-modern states, which are essentially extractive ventures that feed off of the surplus of the countryside, it is not hard to see how a compact, effectively immobile surplus-generating population positioned along often navigable waterways would provide a very strong starting ‘base’ compared to a more diffused population (as in much of Europe). Though even that needs caveats, given that the earliest centralized governments in China emerged not in the rice-farming south, but in the wheat-farming north.
The issue may be less about control of water than about density, distance and communication; we’ve already seen the scale of difficulties of trying to move over a large land-based empire (unless you are Steppe nomads with a completely different subsistence system). It’s hard not to notice how, even after periods of fragmentation, states in places like Egypt, Mesopotamia and China keep forming around the large, navigable rivers that bind the region together (but note that while sloppy scholarship often presents this as if the same state is reemerging over and over again, these are in fact often very different states occupying the same place).
It does seem to be the case, at least from my limited reading, that rice cultivation does tend to shift power away from the large landholding class as compared to wheat farming. Sometimes that power went to the officials of the state who might be directly managing large-scale irrigation and water networks; sometimes, as Bray notes, it went down to the farmers, who might be communally managing water supply (often through long-established understandings with local elites which carried the force of tradition and custom) and whose labor commanded a greater portion of the value of their production. Rice cultivation may contribute to more centralized states (which is not the same this as more despotic ones), but honestly I haven’t seen what I’d consider ‘slam dunk’ scholarship on this point yet.
All of which is to say that while there are some quite importance differences in pre-modern subsistence agriculture with rice rather than with wheat, many of the basic patterns reassert themselves. Poor farmers, often trapped in tenancy or effective debt peonage are common, they appear to frequently rely heavily on horizontal social networks and vertical ties instead of heavy involvement in the market economy as a way of minimizing risk and the living standards, judged by nutrition, are broadly similar. I haven’t gotten into it here, but even in economies where rice dominates, farmers diversify both between different crops and even different varieties of rice to minimize risk, just as our wheat-farmers do.
Thanks for the answer about “hydraulic empire”.
Typo:
“(which, you may not with the yield figures above, lands us right back at around the same subsistence standard).”
You may not what? See?
Fixed
– pozdolisation (podzol);
– households could subsist on much smaller farmers => farms
I liked the second one, actually; it brought to mind an image of a young Chinese woman going husband-shopping and picking out the shortest as requiring the least feeding.
True, but not real. (I was reading the work on a sociologist working in Communist China and he carefully noted that all the women he used as informants had actually met their husbands before the wedding, which was an innovation.)
Couple more:
“with also involves” -> “which”
“could have – and was – turned over” -> “could be” or “could have been”
“rice cultivation, while it…, but isn’t nearly as dependent” -> “, isn’t”
“rice farming gets quite sophisticated in the pre-modern,” -> “pre-modern period”?
“which is not the same this as more despotic ones” -> “same thing”
In addition to proofreading corrections noted by my fellow commenters, I will add the following:
agian this is labor intensive –> again this is labor intensive
are drained out and allowed to dry out –> (delete first instance of out /?)
Caption for watering a rice field: from am album of images –> from an album
invasion). it is a basic thesis –> invasion). It is . . .
some quite importance differences –> some quite important differences
peonage are common, they appear to –> peonage(insert comma) are common. They appear to
minimizing risk and the living –> minimizing risk(insert comma) and the living
Hi, I am ethnic chinese from Singapore. One big difference between rice and wheat is that rice does not need to be milled or baked. Once husked and dried, it can be stored in pretty indefinitely in home conditions, and cooked at home. Hence the small peasant is much more independent of millers and bakers. Also, the rice fields grow frogs and small fish which provide supplementary protein. In fact, frog as a foodstuff is called 田鸡， literally paddy-chicken.
Is the Chinese character for rice paddy a picture of a field divided into four paddies?
It sure is! In Japanese, which uses the Chinese characters, that character usually is pronounced as “da” or “ta” and is a part of a LOT of Japanese names. The “ta” in “Toyota” and “da” in “Honda” are both for the same rice paddy character since both manufacturers were named for their founders.
