This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our model farming families under basically ideal conditions: relatively good yields and effectively infinite land.
This week we’re going to start peeling back those assumptions in light of the very small farm-sizes and capital availability our pre-modern peasants had. Last week we found that, assuming effectively infinite land and reasonably high yields, our farmers produced enough to maintain their households fairly securely in relative comfort, with enough surplus over even their respectability needs to potentially support a small population of non-farmers. But of course land isn’t infinite and also isn’t free and on top of that, the societies in which our peasant farmers live are often built to extract as much surplus from the peasantry as possible.
But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
It is also a useful reminder that tenancy wasn’t just an economic system, but a social one: it gave the Big Man and his agents tremendous power over the lives and livelihoods of the people who lives near the Big Man’s estates. For very Big Men, they might have several such estates and so be absentee landlords, in which case not only the Big Man, but his steward, might be figures of substantial power locally.
Land Holdings
Returning to where we left off last week, we found that our model families could comfortably exceed their subsistence and ‘respectability’ needs with the labor they had assuming they had enough land (and other capital) to employ all of their available farming labor. However, attentive readers will have noticed that the labor of these families could work a lot of land: 30.5 acres for The Smalls, 33.6 acres for The Middles and 56 acres for The Biggs. That may not seem large by the standards of modern commercial farms, but few peasants had anything like such large landholdings; even rich peasants rarely owned so much.
We might compare, for instance, the land allotments of Macedonian and Greek military settlers in the Hellenistic kingdoms (particularly Egypt, where our evidence is good). These settlers were remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings are trying to do is create a new class of Greco-Macedonian rentier-elites1 as a new ethnically defined military ruling-class which would support their new monarchies. In Egypt, where we can see most clearly, infantrymen generally received 25 or 30 arourai (17 or 20.4 acres), while cavalrymen, socially higher up still, generally received 100 arourai (68 acres).2 That infantry allotment is still anywhere from two thirds to less than half of what our model families can farm and yet was still large enough, as far as we can tell, to enable Ptolemaic Greco-Macedonian soldiers to live as rentier-elites, subsisting primarily if not entirely off of rents and the labor of others.3
Alternately, considering late medieval Europe through the study of Saint-Thibery,4 out of 189 households in 1460 in the village just fifteen households are in the same neighborhood of landholdings as the Smalls’ 33.6 acres above (so roughly 55 setérée and up)5 only six as much as The Biggs (about 90 setérée and up). In short our assessment so far has assumed our families are extremely rich peasants. But of course they almost certainly are not!
Instead, as we noted in our first part, the average size of peasant landholdings was extremely small. Typical Roman landholdings were around 5-10 iugera (3.12-6.23 acres), in wheat-farming pre-Han northern China roughly 100 mu (4.764 acres), in Ptolemaic Egypt (for the indigenous, non-elite population) probably 5-10 aroura (3.4-6.8 acres) and so on.6 In Saint-Thibery in Languedoc, the average (mean) farm size was about 24 setérée (~14.5 acres) but the more useful median farm size was just five setérée (~3 acres); the average is obviously quite distorted by the handful of households with hundreds of setérée of land.
So we might test three different farm sizes; once again, I am going to use Roman units because that’s how I am doing my background math. We might posit a relatively a poor household farm of roughly three iugera (1.85 acres). In Saint-Thibery, 68 of the 189 households (36%) had land holdings this small or smaller, so this is not an unreasonable ‘poor household’ – indeed, we could posit much poorer, but then we’re really just talking about tenant farmers, rather than freeholding peasants. Next, we can posit a moderate household farm of roughly six iugera (3.8 acres); reasonably close to the median holding in Saint-Thibery and roughly what we think of as the lower-bound for ancient citizen-soldier-peasants. Finally, we can posit a large household farm of nine iugera (5.6 acres), reflective of what seems to be the upper-end of typical for those same citizen-soldier-peasants; at Saint-Thibery in 1460 there were a couple dozen families seemingly in this range.7
For the sake of a relatively easier calculation, we can assume the same balance of wheat, barley and beans as last time, which lets us just specify an average yield after seed per iugerum of 81.2-189.5 kg of wheat equivalent (achieved by averaging the per-acre wheat equivalent production across all three crops, with seed removed),8 with each iugerum demanding between 11 and 15 working days (averaging the labor requirements across all three crops). Finally, we need to remember the fallow: in this case we’re assuming about a third of each farm is not in production in any given year, meaning it is both not consuming any labor nor producing any crops. That lets us then quickly chart out our peasant families based on the land they might actually have (keeping in mind the household size and household land holdings aren’t going to match; the larger household in people won’t always be the one with more land). First, a reminder of the basic labor availability and grain requirements of our households.
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs | |
| Labor Available | 435 work-days | 507.5 work-days | 797.5 work-days |
| Bare Subsistence Requirement | ~1,189.5kg wheat-equivalent | ~1,569kg wheat-equivalent | ~2,686kg wheat-equivalent |
| Respectability Requirement | ~2,379kg wheat-equivalent | ~3,138kg wheat-equivalent | ~5,376kg wheat-equivalent |
Then for the smallest, 3 iugera farm, the numbers work like this:
| Small Farm (3 iugera) 2 iugera cropped 1 fallow | The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| Labor requirement | 22-30 work days | 22-30 work days | 22-30 work days |
| Labor surplus | 405-413 work days | 477.5-485.5 work days | 767.5-775.5 work days |
| Production after Seed | 162.4-378.8kg wheat equivalent | 162.4-378.8kg wheat equivalent | 162.4-378.8kg wheat equivalent |
| Percentage of Subsistence: | 14-32% | 10-24% | 6-14% |
And then for the medium-sized farm:
| Medium Farm (6 iugera) 4 iugera cropped 2 fallow | The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| Labor requirement | 44-60 work days | 44-60 work days | 44-60 work days |
| Labor surplus | 375-391 work days | 447.5-463.5 work days | 737.5-753.5 work days |
| Production after Seed | 324.8-757.6kg wheat equivalent | 324.8-757.6kg wheat equivalent | 324.8-757.6kg wheat equivalent |
| Percentage of Subsistence: | 27-64% | 21-48% | 12-28% |
And the larger (but not rich peasant) farm:
| Large Farm (9 iugera) 6 iugera cropped 3 fallow | The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| Labor requirement | 66-90 work days | 66-90 work days | 66-90 work days |
| Labor surplus | 345-369 work days | 417.5-441.5 work days | 707.5-731.5 work days |
| Production after Seed | 487.6-1,136.5kg wheat equivalent | 487.6-1,136.5k wheat equivalent | 487.6-1,136.5k wheat equivalent |
| Percentage of Subsistence: | 41-96% | 31-72% | 18-42% |
And we immediately see the problem: only the Smalls manage to get close to subsistence on very favorable (8:1) fertility assumptions on the small farm they own. Now it is possible for the peasants to push a little bit on these numbers. The most obvious way would be focusing as much as possible on wheat cultivation, which has higher labor demands but also the highest yield-per-acre (or iugerum), producing around 50% more calories than beans and 35% more calories than barley per-acre (see last week’s post for specifics). But there’s a limit to going ‘all in’ on wheat to meet food shortfalls: the land might not be suitable for it and wheat exhausts the soil, so our farmers would need some sort of rotation. That said, peasant diets were overwhelmingly grains (wheat and barley) for this reason: they provide the most calories for a favorable balance of land and labor. Our farmers might also try to supplement production with high-labor, high-density horticulture; a kitchen garden can take a lot of work but produce a lot of nutrition in a small space. But hitting household nutrition demands entirely with a kitchen garden isn’t going to work both because of the labor demands but also because the products of a kitchen garden tend not to keep well.
Instead the core problem is that our peasant households are much too large as units of labor for the farmland they own. When we say that, what we mean is that given these households are both units of consumption (they have to provide for their members) and units of production (they are essentially agricultural small businesses), an efficient allocation of them would basically have each household on something like 30 acres of farmland, farming all of it (and thus using most of their labor) and selling the excess. But the lack of economically sustainable social niches – that is, jobs that provide a reliable steady income to enable someone to obtain subsistence – means that these families are very reluctant to leave members without any land at all, so the holdings ‘fractionalize’ down to these tiny units, essentially the smallest units that could conceivably support one family (and sometimes not even that).
I’ve already seen folks in the comments realizing almost immediately why these conditions might make conquest or resettlement into areas of land easily brought under cultivation so attraction: if you could give each household 30-40 acres instead of 3-6, you could realize substantial improvements in quality of life (and the social standing of the farmers in question). And of course that kind of ‘land scarcity’ problem seems to have motivated both ancient and early modern settler-colonialism: if you put farmers next to flat, open ground owned by another community, it won’t be too long before they try to make it farmland (violently expelling the previous owners in the process). This is also, I might add, part of the continual friction in areas where nomads and farmers meet: to a farmer, those grazing fields look like more land and more land is really valuable (though the response to getting new land is often not to create a bunch of freeholding large-farm homesteaders, but rather to replicate the patterns of tenancy and non-free agricultural labor these societies already have to the point of – as in the Americas – forcibly trafficking enormous numbers of enslaved laborers at great cost, suffering and horror, to create a non-free dependent class whose exploitation can enable those patterns. Most conquering armies dream of becoming landlords, not peasants).9
Alternately as farms these holdings could be a lot more efficient if they had fewer people on them and indeed when we read, for instance, ancient agricultural writers, they recommend estates with significantly fewer laborers per-unit-land-area than what we’d see in the peasant countryside. But that’s because the Big Man is farming for profit with a large estate that lets him tailor his labor force fairly precisely to his labor needs; the peasants are farming to survive and few people are going to let their brother, mother, or children starve and die in a ditch because it makes their farm modestly more productive per unit labor. Instead, they’re going try to do anything in their power to get enough income to have enough food for their entire family to survive.
There is no real way around it: our peasants need access to more land. And that land is going to come with conditions.
The Big Man’s Land
Now before we march into talking about farming someone else’s land, it is worth exploring why our farmers don’t get more land by just bringing more land under cultivation. And the answer here is pretty simple: in most of the world, preparing truly ‘wild’ land for cultivation takes a lot of labor. In dry areas, that labor often comes in the form of irrigation demands: canals have to be dug out from water sources (mainly rivers) to provide enough moisture for the fields as the most productive crops (like wheat) demand a lot of moisture to grow well. In climates suitable for rainfall agriculture, the problem is instead generally forests: if there’s enough rain to grow grain, there’s enough rain to grow trees and those trees have had quite the head start on you. Clearing large sections of forest by hand is a slow, labor-intensive thing and remember, you don’t just need the trees cut down, you need the stumps pulled or burned. Fields also need to be relatively flat – which might demand terracing on hilly terrain – and for the sake of the plow they need to be free of large stones to the depth of the plow (at least a foot or so).
In short, clearing farmland was both slow and expensive and all of this assumes the land can be made suitable and that no one has title to it. Of course if the forest is the hunting preserve of the local elite, they’re going to object quite loudly to your efforts to cut it down. And a lot of land is simply going to be too dry or too hilly or too marshy to be made usable for farming ona practical time-scale for our peasants. Such land simply cannot be brought usefully into cultivation; you can’t farm wheat in a swamp.10 So it is quite hard and often impractical to bring new land into cultivation.
That doesn’t mean new land wasn’t brought into cultivation, it absolutely was. We can sometimes track population pressures archaeologically by watching this process: forests retreat, new villages pop up, swamps are drained and so on as previously marginal or unfarmable land is brought into cultivation. Note, of course, if you bring a bunch of marginal fields into cultivation – say, a drier hillside not worth farming before – your average yield is going to go down because that land simply isn’t as productive (but demands the same amount of labor!). But that process is generally slow, taking place over generations in response to population pressures. It isn’t a solution available on the time-scale that most of our households are operating. In the moment, the supply of land is mostly fixed for our peasants.
Which means our peasants need access to more land (or another way of generating income). There are a range of places that land could come from:
- Peasant Households without enough labor to farm their own land. In order to make our households relevant at every part of the process, I haven’t modeled the substantial number of very small households we talked about in the first section, households with just 1 or 2 members. If none of those householders were working-age males (e.g. a household with an elderly widow, or a young widow and minor children, etc.) they might seek to have other villagers help farm their land and split the production. For very small households, that might be enough to provide them subsistence (or at least help). Consequently those small, often ‘dying’ households provide a (fairly small) source of land for other households.
- Rich peasants likewise might have more land than their household could farm or cared to farm. Consider the position The Smalls would be if they were a rich peasant household with, say, 25 acres of land (in Saint-Thibery, 26 households (of 189) had this much or more land). That’s enough land that, under good harvest conditions it would be easy enough to shoot past the household’s respectability requirements. At which point why work so hard? Why not sharecrop out a large chunk of your land to small farmers and split the production, so you still make your respectability basket in decent years, but don’t have to work so darn hard?
- The Big Man. Another part of this ecosystem is invariably large landowners, who might have estates of hundreds of acres. Columella , for instance, thinks of farm planning (he is thinking about large estates) in units of 100 iugera (62.3 acres) and 200 iugera (124.6 acres; Col. Rust. 12.7-9). An estate of several hundred acres would hardly be unusual. Likewise in the Middle Ages, the Big Man might be a local noble whose manor estate might likewise control a lot of land. The Big Man might also be a religious establishment: temples (in antiquity) and monasteries and churches (in the Middle Ages) often controlled large amounts of productive farmland worked by serfs or tenants to provide their income. Naturally, the Big Man isn’t doing his own farming; he may have some ‘built in’ labor force (workers in his household, enslaved workers, permanent wage laborers, etc.) but often the Big Man is going to rely substantially on the local peasantry for tenant labor.
In practice, the Big Man is likely to represent the bulk of opportunities here, but by no means all of them. As I noted before, while local conditions vary a lot, you won’t be too far wrong in thinking about landholdings as a basic ‘rule of thirds’ with one third of the land controlled by small peasants, one third by rich peasants and one third by the Big Man (who, again, might be a lord or a big landowner or a church, monastery or temple (in the latter case, the land is owned by the god in most polytheistic faiths) or even the king). But of course only a little bit of the small peasant land is going to be in search of workers, since most peasant households have too many hands for too little land; some of the rich peasant land will be looking for workers (either tenants or hired hands), but rich peasants are still peasants – they do some of their farming on their own. By contrast, the Big Man is marked out by the fact that he doesn’t do his own farming: he needs some kind of labor supply – wage laborers, enslaved/non-free laborers or tenants – for all of it.
But that also means that something like half (or more!) of the land around our peasant village might be owned by a household that needs outside labor to farm it. So we have peasant households with surplus labor that need more land to farm and richer households with surplus land that needs labor. The solution here generally was some form of tenancy which in the pre-modern world generally came in the form, effectively of sharecropping: the landowner agreed to let the poorer household farm some of his land in exchange for a percentage of the crop that resulted. That ‘rent-in-kind’ structure is useful for the peasants who after all are not generally keeping money with which to pay rent. At the same time, it limits their liability: if the harvest on tenant land fails, they may suffer a shortfall, but they aren’t in debt some monetary quantity of rent (though they may end up in debt in some other way).
Now the question is: on what terms?
Tenancy
And the answer here won’t surprise: bad terms. The terms are bad.
There’s a useful discussion of this in L. Foxhall, “The Dependent Tenant” JRS 980 (1990), which in turn leans on K. Finkler, “Agrarian Reform and Economic Development” in Agricultural Decision Making, ed. P.F. Barlett (1980) to get a sense of what the terms for tenant farmers might normally look like. Foxhall notes in this and a few other studies of modern but largely non-industrial farming arrangements that almost no households in these studies were entirely uninvolved in sharecropping or tenancy arrangements, but that the terms of tenancy arrangements varied a lot based on the inputs supplied.
The key inputs were labor, traction (for our pre-industrial peasants, this is “who supplies the plow-team animals”), water and seed. The most common arrangement, representing almost a third of all arrangements, was where the tenant supplied labor only, while traction, water and seed were supplied by the landlord; the tenants share in these arrangements was a measly 18.75%. A number of arrangements had the tenant supplying not only labor but also some mix of traction, water or seed (but not all) and often the tenant’s share of the production hovered between 40 and 60%, with exact 50/50 splits occurring in about a quarter of the sample. In just one case did the tenant supply everything but the land itself; in that case the tenant’s share was 81.25%.
One thing that is obvious from just this example is that arrangements varied a lot and are going to depend on need and bargaining power. A ‘landlord’ who has land they want under cultivation but can supply basically nothing else may be relatively easy to negotiate into a fairly generous deal; a peasant who is absolutely destitute save for the labor of their hands is easy to exploit. An even 50/50 landholder, tenant split seems to have been the norm in much of Europe though, reflected in terms for sharecropper (métayer in French, mezzadro in Italian, mitateri in Sicilian, mediero in Spanish) which all mean ‘halver,’ though again the terms (and the share split) varied, typically based on demand but also on what exactly the landlord was providing (seed, plow teams, tools, physical infrastructure (like a farmhouse), etc).
For the sake of simplicity in our model, we can assume something like a 50/50 split, with our tenants supplying half of the seed, so that our net yield is exactly half of what it would have been. We can then take those assumptions back to our model. To establish a baseline, let’s run the numbers assuming first a ‘medium’ sized (6 iugera, 3.8 acres, with 4 iugera cropped and 2 fallowed) farm, with our fertility estimate set modestly to 6:1, a ‘good but not great’ yield. We’re going to ’round up’ to the nearest even iugerum and assume an average of 13 days per iugerum of labor, just to make our calculations a bit simpler. How hard is it for our peasants to meet their needs if they have to sharecrop the added land they need?
| Tenancy with a medium farm | The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| Total Labor | 435 work-days | 507.5 work-days | 797.5 work-days |
| Freehold Labor Demand | 52 work-days | 52 work-days | 52 work-days |
| Freehold Production | 541kg wheat equivalent | 541kg wheat equivalent | 541kg wheat equivalent |
| Shortfall to Subsistence | 648.5kg wheat equivalent | 1,028kg wheat equivalent | 2,145kg wheat equivalent |
| Net Production Per iugera farmed as tenant | 67.65kg wheat equivalent | 67.65kg wheat equivalent | 67.65kg wheat equivalent |
| Tenant Land Required for Subsistence | 10 iugera (6.23 acres) (plus another ~5 iugera fallowed) | 16 iugera (9.97 acres) (plus another ~8 iugera fallowed) | 32 iugera (19.94 acres) (plus another ~16 iugera fallowed) |
| Labor Demand for Subsistence | 130(+52) work days Total: 182 | 208(+52) work days Total: 260 | 416(+52) work days Total: 468 |
| Subsequent Shortfall to Respectability (over subsistence) | 1,189.5kg wheat equivalent | 1,569kg wheat equivalent | 2,686kg wheat equivalent |
| Tenant Land Required for Respectability | 18 iugera (11.2 acres) (plus another ~9 iugera fallowed) | 24 iugera (14.95 acres) (plus another ~12 iugera fallowed) | 40 iugera (24.9 acres) (plus another ~20 iugera fallowed) |
| Labor Demand for Respectability | 234(+130+52) work-days (Total: 416) | 312(+208+52) work-days (Total: 572) Shortage: 64.5 | 520(+416+52) work-days (Total: 988) Shortage: 190.5 |
As we can see, tenancy dramatically changes the picture for our peasants. Under these relatively typical assumptions, of our three families all can make subsistence in a normal year but only the Smalls have the right combination of a lot of labor and a relatively small family to have a shot at getting all of their respectability needs (in practice, they’d probably fall short once you consider necessary farm labor not in the fields – fence repair, tool maintenance, home repair and the like). It also isn’t hard to see how we might alter this picture to change our assumptions. Changing the size of the owned farmland has a significant impact (even though it is already so small) because our peasants realize twice the production per unit-land-area for land they own over land they rent (again, terms might vary). Put another way, under these assumptions, somewhat marginal owned farmland that gives an OK-but-not-great yield of 4:1 is of the same use to our peasants as really good tenant-farmed farmland giving a 7:1 yield (both offer 81.2kg of wheat equivalent per iugerum after rent is paid).
That said, the fact that our peasants end up with enough labor to comfortable exceed their subsistence requirements, but not their comfort requirements is favorable for extraction, which we’ll discuss below. These are households with spare labor who can’t fulfill all of their wants entirely on their own, giving the state or local Big Men both a lot of levers to squeeze more labor out of them and also giving the households the available above-subsistence labor to squeeze. By contrast if these peasants had enough land to meet all of their needs themselves, there would be fewer opportunities to compel them to do additional labor beyond that.
But even before we get to extraction, tenancy is also changing our peasants’ incentives. Economics has the concept of diminishing marginal returns, the frequent phenomenon where adding one more unit of a given input produces less and less output per additional input-unit. You will find more errors in the first hour of proofreading than the fiftieth hour, for instance. There’s also the concept of diminishing marginal utility: beyond a certain point, getting more of something is less valuable per unit added. Getting one bar of chocolate when you have none? Fantastic. Getting one bar of chocolate when you have ten thousand? Solidly meh.
Both are working on our farmers to press their natural production inclination not to maximum labor or even hitting that respectability basket but just subsistence and a little bit more. On the diminishing marginal returns front, naturally when it comes to both owned land and rented land, our peasants are going to farm the most productive land first. This is why when we talk about expanding population and expanding agriculture, we often talk about marginal land (less productive land) coming under cultivation; because all of the really great land was already being farmed. But poor farmland doesn’t demand less labor time (indeed, it may demand more), it just produces less. So while we’ve been working here with averages, you should imagine that the first few acres of farmland will be more productive and the latter few less productive.
Tenancy puts this into even more sharp contrast because it creates a really significant discontinuity in the value of farming additional land: the rents are so high that sharecropped or tenant land is much less useful (per unit labor) to the peasant than their own land. So you have a slow downward slope of ‘land quality’ and somewhere in that slope there is the point at which the peasants have farmed all of their own land and so suddenly the effective yield-per-labor-after-rent drops by half (or more!). So the first few hundred kilograms of wheat equivalent are probably fairly easy to get: you have a few good fields you own and your net out of them might be 130-190kg of wheat equivalent per iugerum. Put in a couple dozen days on those two good iugera and The Smalls have just over a quarter of their subsistence needs. But then they have their more marginal fields, which might only yield 80-100kg. Still not terrible but the next couple of dozen days of labor don’t get them as far: not to half but just 44% or so. But now you are out of your own land, so you go to your rich neighbor or the Big Man to get access to some more and suddenly even on their best fields your yield-per-iugerum is 80-95kg so another couple of dozen working days gets you just from 44% to just 57% of what you need. So you need to line up a lot more land, but now you might be starting to look at the worse fields the Big Man has. He still wants them farmed, after all, his choice is between doing nothing and earning money or doing nothing and not earning money; he’d rather earn money. But suddenly you’re looking at maybe as little as 50-60kg of wheat equivalent per iugerum and the labor demands have not gone down.
Meanwhile, the comfort you get from each kilogram of wheat equivalent is also going down. The first 80% or so of your subsistence needs is necessary simply to not starve to death; a bit more makes the household sustainable in the long term. But then – and remember, these choices are coming as you are facing diminishing marginal returns on each day of labor you put in – is it really worth your time to cultivate a couple more fields in order to just get a bit more meat in your diet and have slightly nicer household goods? Wouldn’t you rather rest?
And so what you see is most peasant households aiming not for the full respectability basket, but that “subsistence – and a little bit more” because as each day of labor produces less product and each product produces less joy, at some point you’d rather not work.
And as we’ve seen in theory, our households might hit that crossover point – subsistence and a little bit more – fairly quickly in their labor supply. We haven’t yet, but should now, account for labor spent on things like maintaining tools, fixing fences and other capital investments. If we allocate, say, 45 days, for that and assume that our farmers also want to have some cushion on subsistence (say, another 10%), we might expect The Smalls to be more or less satisfied (on that medium landholding, average 6:1 yields) with something like 245 working days (56% of total), the Middles with 331 working days (65%) and the Biggs with 560 (70%). Working like that, they won’t be rich and won’t ever become rich (but they were never going to become rich regardless), but they’ll mostly survive – some years will be hard – and they’ll have a little bit more time to rest. Some families, a bit more industrious, might push towards achieving most or all of the respectability basket, at least in good years; others might be willing to stick closer to subsistence (or unable to do otherwise).