Technically speaking, wheat does not need to be milled and baked. In many places that method is vastly preferred, but the whole wheat grains can also simply be dried, stored, and later boiled. In ancient Rome, this was the most popular way of eating grains before the widespread popularisation of bread. Today, whole durum wheat is commonly cooked in parts of the middle east.
You can bake your own bread at home. It’s quite simple and not labor-intensive, but before the development of modern yeast and sugar you might have to wait a long time for the dough to rise and so it’s a two day affair.
Or you can do flatbread/pancakes/dumplings and skip the rising.
“brown rice is somewhat better in most categories”
Except protein, where wheat has nearly twice the protein content of brown rice.
Great article, as usual! It reminds me of something admittedly a bit silly. I’ve been playing Six Ages again, and one of the gods in the setting, Shargash, is this fire associated deity; he was apparently originally an agricultural one, how he would be the one invoked to burn away tree stumps and other obstructions to help in dry rice farming (and was married to a “Rice Wife”), but then one day he married ‘River wife’ and everything changed, he became less and less of an agricultural deity and more and more about raging, barely controlled fires, and shifted his aspect into a war god.
India also had issues with horses — no land that could be dedicated to grazing. Had to be imported luxuries.
Only for later Indian history, when most pastural land had been converted to arable land. Otherwise, not true.
I’ve been researching Indo-European migration for school and it appears that they entered India looking for pastural land (both horses and cattle) and found plenty, enough to give horses a rather elevated position. It was due to the constant expansion of agricultural land, the loss of grassland, and the human consumption of the same foodgrains that horses consumed that got rid of India’s dedicated horse pastures. This took centuries to happen. Same with the gradual depletion of jungles/forests and the death due to hunting that constantly reduced the numbers of elephants suitable for war.
And logistically, requring horses to be fed with the same grains that humans ate made it all the more expensive to keep them, so horse-breeding was a very limited speciality in India. It appears that as a result, horse-carts were largely confined to cities and urban areas where there was an aristocracy willing to pay for the upkeep of horses while bullock-carts were used for pretty much everything else – it’s also a pattern you see in China where horses were closest to the Steppe pastures and became progressively rarer as you went south and into the rice-growing areas.
Cattle of course, never had the same issues as horses because they’re ruminants, and they’ve always been able to eat the parts of plants that horses found indigestible. Indian farmers in particular used cattle for plowing and fed them off the inedible husks and stalks of the rice when they couldn’t take them out to pasture in marginal lands. I don’t know if it’s because of soil conditions but Indian cattle are used for plowing by farmers who can afford them.
Much like China, the Indian subcontinent has a north-south distinction with rice and wheat growing with the Punjab and Doab regions having large wheat fields, the deltas and coastlands across peninsular India having rice fields and other areas like hills and marginal lands growing millets (I believe that the Chinese do the same thing in hills?).
“Centuries” is less of history than it may seem at first, given the history goes back millennia.
Doesn’t the theory about an Asiatic mode of production and the concomitant “Oriental despotism” go back a lot further than 1957, at least to Marx and Engels?
More to Engels than Marx I think. Stalin on the other hand did not like Engels theories of how Asian despotic systems, where the economy was run by a central bureaucracy and the ideological superstructure was the deification of the ruler, was an historical dead end.
>Stalin on the other hand did not like Engels theories of how Asian despotic systems, where the economy was run by a central bureaucracy and the ideological superstructure was the deification of the ruler, was an historical dead end.
No wonder why.
Extrapolating wildly from your discussion at the end, I wonder if there’s something to the suggestion that rice cultivation tends to lead to a weaker aristocracy/gentry. That is, if you are a premodern aristocrat writing history, or a non-aristocrat writing history under the patronage of an aristocrat, a system in which aristocrats are weaker vis-à-vis the central state could SEEM “despotic” even if the state’s power over ordinary people is no different.
Obviously one can’t and shouldn’t generalize broadly, much less over an entire continent. It just makes me wonder whether there was a kernel of fact behind the old stereotypes that we have just interpreted backwards.
*looks at Japan*
China still had a class of landed gentry, but they weren’t warrior-aristocrats as in Europe. In China, they were “scholar-gentry” – aristocrats who used their expansive free time to study the classics, learn calligraphy, and prepare for the civil service exams.
Of course, part of their study was military theory, so you still got a crop of officers out of the deal.
The discussion about historical relative use of capital vs. labor in agricultural productivity reminded me of this graph looking at the same in modern times (1960s to 2000s):
https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1027907529555234818/photo/1
It’s a plot of productivity per worker vs. productivity per land area for various regions over time. You still see some of the same patterns discussed here.
Thanks for a very interesting article!
Officials managing water control can best be understood as flood control, something that occupies a very high importance even today, as the Three Gorges Dam is currently under threat.
I’ve read that management of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers was assigned to high officials in the Ming dynasty and I’m sure that it began much much earlier. I’ve read that flooding was recognized as an existential threat to the security of the current dynasty, and prevention absorbed a lot of thought and resources, especially peasant labor. Since the state didn’t compensate for this work you can be sure it wasn’t always popular.
I wonder if that was a factor in the origin of the “hydraulic despotism” arguments. It seems like this might have started from a kernel of truth and then was just slapped over to vast regions to make a more compelling argument.
Flood control was basically the key, foundational myth of the Chinese imperial system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Yao or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China).
Naturally, given that earliest China was a river civilization around the (northern) Yellow River, which floods a lot, it’s not surprising that flood control and response should’ve been an important feature of early Chinese states. That said, it’s not like the Rhine or the Po don’t pose flood risks too–the ‘hydraulic despotism’ argument definitely just sounds like European exceptionalism with a thin gloss of geographic justification.
“tended to peel back the idea that the state dominated the economy and society to the exclusion of all other factors”
What are the factors given more room by modern scholarship? Markets? Household leisure?
I remember reading in Plagues and People by McNeil that wading around in rice paddies is a good way to get parasites so wet rice farming tended to cause more health problems than farming other grains.
Few other comments:
-There have been comments about how you have to mill and bake wheat, but what about bulgur? Perfectly easy to eat wheat without milling it. Does that reduce the calorie content or something?
-Historically in Korea rice was more expensive than some other grains such as millet and eating pure rice was seen as more high class. So once people got a bit richer it became more popular to eat pure rice without it being mixed with other grains so you got more of a focus on rice farming despite the dictatorship trying to mandate that restaurant rice be only 50% rice for a while. Did similar things happen in other countries?
-While there is terrace farming in Korea it’s a LOT less widespread than elsewhere despite the country being incredibly hilly. I wonder why.
-Bread etc. cooked with rice flour is really chewy, old fashioned donuts with a bit of rice flour are really good.
Veteran Risk player!
Hmm. This piece jogged a vague memory of reading about Tenochtitlan in Central America, built in a lake, and with farming taking place in plots surrounded by canals. I’m not sure if they grew rice there though.
That’s chinampa agriculture. Practiced in Yucatan by the Maya too. The muck from the canal bottoms is dredged up to fertilise the fields. Very productive, but not rice. Beans and squash.
Ah, right. Thank you. 🙂
Well, they could hardly have grown rice there before Cortez arrived, but did no one try after rice had turned up?
Beans and squash, yes, but most importantly maize. Also tomatoes, chile peppers, amaranth, etc.
god, if we could get a back of the envelope/speculative comparison applying this kind of analysis to Mesoamerican crops it would make me soooo happy
Peter Watson’s The Great Divide covers some of this territory, IIRC.
If you go to Sichuan, there is a 2000 year old irrigation project that is a big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan
The ability of the state to prevent flooding and ensure a good harvest is now sort of a fable here.
Bret–this is a belated comment, but–I found myself momentarily misled by the beginning of this sentence: Wild rice, as far as we can tell, began as a swamp-grass and thus likes to have quite a lot of water around. The problem being, that there is a completely different grain (consumed as a delicacy in the US) not directly related to Asian rice, called “wild rice,” and this is what I thought you referred to until I had read further.
It was Bertrand Russell who wrote of Hegel “World history, in fact, has advanced through the categories, from
Pure Being in China (of which Hegel knew nothing except that it was)”- Hiostory of Western Philosophy.
Relating to the bread and grain series of posts, when the calculations are made for food required by a family, and how large of a population an area can support, how do you estimate the caloric requirements? I can’t imagine the 2000-2500 kcal of modern life would even be close to enough for an individual engaged in manual labor and something closer to 6000 kcal per day would be required.