Of course in areas where the farmland is meaningfully more marginal – average yields around 4:1 rather than 6:1 – our peasants are going to need to work quite a lot more, about 60% more. That pushes the Smalls to about 84% of their available labor, the Middles to 99% and the Biggs actually slightly into deficit, demanding roughly 110% of their available labor. We should keep in mind that each peasant household is going to exist somewhere along the spectrum: some with larger amounts of property or access to better land, some with less. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but this is part of why the poorest of the peasantry were often exempt from things like military service: positioned on marginal land in poor communities, they had little excess labor available. Most peasant households would have been somewhere in between these two, so a labor utilization rate ranging from 50 to 100%, with a lot of households in that 60-80% labor utilization range.
And now you might think, “doesn’t this take us back to peasants actually not working all that much compared to modern workers?” and first I would want to point out that these peasants are also experiencing a quality of living way below workers in modern industrial countries but also no because we haven’t talked about extraction.
Extraction
Because of course the problem here, from the perspective of everyone who isn’t our peasants is that if the peasantry only does the amount of agricultural labor necessary to subsist themselves and just a little more, the society doesn’t have economic room for much else in the way of productive (or unproductive) economic activity. Remember: our peasants are the only significant population actually doing farming. Sure the Big Men and the gentry and temples and monasteries may own land, but they are mostly renting that land out to peasants (or hiring peasants to work it, or enslaving peasants and forcing them to work it).
And those landholding elites, in turn, want to do things. They want to build temples, wage wars, throw fancy parties, employ literate scribes to write works of literature and of course they also want to live in leisure (not farming) while doing this. And the activities they want to do – the temples, wars, fancy parties, scribes and so on – that requires a lot of food and other agricultural goods to sustain the people doing those things. It also requires a bunch of surplus labor – some of that surplus labor are specialists, but a lot of it is effectively ‘unspecialized’ labor.
To do those things, those elites need to draw both agricultural surplus and surplus labor out of the countryside. And we should note that of course, obviously, this is an exploitative relationship, but it is also worth noting that for pre-modern agrarian economies, the societies where elites can centralize and control the largest pile of labor and surplus tend to use it to conquer the societies that don’t so ‘demilitarized peasant utopia’ is not a society that is going to last very long (but ‘highly militarized landowner republic’ might).
It is thus necessary to note that when we see the emergence of complex agrarian societies – cities, writing, architectural wonders, artistic achievements and so on – these achievements are mostly elite projects, ‘funded’ (in food and labor, if not in money) out of extraction from the peasantry.
Exactly how this extraction worked varied a lot society to society and even within regions and ethnic and social classes within society. As noted above, in areas where agriculture was not very productive, extraction was limited. By contrast, highly productive regions didn’t so much producer richer peasants as they tended to produce far higher rates of extraction. In some society, where the freeholding farming peasantry (or part of that peasantry) formed an important political constituency (like some Greek poleis or the Roman Republic), the small farmers might manage to preserve relatively more of their surplus for themselves, but often in exchange for significant demands in terms of military and civic participation.
To take perhaps the simplest direct example of removing labor from the countryside, from 218 to 168, the Romans averaged around 10-12 legions deployed in a given year, 45,000-54,000 citizen soldiers.11 Against an adult-male citizen population of perhaps ~250,000 implies that the Roman army was consuming something like a fifth of all of the available citizen manpower in the countryside, though enslaved laborers and males under 17 wouldn’t be captured by this figure. Accounting for those groups we might imagine the Roman dilectus is siphoning off something like 10-15% of the labor capacity of the countryside on average (sometimes spiking far higher, closing in on half of it). On top of that, the demand of these soldiers that they supply their own arms and armor would have pushed farmers to farm a little bit more than subsistence-and-a-little-more to afford the cost of the arms (traded for or purchased with that surplus; at least initially these transactions are not happening in coined money).
We see similar systems in the Carolingian levy system or the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, where households might be brigaded together – in the Carolingian system, households were grouped into mansi – based on agricultural production (you can see how that works above as a proxy for ‘available surplus labor!’) with a certain number – three or four mansi in the Carolingian system – required to furnish one armed man for either a regional levy or the main field army. The goal of such systems is to take the surplus labor above and make it available for military service.
Alternately, the elites might not want their peasants as soldiers but as workers. Thus the very frequent appearance of corvée labor: a requirement of a certain amount of intermittent, unpaid forced labor. This might be labor on the local lord’s estate (a sort of unpaid tenancy arrangement) or labor on public works (walls, castles, roads) or a rotating labor force working in state-owned (or elite-owned) productive enterprises (mines, for instance). As with military service, this sort of labor demand could be shaped to what the local populace would bear and enforced by a military aristocracy against a largely disarmed peasantry. Once again looking at the statistics above, even a few weeks a year per man (rather than per household) would drain most of the surplus labor out of our households. Adding, for instance, a month of corvée labor of per work-capable male (an age often pegged around seven for these societies) under our favorable (6:1) assumptions above bring our work totals to 305 days (70% of total) for the Smalls, 373 (77%) for the Middles and 650 (81.5%) for the Biggs. Corvée labor demands could be less than this, but also often quite a bit more (expectations varied a lot by local laws and customs.
Alternately, elites might just crank up the taxes. In the Hellenistic states (the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms especially), the army wasn’t a peasant levy, but rather a core of Greco-Macedonian rentier elites (your ‘rich peasants’ or ‘gentlemen farmers’), regional levies and mercenaries. To pay for that (and fund the lavish courts and public works that royal legitimacy required), the indigenous Levantine, Egyptian, Syrian, Mesopotamian (etc. etc.) underclasses were both made to be the tenants on the estates of those rentier elites (land seized from those same peasants in the initial Macedonian conquest or shortly thereafter) but also to pay very high taxes on their own land.12 So while tax rates on military-settler (that is, Greco-Macedonian rentier elites) land might have been around 10% – 1/12th (8.3%) seems to have been at least somewhat common – taxes on the land of the indigenous laoi could run as high as 50%, even before one got to taxes on markets, customs duties, sales taxes, a head tax and state monopolies on certain natural resources including timber and importantly salt.13 So the poor laoi might be paying extortionate taxes on their own lands, lighter taxes on settler (or temple) lands, but then also paying extortionate rents of those tenant-farmed lands.
Another micro-scale option was debt. We’ve been assuming our farmers are operating at steady-state subsistence, but as we keep noting, yields in any given year were highly variable. What peasants were forced to do in bad years, almost invariably as go into debt to the Big Man. But as noted, they’re simply not generating a lot in the way of surplus to ever pay off that debt. That in turn makes the debt itself a tool of control, what we often call debt peonage. Since the Big Man sets the terms of the debt (at a time when the peasant is absolutely desperate) it was trivially easy to construct a debt structure that the peasant could never pay off, giving the Big Man leverage to demand services – labor, tenancy on poor terms, broad social deference, etc. – in perpetuity. And of course, if the Big Man ever wants to expand his land holdings, all he would need to do would be to call in the un-payable debt and – depending on the laws around debt in the society – either seize the peasant’s land in payment or reduce the peasant into debt-slavery.14
In short, elites had a lot of mechanisms to sop up the excess labor in the countryside and they generally used them.
Consequently, while peasants, unencumbered by taxes, rents, elites, debt, conscription and so on might have been able to survive working only a relatively small fraction of their time (probably around 100 days per year per-working-age male (again, age 7 or so and up) would suffice), they did not live in that world.
Instead, they lived in a world where their own landholdings were extremely small – too small to fully support their households, although their small holdings might still provide a foundation of income for survival. Instead, they had to work on land owned or at least controlled by Big Men: local rentier-elites, the king, temples, monasteries, and so on. Those big institutions which could wield both legal and military force in turn extracted high rents and often demanded additional labor from our peasants, which soaked up much of their available labor, leading to that range of 250-300 working days a year, with 10-12 hour days each, for something on the order of 2,500-3,600 working hours for a farm-laboring peasant annually.
Which is quite a lot more than the c. 250 typical work days (261 weekdays minus holidays/vacation) in the United States – just by way of example of a modern industrial economy – at typically eight hours a day or roughly 2,000 working hours a year. Of course it is also the case that those roughly 2,000 modern hours buy a much better standard of living than what our medieval peasants had access to – consider that a single unimpressive car represents more value just in worked metal (steel) than even many ancient or medieval elites could muster. No, you do not work more than a medieval or ancient peasant: you work somewhat less, in order to obtain far more material comfort. Isn’t industrialization grand?
That said, our picture of labor in peasant households is not complete! Indeed, we have only seen to half of our subsistence basket – you will recall we broke out textiles separately – because we haven’t yet even really introduced the workload of probably the most fully employed people in these households: the women. And what’s where we’ll go in the next post in this series.
- That is, landholders with enough land to subsist off of the rents without needing to do much or any actual agricultural labor themselves.
- For scale with the cavalrymen we are talking about just a few thousand households lording over a country of perhaps five million; these fellows are honestly closer to something like a medieval knightly elite than the peasantry.
- On these allotments, see P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt, 323-204 BC (2020), 158-160 and C. Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014), 212-217. On the rentier-self-sufficiency of these parcels, at a 5:1 yield, 30 aroura should yield something like 3,500kg wheat equivalent (almost 12 million calories), more than enough to support the settler’s household at a 50% rent (see below) using labor from the much smaller adjacent farms of indigenous Egyptians. Indeed, to me it seems very likely the land allotments were calculated precisely on this basis, with infantrymen receiving the smallest allotment that could reliably support a household in leisure.
- Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966)
- A reminder that the setérée is an exact unit, about 1/5th to 1/4th of a hectare, so about 0.49-0.62 acres.
- Rosenstein (2004), 75, n.68; Erdkamp, (2005), 47-8; Cho-yun Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (1980); Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (2020), 101; Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014), 121
- It’s hard to tell precisely from what I have because Le Roy Ladurie groups households in brackets.
- The average yield-per-iugerum at each fertility level in wheat equivalent are: 4:1, 81.2kg; 5:1, 108.2kg; 6:1, 135.3kg; 7:1, 162.4kg; 8:1, 189.5kg.
- I would argue that the Roman approach to Italy from 509 to 218 BC appears to be an exception to this rule: the Romans do tend to use conquered land to set up large numbers of small landholding farms. Not rich peasants, but the Roman military class – the assidui farmer-citizen-soldiers – were also clearly not utterly impoverished either. It’s striking that the Romans could have set up a system of rents and tribute extraction in Italy but didn’t, instead effectively terraforming the Italian countryside into a machine for the production of heavy infantry. That heavy infantry in turn bought the Romans stunning military superiority, which they then used in the second and first centuries BC to create an enormous system of tribute and extraction (rather than extending the approach they had used in Italy).
- Of course you can drain a swamp, but such drainage efforts are the kinds of things large, well-administered states do, not the sort of thing your local peasants can summon the labor for.
- On Roman deployments, see Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020).
- The way this was structurally, legally, was that the king, directly or indirectly owned all the land (‘spear-won’) and so many taxes were instead technically ‘rents’ paid to the king.
- On the Seleucid taxation system, see Aperghis, The Seleucid Royal Economy (2004). For an overview of the relatively similar Ptolemaic system, see von Reden, Money in Ptolemaic Egypt (2007), Préaux, . L’économie royale des Lagides (1979).
- The abolition of this specific form of slavery (but not others) is a key political moment in the development of both Rome and Athens (and we may assume, many other Greek poleis) that signals the political importance of the smallholding farmer-citizens and their ability to compel major reforms. But the Big Man can still seize your farm!
“Which is quite a lot less than the c. 250 typical work days (261 weekdays minus holidays/vacation) in the United States”
I suspect this is a typo; did you mean to say “Which is quite a lot more”?
more typos:
“being taken award by the estate’s steward” ITYM away
“And we should that of course, obviously, this is an exploitative relationship,”
ITYM “should note that”
Fixing
Yes, fixing.
Footnote 5 has a typo, should be INexact rather than exact.
I’d love to see an expansion of footnote 9 as a full article in the future. Specifically: why did the Romans not extend to the socii system outside of mainland Italy? and, relatedly, why did they found so few colonies (proportionally to their population) after they gained homogeny over Italy, doing almost none in the last two centuries BC?