I believe you’ve mentioned before in other posts that the daily rations for Roman soldiers are fairly well documented (at least during certain periods), so is that a starting point?
As an aside I thought I remember reading that in pre-revolutionary France (right before the grain shortages) that the average french peasant consumed around 2lbs (5.12 kg? Sorry, coversion off the top of my head…) of bread per day.
A fiddly, complex question with multiple possible interpretations that ate up roughly 600 words and 5 footnotes in my dissertation.
The short version is that you have two options: compute from modern nutritional guidelines or compute from ancient rations. Contrary to what you might expect, the former is higher than the later, though not by much – so it doesn’t seem like ancient manual laborers required huge diets.
6k is waaaay to high. 3K calories is enough to get some people through a marathon and no one was putting in THAT much effort day after day.
Also pre-modern people weighed less which means fewer calories to keep going.
Agreed. Polar explorers man-hauling sledges were burning 6500 kcal (“calories”) per day.
Yes. The biggest calorie burn is maintaining your system; exercise is the frosting on the cake.
To be sure, they would be more muscle and less fat than modern man, and muscle requires more calories, but still enough that the calorie intake would be less.
I once saw 6k as a figure for workers in heavy industry. So mining, steel mills, concrete factory etc. At lot of automation happened since then. But moving heavy weights in great heat, would explain the extremly high number.
Sorry for the very late answer, but maybe you are still reading this.
The only time I saw 6000kcal requirements for modern workers, it was for steel mill workers.
Steel mill workers will have very different requirements, than subsitence farmers. First the obvious, farmers have a couple of times of heavy work during the year (tilling, harvest) and times relative leisure. Keeping up a consitence diet year round, will probably get you through the exhaussting times. Steel mill workers have about the same workload year round. Notice though that eating like somebody who threshes grain (Fressen wie ein Scheunendrescher) is an old saw for overeating in German. So we can assume that subsistence farmers had an higher than average calloric requirement during harvest.
Also steel mill worker will spend a lot more calories on temperature regulation, than almost any other demographic.
Janet Macdonald (‘Feeding Nelson’s Navy) calculates the average calories provided by the issued ration at just under 5000 per day. This was for young men doing heavy labour in unheated ships. It was acknowledged as generous – certainly better than what they would have had by land (although not as balanced, given the preserving technologies at the time). At a guess, 3500 calories/day would be closer to what people needed.
Comparison with moderns is fraught – we don’t work outdoors, live in unheated houses and we have better clothes.
Terminology note if you need to do a literature search:
Wet rice cultivation is also called “flooded” or “paddy” or “lowland” cultivation. The latter term’s origin is clear when you remember that water runs downhill *G*, but it’s misleading, as is clearly visible from enormous terraced slopes with rice paddies located hundreds of metres above the valley floor. Dry cultivation is often called “rain-fed” or “upland” cultivation. Upland, again, follows the logic that water runs downhill and again, it’s misleading because you can have dry areas downslope and midslope, depending on soils and topography and how you’ve created your fields and how easy it is to divert runoff into fields that would otherwise remain dry. Both may be called “irrigated” cultivation, depending on how water is supplied and how much.
(Sources: I work with Japanese rice geneticists, and these are the terms they use to describe their rice systems and cultivars.)
Fascinating, and good to have what sounded like an unrelated concept that’s been floating around in my head so clearly articulated.
I was worried recently about some of the news coverage of behaviour during the covid-19 lockdown in some of our poorest areas here in the UK. There was a quote which caught the public attention which said ‘there’s no lockdown here’, which people railed against. It occurred to me that the people living in these areas are mostly living ‘hand to mouth’, which must require significant social investments in their neighbours in order to mitigate against personal misfortune. You just can’t maintain that level of social capital while you’re stuck inside your house not contacting anyone, meaning these people have no choice but to weight the risk of a largely non-fatal disease against the very real risks of homelessness, malnutrition and increased risk of dying from non-fatal diseases (such as covid-19). Against that, I can see why people didn’t lock themselves away in their homes.
The fascinating things history can teach us about the present day!
Apologies, replied to the wrong post!