The answer can’t just be about the new conquests being too culturally different, because they treat southern Italy and Sicily drastically different despite them both being Greek. It seems to me that doing so would have alleviated the huge problems of over population that Rome had – and the social crisis it sparked. Did the Roman peasants just not want to emigrate to transalpine Gaul or nearer Spain? Did the elite care less about having rich peasants as the legions shifted slowly to be longer standing, professional troops? Another reason I’ve over looked?
He does talk about a couple causes here: https://acoup.blog/2023/11/03/collections-how-to-roman-republic-101-addenda-the-provinces/
These include societal differences (not having the large bodies of wealthy freeholders needed to provide the socii armies), shear distance (making it difficult for the large bodies of socii troops to meet up *every year*), and needing other things from them (like syracusan grain to feed their other troops).
In the vast majority of cases, the socii agreement requires walking a corps of your citizens to Rome every year. This is a real problem for places outside of Italy, but at first the Romans did try setting up lots of little puppet governments in Greece that sent cash instead, only it turns out that if what you’re extracting is just cash there are better ways of organizing colonies for that than socii.
I suppose you could march them to the provincial Governor whenever he wanted an army, which I imagine would be most years. Or were they afraid that would give the provincial governor an army, rather than Rome?
I’m pretty sure that at that point provincial governor actually meant ‘guy with army,’ so I doubt that’s it. I don’t get the sense that the Romans did a lot of forecasting what could go wrong and then planning the growth of their systems around preventing that. They had a thing that worked in a context and they did it until they ran out of that context and then they did other things in the new contexts with as few changes as they could manage until it all blew up and they found themselves in another new context everywhere.
It is not quite as simple as that. Most provincial governors didn’t have legions at all. They were administering provinces that were peaceful and without belligerent neighbours, so the troops were only for internal use: guard duties and anti-riot actions. It seems that the actual soldiers were probably mainly auxiliary. In addition, the province might have neighbouring allied kingdoms with rather large armies.
So, while technically, the provincial governor had the imperium, and some soldiers, they were not really “guys with an army” unless the provinces was a frontier.
Well, if the governor doesn’t need an army, bang goes my “march them to the governor” idea.
And yet one wonders, in some alt-timeline where the Roman figured out how to expand the production of heavy infantry cost-effectively beyond the borders of Italy, did they take over the entire world? Did everyone everywhere become Roman?
“Why” isn’t always a question that a historian can answer. For one thing, the Romans aren’t the Borg- there’s lots of them involved in any official action and different stakeholders might have different reasons for doing the same thing. For another, we’re rarely blessed with a primary source in which a historical figure explains exactly what they did *and why they did it* (and even when we are, that figure’s stated reasons should usually be taken with a grain of salt)
To take a contemporary example: the US Constitution has minimum ages for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. “Why do you have to be 35 to be President?” is a question lots of people ask, and there are a variety of plausible explanations of what *might* have been the reason. But the truth is we simply don’t know why- the provision doesn’t seem to have been debated on the record at the Constitutional convention, and most of the men who ultimately voted for it left no explanation
I’ve always just assumed the age requirement is for the same reason men pay so much for car insurance until at least their late twenties.
I’ve never heard of other, competing explanations. What other reasons are in the running?
That is fascinating – I didn’t know that the age limit was literally a mystery. (As are presumably the age limits for senator and representative). They didn’t get that from the UK, which has never had any age limits for elected or other office, except for more or less whatever the generally agreed age of majority happens to be. Old enough to vote, old enough to stand for Parliament, old enough to be prime minister.
Republican Rome did, though, which I suppose is the obvious model.
And this is why I laugh at “Goku style of military” that our host pushed. I guess it worked in central Italy, but it immediately unravels everywhere else and they’re forced to use normal conquering style. Also considering how small Italy is compared to the rest of the world, I’ll not be surprised if every single big ancient empire out there have Goku style Italy sized core world, making Rome not special at all.
Worked for Rome though. They did conquer the Mediterranean basin with Italy as a base.
And AIUI Britain got little if any tribute out of India, but it did get control of the Indian Army, so it seems to have worked for them. And I seem to recall Genghis Khan doing something similar with defeated Turkic nomads.
In general, I think it dubious to both laugh at something and say it is common. If it is common, it is probably a pretty good idea.
You forgot that Rome not only conquered the Mediterranean basin, but also Spain and Europe nearing to but not quite the Danube River with Italy as the base still, then held onto that land for centuries. This feat, controlling the Mediterranean, Spain, and Europe up to the Danube simultaneously has never been accomplished by any other state or empire in the time before or after the Romans.
To be picky, I wasn’t the guy who said he was laughing at Rome.
You will find more errors in the first hour of proofreading than the fiftieth hour, for instance.
I feel like this thought came from the heart of our host. I’d add that proofreading is unique in that it not only has diminishing returns but *negative* returns: after a certain point, fatigue and overfamiliarity with a text leads to errors being added faster than they are removed. Too many collaborators with stylistic differences and the demands of reviewer 2 are also known to have the same effect.
I have a serious question and a silly comment. Serious question goes first.
When talking about clearing land, how much work that took, and how that was generally somewhat marginal land: I feel compelled to ask, what about floodplains? Because there are a lot of very agriculturally productive areas that sit in places that flood a lot of the time. If you can’t do anything about those floods, they are not very good places to farm or live; the waters wash away your crops very quickly.
So my amateur assumption is that these places get claimed up very quickly, or at least very quickly once you hit a prerequisite requirement of engineering ability and social organization to mobilize enough labor to dam up whatever river you happening to be living near. Do we have any good sources on that process? Like how long it took to control an unruly river and then how the resulting farmland thus created would be parceled up?
For the silly comment, you say, and I quote “Getting one bar of chocolate when you have ten thousand? Solidly meh.”
My wife would strongly disagree with you on that score.
Edit/Follow up. I told my wife about the crack I made. We are now heading out to the store to get chocolate.
I took an economics class where the professor tried to demonstrate diminishing returns using a bag of candy bars and a volunteer from the class. The volunteer was a very large young man who would happily have eaten the entire bag.
I have this vision of the large young man at the front of the class with his mouth open like a baby bird…
Re floodplains: I get the impression they didn’t even try to dam them. The famously flood-prone Nile wasn’t dammed until the 19th and 20th centuries, for instance (according to Wikipedia).
I’m not sure what they did instead, but I’d guess they just waited for the flood and planted afterwards. From some Googling this seems to be reasonably common in the Murray-Darling basin, for instance. The Murray-Darling floods very irregularly (unlike the annual cycle of the Nile), and it seems like crops do often get flooded out.
I also saw articles talking about crops getting water-damaged but not necessarily lost entirely.
If you farm a mix of floodplain and hilly, marginal land (as Bret talks about in earlier posts), losing the floodplain crop is probably just another kind of bad year, like drought, etc.
China had flood control, starting before written records IIRC.
Fair point!
I was thinking as I wrote that that China and rice-growing areas generally must have done something, but I was also conscious I’m stretching a long way beyond my knowledge even for Australia (as demonstrated by the fact I was wrong).
Do you know if they had flood control in the wheat-growing parts as well? I’m guessing yes, seeing as the tech and state capacity existed?
Chinese civilization started in the north, in the wheat-growing area, and that’s where the Yellow River is. That river is a very serious flood hazard and always has been.
@Bullseye I think that’s a critical point. There’s floods…and then there’s *floods*.
The yellow river is supposedly very violent and unpredictable. The yangtze, nile, tigris and euphrates are supposedly much less so.
I think the predictability helps a lot. If you know when it’d going to flood, and the climate allows it, you can adjust your agricultural timetable around the floods.
“I think that’s a critical point. There’s floods…and then there’s *floods*.”
This is exactly it. There are Nile-type floods where every year the river rises slowly and predictably, and, a little later, recedes to leave a nice black layer of new fertile soil for you to plant in and name your country after.
And then there are the other sort of flood that happens suddenly and infrequently and washes away your village overnight. (These ones are perforce infrequent because if they were frequent there would eventually be no land left to flood, because it would all have been washed away!)
You may not want to control the first sort at all, but if you do it can be done with dykes and canals and so on. Easy for a bronze age civilisation. The second sort, though, needs serious civil engineering.
There’s one thing I don’t understand with these figures. In the examples given, all households need quite a lot more tenant land than they own themselves just to reach the subsistence level (from 2.5 times as much for the Smalls to 8 times as much for the Biggs). But if the Big Man controls about as much land as the small peasants collectively do (per the “rule of thirds”), and all these small peasants are looking for tenant work, how is that possible? There’s not enough land to go around, either most households aren’t getting any tenant work at all, or each of them can’t expect a tenancy much bigger than their own farm, and that’s not nearly enough. What am I missing?
You did not account for the other third, the “rich peasants”. They also employed tenants.
It’s still not enough. IF all the poor households are like the Smalls and only need 2.5x extra land and IF the rich peasants make all of their land available for tenants and IF the small peasants make up somewhat less than a third of the total land, THEN it can just barely fit. But with bigger households needing more land, rich peasants farming some of their land themselves to increase their revenues, variability on how big each of the “thirds” are, then there’s just not enough land.
Right. In addition to owing a share to the landowner, the peasants also need to find a way to buy some of that share from the landowner or they starve. I assume this will be handled in the next part, about women, which will necessarily contain a lot of discussion of productive non-field labor.
But productive or not, non-field labor doesn’t get you food.
OGH has already counted truck gardens after all.
Chickens or rabbits? You would need animals that can be cared for close to the house. So no sheep etc. And they also need food, though in general not stuff that we can eat.
M, it gets you food if there’s local households with surplus food to barter, and we know this is at least one such household because that’s what created the land scarcity in the first place.
M, there’s a few things i think haven’t entirely been covered in terms of animals – milk cows can be kept without taking much ‘labour’, as whilst you tie them up at night, they’re docile enough that i’ve seen little old ladies doing their knitting or chatting or whatever whilst the cow grazes at the other end of a length of string, and 1/3rd of the fields are in fallow, which, with a strip farming system would likely also mean a large multi-farm unit of land available for grazing use (as everyone owns a strip of it, but the fence/boundary general goes around the perimeter, and there’s no crops there this year).
You can also keep smaller pigs in pens close to the house, and make up significant amounts of their food with table scraps – pet pigs, like chickens, were still a thing in urban areas until rather recently.
Remember the big man controls a third of the land *with only one household*. (admittedly probably larger than the peasant ones)
But that household includes a number of servants and hangers-on, who also generally aren’t farming.
Remember that some of the poor peasants are in micro-households and also have land to let – the lone widow, elderly widower, etc are providing some more land and importantly are not demanding land to work, so it’s only a percentage of the poor peasants who are actually looking for work, not all of them.
You’re right. If you look at the last table, under “Tenant Land Required for Subsistence”, the Smalls, who you will recall farm about 1.5 acres of their own, require roughly another 11 acres to meet their subsistence needs. The others need more. As far as I can tell, we are assuming that land available for tenant farming is effectively infinite. Hopefully this will be addressed in the next installment.
“Of course you can drain a swamp, but such drainage efforts are the kinds of things large, well-administered states do, not the sort of thing your local peasants can summon the labor for.”
Or stock-/bond-issuing companies! The early modern Netherlands largely built up its experience with this form of social organization on polder projects.
“And the answer here won’t surprise: bad terms. The terms are bad.”
Standard result of Georgism: the terms of sharecropping approximately follow the productivity of marginal freehold land. An old extrapolation of the limit case where (usually gesturing at the justification that local conditions make rain-fed agriculture impossible) the productivity of marginal land might as well be zero is the “hydraulic empire”, where the status of the peasantry becomes indistinguishable from slavery.
“the societies where elites can centralize and control the largest pile of labor and surplus tend to use it to conquer the societies that don’t so ‘demilitarized peasant utopia’ is not a society that is going to last very long (but ‘highly militarized landowner republic’ might)”
Obligatory Monty Python bit?
“you work somewhat less, in order to obtain far more material comfort.”
You work quite a bit less, in order to obtain vastly more material comfort. 20-44% less, for …well the gap is so large that it is difficult to put numbers to it (most of the goods and services in the modern basket simply don’t exist even for kings), can we just say “two orders of magnitude, i.e. 100x, is probably too low”?
The best way of noting the difference in QoL is food.
From the calculations in this series, two thirds or more of the average peasant’s labour went into subsistence. So their daily bread – made with adulterated, course flour and eaten with soup and a seasonal vegetable or two – cost them 7h+ of back breaking labour. For the cost of one hour’s labour at minimum wage, I can make someone bring me a bread dish in under an hour full of flavours, seasonings, meats, and ingredients that a medieval Monarch would be impressed by. We call that delivery pizza.
And that’s comparing average to minimum. If we compared minimum to minimum or median to median it would be even starker.
For all the woes of capitalism, the simple fact that (unlike a peasant) I don’t have to live under a big man who is simultaneously: taxman, land lord, employer, equipment lander, magistrate, judge, and jury; is a good thing.
The question, of course, is how much of that is attributable to “capitalism” as opposed to the form of industrial advancement which might have emerged under capitalism, but is neither dependent on it, nor is guaranteed to last forever under it (quite likely to be the opposite, in fact.) A number of scholars (going back to Buckminster Fuller in 1940, apparently) have described this gain as coming from our “energy slaves” – and have questioned whether we will ever retain the same number of them as we do now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave
An associated concept (though not described in the link above) is EROI/EROEI (Energy Return On (Energy) Investment) – i.e. once these measures become negative, technically extractable energy becomes more trouble than it’s worth. You can sometimes find debate over whether fossil fuels, particularly oil, represent such uniquely high EROI bounty that a decline in their use (hopefully for climate reasons – though ignoring them would simply bring us to the same point later on, but with a functionally irreversibly perturbed physical environment to boot) in favour of renewables and nuclear would necessarily represent a marked decline in living standards or if their substantially greater efficiency (i.e. internal combustion engines notoriously produce far more thermal than kinetic energy) would offset the EROEI difference – although it seems to be confined to the fringes.
As long as EROI is above 1, it doesn’t really matter, cost per MWh (or whatever energy unit you prefer) is the dominant factor in energy production. And renewables do very well in that regard and are still improving.
Exactly. EROI tries to be smart and copy the concept of seed yields from agriculture, but ignores that there is no intensive limit.
If the peasants tried to sow more modii of seeds per iugerum of land, their total harvest (and certainly the harvest minus sowed seeds) would go down; this balancing is why they sow exactly the seed density they do. E.g. nuclear power plants are not limited in this way. Even if their EROI is poor, we can just invest more energy in building them and they will produce more output energy.
“Fortunately as we all know, capitalism imposes a really quite trivial amount of human suffering on other people – only half of the planet lives in poverty.”
This is not quite correct. As of last year, 9.86% of the planet lives in poverty. As recently as 1990, that figure was 40% – about half of them living in China, which at that time had 83% of its population in poverty.
Now, I suspect, we (or rather you) have a choice to make. Is it going to be “ah, but that decrease in poverty mostly happened in China and was therefore due to the benefits of China’s communist system!” or “oh, but you can’t blame communism for China having a billion people living in abject poverty in 1990, China’s system isn’t properly communist!”
Are you sure that there are no limits such as land, water, etc.? For nuclear specifically, I think it’s worth noting that right now, the U.S. already has nearly 100 power plants (94, to be exact), and those supply a little less than 20% of its current electricity (and even less of primary energy, obviously.) Consequently, attempting to generate all of US’ present-day electricity demand from nuclear (as had been ludicrously suggested by some anti-renewables people) would require operating about 500 nuclear power plants – which is not a vision I have seen anybody credibly defend. France is a well-known example of a country which relies the most on nuclear – and which also at times struggles to supply them with cooling water, in spite of being rather temperate. It’s easy to imagine how much worse that challenge would be in so many of the American states.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear-reactors-in-operation-by-country/
(And yes, it’s easy to say that the solution is to just mostly build solar and wind – but even in a mixed nuclear-renewable grid, exponential growth of power consumption could well require similar numbers of power plants even for a fraction of total energy generation. That point might not be hit in this century, but unless growth stops, it’ll be hit eventually.)
This is basically nonsense.
EROI isn’t what matters. Consider the related Seeds returned on Investment. SROI. Wheat will only give you a SROI of 7 or so, but a single vannilla plant can produce millions of (tiny) seeds. So vanilla has an exceptionally high SROI, and is thus an ideal staple crop.
No.
What actually matters is the ratio R=SROI/(SROI – 1), this ratio tells you multiplicative factor needed to cover future investments.
If you have an SROI of 2 then R=2 , you need to plant half your crop as seed. So the crop has to be otherwise twice as productive to be worth it.
If the SROI = 3, then R=3/2, so you must invest 3/2 times as much labor (If someone gave you free seed forever, you could do 2/3 as much labor)
Solar and nuclear have the potential to offer Vastly more energy than fossil fuels.
If you can invest 1 unit of energy, and get 2 back, and you can do this quickly and with little labor, you still have it made.
EROI, and SROI, do put some upper bounds on growth rates, but these aren’t really relevant.
> The question, of course, is how much of that is attributable to “capitalism”
not if you’re not a tankie. industrialism didn’t just emerge under capitalism, capitalism is the only system that has sustained it. You can, by inflicting a tremendous amount of human suffering on innocent people, kind of sort of replicate it with other systems, but not sustainably.
To be fair, capitalism is the only system that has sustained it in an environment that is exceptionally hostile to non-capitalist societies. Cuba seems to be giving it a pretty good go under some quite thoroughly abysmal international constraints.
I’m not sure we have anywhere near enough of a representative sample to be able to say anything even nearly as strong as ‘it is the only system that could work sustainably’.
> You can, by inflicting a tremendous amount of human suffering on innocent people, kind of sort of replicate it with other systems
Fortunately as we all know, capitalism imposes a really quite trivial amount of human suffering on other people – only half of the planet lives in poverty. The other half is doing great thank you very much.
“To be fair, capitalism is the only system that has sustained it in an environment that is exceptionally hostile to non-capitalist societies.”
It seems to me that there have always been many anti-capitalist politicians, political activists and so on. The fact that capitalism appears to have survived is clearly not because few people hate it. We have entire political philosophies dedicated to the hatred of capitalism. And since the list of people who hated it included Stalin, Mao, and arguably Hitler, many of those opponents were not, whatever their flaws, lacking in aggression or power, or ruthlessness.
If you want to explain why it is still around after that lot, you might consider which of the alternative systems that have actually been tried do you prefer?
If there is not one, you should seriously consider the possibility that the reason it survived is that it was the best available option. That is why most tools stay in use.
@ad9 While that may be the case, I think the most powerful country in the world for the past 100 years, at the heart of global financial systems, being both capitalist and vehemently anti-socialist (to the point of fairly frequent international intervention to depose socialist leaders) outweighs the rest of those factors.
You can argue that there was a reasonable counterbalancing force up until the 90s, but considering that counterbalancing force was the Soviet Union’s particular brand of socialism, I’d argue that’s not exactly a fair shot.
I’m not saying that capitalism isn’t without significant advantages that make it very appealing. But it is also not without significant flaws that appear to be coming home to roost fairly significantly right at this moment, as far as I can tell. Perhaps I’m wrong about that. Perhaps this is a temporary setback caused by a number of consecutive shocks, and everything will be fixed within a decade.
Perhaps I’m a cynic, but I doubt it somehow.
@Ynneadwraith
The environment is not necessarily ‘exceptionally hostile to non-capitalist societies’.
For example, during parts of the Cold War Yugoslavia and China even were supported by NATO as counterweights against the USSR.
After the Tito-Stalin split, Yugoslavia was, I had read, even regarded as a de facto NATO ally; however, Khrushchev had later improved relations with Yugoslavia.
After the Sino-Soviet split and Nixon’s visit to China the PRC and USA became so close that Mao was pro-Pinochet, because Allende had been pro-Soviet, and the USA kept on recognising the Khmer Rouge as the lawful government of Cambodia after they had been overthrown by the Vietnamese, because the Khmer Rouge were aligned with China in the Sino-Soviet split.
Not to mention that just after WWII relations between the USSR and the other allies were not yet bad.
In 1946, the UK government had even agreed to sell Rolls Royce Nene jet engines to the USSR so long as they were not used for military purposes. The Soviets rather quickly started putting them into jet fighter aircraft. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eop1oe/in_1946_the_uk_government_agreed_to_sell_rolls/ )
However, relations quickly deteriorated as a result of such things as the Berlin blockade and the start of the Korean War. I had been told that this was because Stalin for ideological reasons believed that conflict was inevitable between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ and had thus not bothered to attempt to prevent it.
That I agree with.
For example, the Lange Model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_model ) was a never-implemented model for an economy based on public ownership of the means of production, where simulated markets and a trial-and-error were to be used by planning organs to set prices, determine output targets, and the allocation of goods.
I suspect it would over the long term have done a less poor job than Soviet-style central planning; if only because then people, from consumers to factory managers, no longer would have needed black markets just to get the goods they need.
Then there is also market socialism; I suspect also an economic system based on market-competition between cooperatives* and state-owned enterprises also would over the long term have done a less poor job than Soviet-style central planning, and considerably so.
I suspect its performance still would have been inferior to a ‘capitalist’ economy because of such things as the absence of venture capital.
However, I am willing to admit I am not 100% certain of that. Apparently, in the 1980’s there were intelligent well-informed people** who predicted that a ‘Market Leninism’; would be an inherently unstable and unsustainable system that cannot last, but as the PRC is still around today, forty years later, that turned out to be false; so best to remain humble.
* IIRC, there is a region in Italy were cooperatives make up double digits of both GDP and employment.
If the few things I read of it are correct it also serves to disprove one argument against an economy based around cooperatives: that an economy based on worker-owned cooperatives would lead to high unemployment because cooperatives would be much more hesitant in hiring new workers as the existing workers do not want to dilute their share of the cooperatives management and profits; however, in that one Italian region the cooperatives are part of cooperative federations and their contributions can be used to found new cooperatives.
However, outside of that there are still arguments against cooperative-based economies which might become relevant if cooperatives start making up an even larger share of the economy.
** Those people even include János Kornai who had been an influential foreign advisor during the PRC’s economic reforms. Or at least that was what was discussed here: ( https://andrewbatson.com/2018/01/22/why-was-kornai-wrong-about-the-sustainability-of-chinas-market-socialism/ ), poorly enough I lack the time to read any of Kornai’s work directly.
Considering that remittances are estimated to make up about a quarter of Cuba’s GDP, or even a third when including remittances sent in the form of goods, so much money do Cuban-Americans send back to family members there, and the USA happens to be the only nation embargoing Cuba since the Cold War ended, I think that overstates both how ‘pretty good’ Cuba is going and how ‘thoroughly abysmal’ its international constraints are.
I admit that the US embargo also hinders trade with third countries; among others it makes it required to set up shell companies to avoid business trading with Cuba to become the target of US secondary sanctions. Though, I remain unconvinced those extra costs are more important than a remittance income of a quarter of a country’s GDP.
@James: ah yes, as opposed to the times before capitalism, when no one lived in poverty…oh wait, those times have never existed, and, as OGH has pointed out here, the vast majority of people have lived in what we would consider poverty.
Ynneadwraith, which of the historic non-capitalist states do you prefer to the historic capitalist ones?
“Fortunately as we all know, capitalism imposes a really quite trivial amount of human suffering on other people – only half of the planet lives in poverty. The other half is doing great thank you very much.”
(1) which metric you use for poverty?
(2) note that notable amount of that poverty can be hardly blamed on capitalism – for extreme example see North Korea
(3) are you really arguing that it is a reason to be against capitalism?
which other economical systems were better at achieving prosperity or are likely to be better?
for example feudalism or communism as actually practised lose to capitalism in practice
(in the same way as democracy is really bad scheme, but handily wins with whatever else was tried so far)
The idea that capitalism is currently sustainable is so laughable that even the arch-capitalists of the World Economic Forum (aka the literal Davos) have been acknowledging for years that it very much isn’t. Here’s one of their starkest opinions on the matter.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/03/sustainable-resource-consumption-urgent-un/
At most, you can argue that the 20th-century alternatives have also not been sustainable, and that capitalism has better odds of achieving sustainability while retaining highest possible living standards than the alternatives to it. (Although, it would fly in the face of, e.g. Cuba getting frequently described as one of the most sustainable nations on Earth on certain metrics.) However, I believe we ought to defer to Hegel here.