Though now we know while fatalities are low morbidity is actually very high with long Covid, respiratory issues, cardiac issues, and clots and those consequences. Which would now make that calculus of infection vs hunger much more complicated, for those who know of this.
I do want to note that the Chinese created a large centralized empire before they mass cultivated rice. The early chinese dynasties, most notable the Han, were centered around (and the population density was much higher) the Yellow River and not the Yangtze, and cultivated wheat grain. And still had large centralized armies (at least until the later Han power transitioned into the hands of local elite and the empire fragmented)
It isn’t until later dynasties that population shifts south (in a sort of colonization/refugee crisis from chaos in the north). But politically northern chinese cities still trended to being the capitol of the empire even after the population density started to favor southern China.
A very tardy question: why did rice cultivation never take off in Europe? Too dry?
I’m no expert but I note that even in China rice is mostly in the south, the Yangtze river valley; the northern Yellow river grows wheat or millet.
And rice has been grown in Europe, mostly in southern drained swamps. http://ricepedia.org/rice-around-the-world/europe
“Rice was introduced in Greece following Alexander the Great’s expedition to Asia, as far as the banks of the Indus, in about 320 B.C. The Arabs introduced rice in the south of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century.”
“each region has developed its own rice culinary specialities: riz au gras in the Camargue, the many Milan-style risottos in Italy, and the paella valenciana in Spain”
“European rice-growing areas resulted from the drainage of regions long considered as being unhealthy and inhospitable (the deltas of major rivers and alluvial plains) but that had abundant water resources. Rice was introduced, after substantial development work, as a “pioneer” crop that leaches the soil, making it suitable for other crops (grapevines and grain crops).”
“Italy is the leading European producer with a total of 220,000 ha under rice. ”
“All these rice-growing areas are at the northern limit of the natural rice cultivation zone and suffer from the same constraints: a short cultural season [culture as in cultivation, not culture as in society] (May to September), low temperatures at the extremities of the cycle, and irregular sunshine and harvests frequently hindered by rain.”
So you have introduction thousands of years later, at the edge of climatic feasibility, to a region that already had perfectly good crops, and the new crop takes lots of water and labor to cultivate.
Recall how far north Europe is. Venice is 45°, Rome is 42° north, Naples 41°, Beijing 39°, Nanjing 32°.
Thanks!
I’m expanding a bit on this guy’s question because I’m trying to figure out worldbuilding questions: If rice only made it to Europe after Alexander’s campaigns it makes sense that places like the the Nile and Tigris and Euphrates would have grown wheat and barley before that point, but did those more southerly rivers ever switch to growing rice during the periods in which Roman rule took place? Or after? Why or why not?
Is the thing that makes a major river suitable or unsuitable for rice cultivation purely a matter of how close to the equator it is, or is there some characteristic related to river flooding that affects suitability for major rice farming?
I was considering worldbuilding an empire recovering from a period of fragmentation, located along a major river system with a lot of large tributaries feeding into it, sort of Mississippi-adjacent in shape, for a thing I’m thinking of writing. Is the Mississippi not used much for rice farming because of the distance to the equator, or because it was colonized by a culture which prefers other crops, or because the way the tributary system feeds water into it creates unsuitable flooding patterns along much of the length?
More particular question: why would they switch? Rice farming take different skills (managing flooding and you can’t plow too deeply) than wheat farming and requires a lot more labor. Romans, with deep plows and used to the labor demands of wheat and barley, could well have experimented with rice, ruined it by plowing too deeply (or checking returns before the land could be properly terraformed) and concluded that rice wasn’t worth it when you could grow wheat or barley.
The notion of someone looking at the history of China and believing that it never broke up internally made me cackle. “What’s long united must divide, what’s long divided must unite.”
Surprised noone has yet pointed out ‘as households could subsist on much smaller farmers.’
Hobbits? 🙂
The first thing that sprang to mind about this rice and despotic states and maybe weak big landowners thing is the Philippines. To my knowledge they grow lots of rice, and they have a strong tradition of local and regional Big Men, and not so much a centralised State, until the Spanish more or less pushed them into that. And even then it appears to be rather superficially. Also Java, although that seems to have had several instances of more or less larger states before the Dutch arrived..