That is, it’s not possible to speak of any system’s sustainability when none have achieved it on the timelines that would truly matter to historians.
Well, as YARD observed, a lot of that requires productivity per unit of land to go up faster than the population, without productivity per person falling.
But I notice that when people start talking about agricultural revolutions, they tend to be talking about capitalist Holland, or capitalist Britain, or capitalist America. Or capitalist Germany, perhaps. Not peasant Africa, or communist Russia, or Maoist China.
So the capitalism thing seems to be doing something. And, of course, it does tend to require the separation of your land lord and employer from your magistrate and judge.
I do think people often somewhat misunderstand what went “wrong” with with the agriculture of the communist states. Often you *do* see fairly impresisve increases in yield from early policies. The problem is that the govenrment also then ups extraction for various purposes. (and often there are systemtic issues where the government doesen’t actually know how much the production is, and often overestimates it, leading, oftne then blaming the peasants for the shortfall in their own predictions, and basically leading to extraction-to-death)
> Often you *do* see fairly impressive increases in yield from early policies.
I doubt it. Maybe it’s increased visibility into existing yields, or technology improvements *despite* communism. Would be curious where you see these policy-caused increases (esp the causal link to policy).
https://weibo.substack.com/p/a-history-of-poop-in-china
The policy actions that come to mind are things like, Mao ordering peasants to smelt down their tools. The CCP seizing fertilizer production, turning fertilizer into a scarce resource. Bulgarian communists seizing working farms and operating them with forced labor (obviously at much lower efficiency).
I bring this up not to assert that capitalists were saints, but rather – if communist policy causes farmers to have no tools and fertilizer, I sure hope the rest of it includes things like “turning bread into wine” cuz I don’t see how we land at “impressive increases in yield” otherwise.
That generally came latr, in the later stages of collectivization: THe early things I’m talking about was things that happened in the early 50’s, like pooling resources together for peasants to buy tools. Pooling draft animals, land redistribution (collectivization comes later) etc.
The problem is that because of the dicatotiral nature of the regime, as well as a bunch of structural factors (basically, everyone wants to be seen as successful) yields get overreported: Probably not that much but since *each level* ads a few % the end result is a massive misalignment: The Central Government interprets these yield increases as *massive* yield increases and then redirects resources accordingly (generally: Food from rural areas to cities and then later on during the Great Leap Forwards farmwork to industrial labour) the end result is disaster: Rural areas starve while cities (at first) have a glut of food. (then of course the famine in rural areas causes food production to plummet further) then of course the regime does what regimes always do: Blames the peasantry (“they must be hoarding grain since our numbers say there should be lots of food”)
For USSR in particular, literal statistical noise played a surprisingly important role. Basically, yields in 1928, just before collectivization, dropped severely due to early frosts, and then the weather conditions had been very good in the 1930, giving the leadership a distorted idea of how effective collectivization was. They felt confident to export the record surplus…and when things flipped, famine followed.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/op125_agricultural_production_Wheatcroft_1981.pdf
How about mechanization? It’s easy to take the humble agricultural tractor for granted now, but the first proper internal combustion tractors were only developed around 1903 in the U.S. and the UK simultaneously. (The U.S. also used steam tractors in the latter half of the 19th century, but these were impractical outside of fairly specific conditions.) The Czarist Russia had displayed little interest, but one of the first things Lenin did when coming to power was to direct engineers to produce them, and to purchase them abroad. While it had to resort to purchasing American designs and contracting engineers to build the required plants, by 1934, it was able to stop purchasing foreign tractors, and by 1940, the USSR was producing 40% of the world’s tractor output. Soon, many had been exported to the other Communist states.
Admittedly, this was also in many ways a forced measure to offset mass livestock losses following the civil war and early Communist policies. Another 1980s work had suggested yields by 1940 would have been up to 4 times higher in the absence of collectivization, but it was of course produced during the height of the Cold War, and newer scholarship seems hard to find.
Britain was hardly ‘capitalist’ when its agricultural productivity took off (and the landlord was definitely your employer and judge at the time). Holland was mercantilist. But south China and Gujarat in India achieved very high agricultural returns too.
The initial breakthrough into industrialism happened in one place, spread rapidly, gave an enormous advantage that put those that did it or could copy quickly (Britain, the Belgium, north France, west Germany, later the US). Replicating that socially and economically was not cheap – doing it fast was even more costly, doing it fast in the teeth of competition or worse was even more costly yet..
People talking about the Agricultural Revolution in Britain are usually talking about the 18th century, which is also the period people usually think of as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
And IIRC the labour force in early modern England was not land-poor peasants spending some time sharecropping, but entirely landless labourers working for wages. There were landowners, farmers and farm labourers. No poor peasants with tiny bits of land.
If the distinguishing characteristic of capitalism is the split between wealthy capitalists and capital-less workers, as Marx would presumably claim, that split had already occurred in 18th century Britain.
Which makes sense, because if you are looking for a typical preindustrial society, the last place in the world you should look is the one at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution.
Equivalently, look at the macroscale.
80-90% of the population used to be peasant farmers, and produced just barely enough food for most people not to starve to death (but were chronically malnourished).
Today 1-3% of the population are farmers, and not only are developed countries fed quite comfortably indeed, they on net export bulk cereals and such, including giving it away for free as aid.
In the process of that transition, we managed to turn grain soup (a staple food to be eaten) into beer (a recreationally consumed drink), and forgot this happened, resulting in occasional breathless articles on “did you know how much beer peasants used to consume?”.
On tenant farming you get the problem of who provides traction, seed, etc. But doesn’t the freeholder also have problems providing those, meaning buying them from the Big Man somehow?
As far as I know, that was fairly common. So unless one was a wealthy peasants that would be another cost to add to all the other ones. Being a peasant definitely wasn’t fun.
The terms for tenancy when the tenant provided traction were much more generous on their face. Only labor was 20% or less, while traction became 50% or so.
The trick there for the tenant is you a) have to own the traction and b) feed the traction while it works.
So I think a fair bit of that extra 30% goes to food for the traction.
I’m wondering if a large portion of why terms in e.g. England tended to be more generous were because there were more tenants who owned and could provide for traction.
Which also reminds me of the phrase “40 acres and a mule” for freedmen in the US. That could be fairly generous if it were cleared, reasonably good land. Or not very good if it was a swamp of course.
I note that a farm was stereotypically farmed by a *couple*. Not single women, but not single men either. There was just too much to do, and a single man would have been overwhelmed.
There’s a reason basically everyone married. If you left your parents home before marriage, it was generally either to run away, or to join the army. Or go into service for the local Big Man, but you could either have a room in the Big House or commute back home.
This is often still the case in non-English Europe. It’s becoming the case in some parts of the US and Canada, but those are generally in large expensive cities.
A family with many women, providing less agricultural labor per mouth to feed, would instead send over women to make cloth or work as servants in the Big Man’s estate, I presume?
Or just have their daughters married at early age, so they become their husband’s problem from now on…
That was complicated by dowry customs.
Probably not servants, at least in pre-modern Europe. Domestic service was slave-work for the Romans. And during the medieval period the Big Man’s servants were a cut above peasants. It was a “good job”, and posts that came open were generally filled by family and friends of the existing servants.
It’s only after the agricultural revolution that domestic service becomes a major labour sink for the poor; not coincidentally that’s also when servant’s status and working conditions begin to plummet.
The urban merchant/artisan class also employed “servants”, and they were at the bottom of the medieval urban hierarchy, but they were more unskilled labourers doing the drudge work in the workshop than what a modern audience would think of as servants.
Re,
Oh, interesting, what should I read on this? What I’ve read is that neolocal Early Modern norms were that commoners hired themselves out as servants in their late teens and early 20s to save up money to be able to marry and form a family. But that might be just an urban working-class norm, not a rural one.
It was a rural norm – the Big Men travelled (from estate to estate, up to court, to parliament or assembly) and took their entourage with them – not just domestics but stable-hands, packmen and so on, plus guards and hangers-on there to display their prominence. A good way to scout for farming opportunities, earn a bit, see the world ..
Depends exactly, scandinavia had the entire life cycle servants thing. These wouldn’t be domestic servants per se, but generally closer to farm workers. But it was basically a way to shuffle extra children from farms with too many to farms with too few. (it also seems to have been one of the ways people met prospective marriage partners, by working at another farm where there also worked another boy/girl from somewhere else)
Notably the term for these kinds of servants in swedish just means “boy” and “girl” in norwegian.
> . But the lack of economically sustainable social niches – that is, jobs that provide a reliable steady income to enable someone to obtain subsistence – means that these families are very reluctant to leave members without any land
Implies that there isn’t a reliable pool of alternative jobs for your family of women to do
the more and more you talked and discussed this, the more and more I wanted retroactive revolution to overthrow the Bigs in so many ways, course if not me then who and gha.
but yeah. youch. Im reminded of the constant lazy farmer trope from disdainful useless nobles sticking up their nose at things cause wow you dont know.
Gha. dumb-dumb.
fuck youve discussed it before but the wealth and productivity of now versus then and making war pay for itself and more and just changing the top keep sending me the goodies…… youch.
Worth noting that the attitude hasn’t exactly disappeared today, including from the people status quo supporters would claim know best.
…Michael Bloomberg, three-time Mayor of New York (elected by ~750k people the first two times and ~590k the final time.) His team’s “justification” was even funnier for implying preindustrial agriculture was less demanding than the modern one.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bloomberg-farmers-gray-matter/
Remarkably, this passage was embedded in the kind of speech which otherwise dovetails with quite a bit of this series.
And right after the “grey matter” line.
And this passage is even more interesting nearly a decade later, in the wake of the “Department of Government Efficiency”, even if the claim at the end is…dubious.
*RFK Jr. says no.
“I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer.”
I doubt if he personally could do that. But if most people throughout history have been farmers, it must have been something that most people could learn to do.
Most people have jobs that most people can learn to do.
I think the important distinction is between the implicit assumption that it is a trivial thing to learn to do (as found in his incredibly simplistic comment on what sowing seed entails), and the possibility that it is a sophisticated knowledge base that one benefits the most from being immersed in from birth and taking from predecessors that have accumulated and refined it across generations.
It probably wasn’t easy to be the ‘first’ farmers.
Sure. But they still have to learn, and there’s still a wide range between “I can stick a seed in a hole in the ground” and “I know where and when to put this seed in the ground, how deep to dig the hole, and what to do to make sure I get harvest out of this.”
Decades ago, I worked for a few months at a fast food place. That’s when I learned that there were skills to learn even in a low-skill job; for example, my shift manager could cut up eight heads of lettuce in the time it took me to do one. Most people can learn to cut up lettuce, but classes in kitchen knife techniques are offered for a reason.
There is an interesting economics paper on “o-ring production”
But basically, in some jobs, the returns to skill are fairly limited and diminishing. Whereas in other (generally more high tech) jobs, you need a lot of skill to be doing anything useful at all.
The job “chop lettuce” is something most humans can pick up fairly quickly. Sure they won’t be as fast as someone who has done it for years. But they can still do it.
Whereas designing weather monitoring satellites isn’t the sort of task that the average person can do after minimal training. It takes a lot of skill and specialist knowledge to be anything other than a total liability.
Wait? Did Michael Bloomberg really say that?
That sounds stupid, even if you happen to agree with the premises he put forward.
Even if you start from the assumption that many people cannot find employment on the private market because of outdated skillsets and the government has to step in to provide them with jobs. Would it then not make more sense to first attempt to create jobs that are at least a but useful?
For example, the government could hire people who can otherwise not find employment to build social housing or work in public daycare centres; that would at least do something to solve problems of the rest of the population like too expensive housing* and childcare. Even should the benefits be tiny relative to the money spent on it, it would still be better than deliberately useless jobs.
Moreover, I was under the impression that Bloomberg was one of those rich people alienated from the rest of the population; though as I have only second-hand knowledge of him, I admit that could be wrong.
I would have expected one of those people to instead suggest introducing subsidies to employers hiring ‘people who otherwise would have difficulty getting a job’; there were studies according to which wage subsidies like EITC could increase labour force participation so, this would also do something. Then their companies could hire new workers and they themselves new maids and nannies and receive money from the government for that.
However, it is possible he thinks suggesting that would not look good for the voters.
* I now find myself wondering whether social housing would actually impact house prices a lot. As I understand it, in the USA the main problem is NIMBY’s introducing regulations making the building of cheap housing illegal; I had been told that in those Californian cities with very strict zoning houses are several times more expensive than Houston, Texas with its very loose zoning. Is the government better at going through NIMBY oppositions than private developers?
I was given afternoon tea by a landlady in the Philippines, on the verandah of her large and lovely house, who talked about how the peasants we could see labouring in her fields (under the tropical sun) were lazy and shiftless, and basically would perish from stupidity without her benevolent hand.
On a few previous occasions, you’ve disagreed with Malthusian theory, and I’ve so far been persuaded by those arguments.
However, the strong implication of this post is that without the big man ‘managing’ a large portion of the land, peasant families would grow, and split the land, until subsistence became untenable.
If you have time in a later post, could you explain how those ideas can be reconciled?
Peasant families are made up of intelligent human beings who can, even without modern contraceptives, make estimates about how many children they can support and do their best to limit the growth of the family by delayed marriage and various other methods. Discussed in
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/
If people are consciously limiting the number of children they have in order to prevent them from starving, that sounds rather Malthusian to me. On the face of it, at any given time the median peasant is going to be near the “any more children will starve” limit.
Question was why peasant families wouldn’t keep growing and splitting the land until they were too small for subsistence.
You’re conflating resource constrained with Malthusian.
If the peasant’s had more land they would, over time, split the land into smaller farms because that was good for the social standing of second and third sons. At least when the land could at provide enough to remain a peasant farmer. The family size wouldn’t necessarily increase if the peasant got lucky and inherited a couple of acres, though the family would be significantly wealthier. This seems to have balanced out over the long term with family lines dying out and others peasant’s farming the land.
This doesn’t include the specifically Malthusian elements of oversupply leading to overpopulation leading to outstripping the available resources leading to deaths by famine. When hungry times came it was bad weather, disease, natural disasters, or invasion rather than overpopulation driving the problem.
And the bits of Malthus where he pushed the idea that a Big Man managing the land and extracting surplus for the good of the peasant’s is just nonsense.
But it isn’t a “will starve” limit, because the growing family can make up the caloric need by working more hours and sleeping less, or selling themselves into serfdom/debt slavery. They are choosing how hard they want to work overall and targeting a number of children that is within that level of work but still allows them to expect to be ancestors after they’re gone. Environmental food limits don’t come into it and are moreover unknowable to the people making the fertility decisions in question.
No? There are two factors at work here.
First is that the peasant families working in a land free of Big Men would probably simply have larger amounts of land, corresponding to what they actually need to farm to have subsistence + a bit more.
Second is that the reason peasants need to be constrained by force and/or threat of starvation into providing surplus and extra labor is that there is zero hopes for them of ever achieving a better social status than that of peasant. In a world with more upwards social mobility, or where access to goods other than basic food and clothing isn’t so prohibitively expensive, those can be their own motivation.
In other words : we don’t need Big Men to avoid everyone starving, people have always managed to do that, and we also don’t need them to forcibly extract surplus which produces things other than food because we have better technology and better (though far from perfect) social organization.
For example, while capitalism undoubtedly sucks ass, a modern farmer can use their surplus to save money which will pay for the higher education of their children, or a more comfortable retirement, or a vacation they want to take.
By contrast, in a stateless post-currency utopia, that farmer might be motivated by the fact that the amount of food they produce enables other to produce non-food goods that the farmer can partake in equally.
In either case the farmer will want to produce a surplus because that surplus has returns that do not diminish nearly has sharply. Also, obviously, producing a surplus is significantly less work with industrialized agriculture, satellite weather monitoring, and specialized farms supporting each other against bad years through vast distance, which means that while farming is by no means easy work it is far less awful than it was in the pre-industrial world
Chris Wickham (in The Donkey and the Boat) argues from extensive archaeological surveys that over time the peasants often manage to claw back a good deal of the surplus, so creating room for demand in respectability to grow – as evidenced by finer pottery.
Over longer time frames, complexity, collapse and revival create a cycle of soil loss, forest regrowth etc, which in the revival phase leaves a lot of room for reclaiming land – as happened on a major scale in Europe from c1100 on. Landlords would offer extended terms of low or no rent, various rights and so on to peasants prepared to extend their holdings. Sometimes recruiting from distant places (Flanders to Poland is one example)
What happens to that land without Big Men?
It likely doesn’t take too long before the Bigs become Big Men.
Our host has explained this in a past post:
“This actually leads back to a point that has come up in the comments a number of times: why I don’t ascribe to the automatic assumption that there is an inherent Malthusian trap in the pre-modern world. […] the normal assumption being made here is that agricultural production is fundamentally static. But it isn’t. What we see instead are agricultural systems capable of operating at multiple equilibria.
You can imagine a low-equilibrium society, where trade and monetization are minimal. In this environment, it is very hard for small farmers to get access to productive capital (plow-teams, manure, mills) and so agricultural productivity is low. Because agricultural productivity is low, it is hard for the society to support many specialists, which in turn means fewer tools, plow-teams, manure and mills. The system is in a stable equilibrium, but at a relatively low level.
But take the same society and increase trade and monetization. Access to capital gets easier through monetary means and increased trade means increased agricultural specialization, which increases overall out[put]; the trade compensates for the added risk of pushing closer to mono-cropping in each region by evening out prices. Because agricultural productivity is high, the society supports many specialists. Some of those are freeloading aristocrats and large landholders who do little but extract rents and live lavish lifestyles, but many are productive specialists who produce the capital necessary to improve yields, or maintain the trade systems that support everything. This society is operating at a higher, stable equilibrium.
Without changing any farming technology – that is, we haven’t invented anything, although existing technologies are more available in our high-equilibrium society – or the amount of land available, or the quality of the land, the second society is going to support far more people, potentially at a significantly higher standard of health […crux…] It is better to live in danger of starvation in a well-made house with decent clothes, good tools, fine poetry and fun civic festivals than it is to live in the same danger of starvation, but alone in a mud-hut with none of those things.”
My opinion is that:
1) This is still Malthusian, but most discussions of Malthusianness leave out this perpendicular dimension, and it is good and necessary to point out its existence;
2) I get the impression that the Professor is perhaps annoyed with the direction most people/conversations go after Malthus is brought up, and as it appears to me, overcorrects toward opposing the standard Malthusian argument too much;
3) In the above I cut out a part of the argument (marked with […crux…]) where I flatly disagree:
“for the decades or centuries [emphasis in original] it takes for population growth to catch up to the increased production ceiling. Even once the total population pushes against that ceiling, it may benefit from the availability of produced goods which continue to be produced by the specialist non-farmers, even if [sic!] food once again becomes tight.”
Given the detailed discussion in parts 2&3 of this series of the pattern of malnourishment-related mortality, to me it’s very clear that this population is very much rubbing against the ceiling, and that it would very quickly follow any motions thereof. And that if, for whatever reason, the ceiling flew out of sight, this population would grow explosively, doubling in less than 50 years. (It is extremely well documented how populations worldwide reacted to the recent agricultural/industrial revolutions reaching them. That from 1927 to 2022, world population went from 2 bn to 8 bn.)
“(It is extremely well documented how populations worldwide reacted to the recent agricultural/industrial revolutions reaching them. That from 1927 to 2022, world population went from 2 bn to 8 bn.)”
My understanding has been that this has more to do with advancements in health care and medicines than agricultural improvements. If we lived in a world that experienced similar improvement in health care and plummeting child mortality, but without parallel advancements in modern contraceptives and agriculture we would probably crash straight in to Malthus. In the past century health care has advanced faster than people’s trust in health care. There is a significant delay before people believe that they don’t need a large amount of children to have assured heir for their farm.
One of those major agricultural advancements was the Haber process for making ammonia. Without that, we’d have exhausted the available natural supplies of nitrates (guano and so forth) decades ago and likely hit those Malthusian limits. Something like 3% of all human energy use is for the Haber process.
You can’t predict a counterfactual world. Approaching the guano limit made the Haber process something viable for transition from research to development. If it had never been discovered then that would have made waste reclamation techniques, or intensive aquaculture, or cricket ranching, or bacterial soil enrichment, or something become the famous fix.
Increasing the number of human minds in existence does increase the total (not per capita) human suffering in the world, everyone’s suffering a bit all the time; but it also unavoidably increases the number of anthropogenic solutions being considered.
Health care and medicine don’t matter if you starve.
The Haber process plus the green revolution made 8 billion actually possible.
That you can move to the city and get food without farming it yourself is unprecedented for most of that 8 billion.
You’re right that it takes a while before most of the population internalizes that children are now in many cases an overall expense, instead of a retirement fund.
The Big Man managing land wasn’t what stopped peasants from having more children than they could feed. What stopped that was peasants managing their own fertility to fit their resources.
But since one of any peasants resources was the option to spend some time working the Big Mans land in exchange for some of the proceeds, the *minimum land area they needed to own*, was less than the *minimum land area required to support their family*.
Don’t forget that he also described a plethora of methods by which peasants historically controlled their own population. It’s complicated to predict societal level outcomes, but strictly in terms of land available to farm the peasants would have been much better off if “big men” didn’t exist.
Other than “extraordinarily poorly”, how did this math work out for enslaved workers? You’ve talked a great deal about how the terrible life expectancy tends to lead to falling peasant household sizes unless the birthrate is quite high. It doesn’t take a whole lot of surplus-removal to push these peasants into death and decline (and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of surplus even among free laborers). Not only would I expect enslaved workers to receive less of everything (food, textiles) slavery sounds like it was wildly detrimental to the health of the enslaved workers in other ways.
So how did the population of enslaved workers in the ancient world not always quickly decline to nothing, with this sort of math? Is it that in much of the ancient world, the enslavement of people was just persistently high enough to supply these demands?
Yes, almost all systems of slavery relied on a constant stream of the fresh bodies. Typically war captives or the destitute being enslaved.
Rome is a particularly vivid illustration. The conquests of the late Republic and early Empire flooded Italy with slaves, but once the Empire’s borders stabilised the slave population dwindled. Thus the large estates gradually switched to relying on sharecroppers as their main workforce.
Though it should be noted at least part of this was that roman slavery (and some other systems, like islamic slavery) had a slow but steady trickle of emancipations. There are particular places that were just a death sentence (mining was particularly horrid, to the point that getting people to do that kind of work without *some* level of coercion seems to have been almost impossible) this wasn’t really significant on an individual scale but over centuries and with diminishing imports it actually mattered.
The epitome of this are the West Indies sugar islands. At emancipation the number of slaves was roughly equal to the number transported over the centuries (ie, no natural increase).
Though while mortality is a big part of this, a large chunk of the reason for this was simply that the imported slaves were mainly men. Since the number of women basically puts a hard cap on nativity…
They did a lot better than the free immigrants, then?
(In terms of population increase, not living standards, in case anyone is wondering.)
This was as much due to acclimation to the climate and local diseases as it was to harsh working conditions though the harsh working conditions didn’t help.
If you look at the records of European military units in the West Indes over a 10 year period some units had casualty rates of over 100% even though the unit saw little combat. Note this doesn’t mean they all died. It does means that they had to send over soldiers that could have formed two units of that scale in order to maintain the unit.
It was bad enough that being assigned to the West Indies was considered to be a likely death sentence and the rumor that a unit was going there would lead to large-scale desertions or mutiny.
“mining was particularly horrid, to the point that getting people to do that kind of work without *some* level of coercion seems to have been almost impossible”
I’m curious how to reconcile this with the various gold rushes of the 19th century. Was there a (or multiple) technological advancement(s) that made mining much less lethal? Was it the case that all of the easy-to-reach precious metal deposits of the Old World had long since been taken, leaving only the much-more-difficult-(and-lethal)-to-reach ones (while the New World still had plenty of easy-to-reach deposits)? Or is it simply the case that miners can be very easily motivated to do horrible and potentially lethal work as long as there’s a chance of them getting rich in the process?
I have to wonder how many of the “miners” in the gold rushes were actually mining. Versus panning, which takes a lot less equipment and a lot less knowledge, and should be a lot less lethal.
Also what percentage of the people involved were even bringing gold out, versus catering to their various needs.
I would think a 19th century miner would be a lot more likely to be mining coal than gold. I would also guess that the working conditions of a free 19th century miner were quite different from those of a 1st century BC slave. Even if the geological conditions were identical. Perhaps a better comparison would be a mine in the 20th century Gulag.
There were significant technological advances in mining between Roman and late/early modern times medieval times. Agricola’s de re Metallica (1550s) is a world away from Greek/Roman mining. But a large part may be due to mining was now quite remunerative (to the workers) and done by communities of free men.
Surface prospecting is not really comparable to underground shaft mining.
It should be noted that falling under the “subsistence” threshold does not mean immediate family extinction. People can still keep going in a starvation state for quite some time, which means that even if a slave family is kept at the absolute minimum of existence by their master, they might still have children and continue to provide labor. It might just not be enough children to be long-term viable, but as you noticed, most societies have ways to “import” new slaves.
There’s also some more buffer mechanisms that can cause a population to drop slower than expected as it is pushed below subsistence:
Firstly, the increased mortality from the deprivation will be concentrated in children and the elderly. The first is of course a problem, but the latter serves as buffer: A population which has less old and unproductive people to take care of has a higher productivity per capita because more of it is prime-age workers.
Secondly, in a situation where there are less kids, there is less demand for child care, freeing up labor which can be put to use to produce more food.
Thirdly, depending on the exact type of slavery, certain parts of the living requirements become the responsibility of the slave master, whose economy of scale might result in lower labor requirements per person. An extreme example: A barracks full of overcrowded bunk beds requires less maintenance than ten individual farm houses while holding the same amount of people.
And to be clear, all of those mechanisms are the product of suffering and cruelty and will be traumatic for the people having to experience them.
“People can still keep going in a starvation state for quite some time, which means that even if a slave family is kept at the absolute minimum of existence by their master, they might still have children and continue to provide labor.”
I have my doubts about a woman in a starvation state bringing a child to term.
Indeed, this was proven as recently as the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries’ sugar plantation slavery.
Yes, to the point that there are some (horrific) manuals for slaveowners in the sugar plantations on how to increase the chances that your pregnant slave women would carry a child to term.
A lot of it also depends on the economic incentives of the slaver: They generally presumably do not want to actually starve their slaves (it’s usually cheaper to just feed them than to buy new slaves) though that can depend a bit on their personal economics (if times are tight the slaves are going to have their rations cut first…) the difference between “productive” and “unproductive” slaves, etc. But it also depends on the price of replacements, how profitable what they are doing is, etc.
The southern American system was pretty close to unique in that even after a lot of the routes for fresh bodies dried up, they still ended up with a growing enslaved population.
Due to the British embargoing the Atlantic slave route, I will note. They don’t get nearly enough credit for that.
Yes, the price went up, but not to the extent you would expect with other systems, where the enslaved population would fairly quickly die off if there weren’t more available.
It was bad for your lifespan being a slave in America, but not nearly as bad as pretty much every other place where there was slavery.
The West Indies and Brazil – and Greek/Roman mine slavery – were worse, Islamic slavery generally better (manumission available, restrictions on family separation, and eg when slaves joined a large revolt in southern Iraq they won their freedom as part of the settlement).
Did the sharecropping percentage depend on the quality of the land? If I’m a tenant and I have my choice then I’m obviously going to prefer to work the big man’s most productive fields. But so would everyone else. I’d expect that to turn into a sort of bidding war.
I’d have guessed something between ‘bidding war’ and ‘giving the best land to the families who were my staunchest supporters among the peasantry’, veering towards the latter if I was forced to choose.
That sounds quite interesting from a game theory point of view. After all, the worse the terms, the more effort the tenants will put into their fields rather than yours. And it is hard to shift the risk over to the tenants because defraying risk is one of their highest goals.
Why didn’t the Roman Republic expand the system they used in Italy to the provinces, as well? Since it had been successful.
They tried a bit, there’s some discussion in the posts here on the initial conquests in Greece about the Romans chopping up the conquered kingdoms into client city-states and taking regular payment from them. But the system in Italy was successful in part because it it put men from the Italian allies in battle alongside Romans and forced those men to see Rome in person, and the logistical burden on the allies in Italy for that was not that large. You can walk to Rome from any of them in less than a fortnight, something that doesn’t work for the three big Italian islands and definitely can’t be made to work for Cartagena or Corinth.
I’d have guessed it would have been a lot easier from somewhere like Dalmatia or Sardinia. Potentially easier than Bruttium.
Still, I expect they’re not meticulously planning these things out. Perhaps the Bruttians got in while they were still in a ‘socii are a good idea’ frame of mind, then Sardinia and Dalmatia may well have been folded in after the ‘we tried socii outside of Italy proper and it didn’t work’ transition.
I think it’s an open question why there were so many places with a treaty that required them to march their armies to Rome to become attached as wings to the legions, but there don’t seem to have been places that were required to sail their armies to Ostia to march to Rome to become attached as wings to the legions.
A lot of people were that dirt poor even at ~1900, peasants in countries with low fertility lands like Russia were working with 1:3-1:4 returns. Green revolution of 1950s was truly a 3rd Great revolution in human history, after Agricultural and Industrial ones
Gonna pull out “when Adam delved and Eve span” for the next post?
The part about land scarcity being the bottleneck and that being the cause of many of the wars of conquest, is a detail that a lot of moderns miss and should be focused on more, especially in context of the last seven posts in this series.
For 99% of the humans history, at both an individual and societal level, life was an absolute living hell, and ‘kill your neighbor and steal his shit’ was basically the only viable way to make it slightly less hellish. The reason that so many historical societies turned into expansionistic genocidal mass-enslaving empires is because for most of human history it was the materially, objectively correct decision to do so, by such an absurd margin that only an absolute idiot wouldn’t.
Those who beat their swords into plowshares get conquered and slaghtered by neighbors who kept their swords. Everyone knew that, and everyone knew that everyone else knew that, so the conquest and slaughter was a permanent churn. It was only industrialization, which shifted the pattern of bottlenecks and ROIs, that changed this. For al it’s LEGION of drawbacks and externalities, industrial capitalism was an EXTREME net good for humanity.
For that matter, we still have many people thinking that raiding others and stealing their stuff is the way to get rich.
See the Iraqis in Kuwait, or any riot.
You make a lot more stuff with an intact factory and the trained workers in there. Raiding the area the factory is means the factory doesn’t work any more and the workers have run away. But many people in this world still think that works.
If that’s the case, then why did the worst wars & genocides in human history occur after industrialization?
Also, if history was such a blood-soaked nightmare before 1750 or so (as opposed to after), one wonders how they built cathedrals, mosques, pagodas, and created classical arts in the midst of all that chaos?
Also, factories require raw materials, which in turn require land. So yes, control of territory still matters, and can still spark wars — Ukraine is a notable example, since it has rich farmland, and especially rich mining in the contested Donbass.
My point is not to downplay the benefits of modern life, rather it’s to point out how ideological and biased this viewpoint is.
WW II-sized death counts were impossible in times where total world population was much smaller than nowadays.
Have you tried comparing death count as % of population?
Genghis Khan conquest resulted in greater death toll as % population, despite absolute numbers being lower.
> Also, factories require raw materials, which in turn require land. So yes, control of territory still matters, and can still spark wars — Ukraine is a notable example, since it has rich farmland, and especially rich mining in the contested Donbass.
Russian invasion of Ukraine is hardly example of something economically profitable for Russia* and does not seem likely to become one.
The argument is not that invading brings you no benefit whatsoever, but that it is inferior to other things you can do and inferior to past profits and costs also increased.
*whether it is profitable for Putin is another issue, and murkier one
You make a reasonable point on % of population, since population went up drastically thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Of course there was large-scale, intense violence in the past, although not as frequently, and the Mongol conquests are an exceptional case in many ways. The 20th century, on the other hand, saw frequent outbreaks of nightmarish violence, all made possible by industrialization.
There’s also other factors to get into, like social dysfunctions and physical/mental disorders that were uncommon before modern times, although that must be balanced against the wonders of modern medicine, and so on.
As for the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s far from over. Point being, it contradicts the whole idea that we can all just trade & capitalize and, in that way, make warfare obsolete (ie the End of History). The world is highly interconnected, but irreconcilable differences persist, which brings back the zero-sum game of conquest.
“Our farmers might also try to supplement production with high-labor, high-density horticulture; a kitchen garden can take a lot of work but produce a lot of nutrition in a small space. But hitting household nutrition demands entirely with a kitchen garden isn’t going to work both because of the labor demands but also because the products of a kitchen garden tend not to keep well.”
The second is probably the main reason.
Some of the tropical swidden farming is precisely meeting household food supply entirely with a kitchen garden.
But this is limited areas – and significantly limited population too.
In temperate climates, there are cold winters which are not growing season, so you need grain crops which preserve through winter. In much of the tropics there are dry seasons so again you need grain crops which preserve. There are areas of irrigated agriculture like Egypt – but before 19th century, irrigation in Egypt was seasonal. It is limited areas of permanently wet tropics where year round kitchen gardens work. And these are historically sparsely populated. In Indonesia, the historically heavily populated region is Java, which has more of a dry season than the much less populous Sumatra and Kalimantan, and grows largely rice, a grain crop. In India, year round gardens may work in Kerala – but most of farmer population is in Ganges plain, which has a clear dry season, and also grows mainly grain.
Not that I’m second-guessing actual farmers, but I’ve had a fair bit of success preserving garden crops with fermentation. No idea what it does to calorific value, but I’m up to a couple of months on some cabbage, pepper, broccoli and runner beans I’ve preserved (the broccoli is pretty punchy, though still edible. The rest is very tasty). Supposedly they can keep for a year or so if kept in a cool place like a root cellar.
It must have been somewhat of an issue though, because considering the shockingly poor arrangement of tenant farming I’d have expected people to be using some of that labour to grow veg and preserve it instead.
Perhaps there were other constraints involved as well. Kitchen gardens can be wedged into small spaces, but they’re still quite land-hungry *for the calorie value you get out* compared to cereals. If you have a big enough garden…you turn it into a field. Perhaps growing some runner beans up a trellis on the side of your house isn’t going to make or break your dependency on tenant labour.
A couple of months would get you about halfway through winter in a lot of Europe.
Which I guess is enough that you might not get scurvy before you get the first radishes etc. of the early spring planting.
Fermentation has been done for a long time, though mostly cabbage. See sauerkraut or kimchi. Or the various pickles which are a similar effect, though that requires vinegar.
You would need well-sealed pots, so you don’t get mold. Mason jars are a new thing, requiring rubber or equivalent. Wax plus a well-fitting plug might work, though putting it on when the pot is hot enough but still letting it harden doesn’t seem workable.
Also a cool room, which would require digging it out. Or a cave? You don’t want the fermented stuff getting hot enough to boil over.
A couple of months is at effectively room temperature. Kept anywhere cool it’s anywhere up to a couple of years. And I’ve seen some natty pots that have a little pool of water in the top that you place a lid over which creates an airlock (useful as it allows built up gases to escape but keeps it sealed from mould).
I was thinking ‘digging a hole doesn’t sound that bad’ but ‘digging a hole big enough to store a meaningful amount of an entire family’s calorific intake’ is probably a bit of a bigger undertaking. I was under the impression that many families had root cellars already, though if I’m mistaken then that would be quite a sizeable capital investment.
“digging a hole big enough to store a meaningful amount of an entire family’s calorific intake”.
With support for the sides and a path down to the floor so you can actually retrieve the pots. And doors on top so people don’t fall in, and so it doesn’t get too cold.
I mean I suppose you could just bury the pots, but then it’s a lot more work to retrieve them. In winter (when you want them) it may be impossible as the ground freezes.
If it does freeze you have to get below the frost line, or you may end up with burst pots.
Digging a root cellar with 13th c. hand tools would be a fair bit of work. I imagine this might have been another reason for being slow to move out of the family home, as opposed to just making it bigger.
“‘digging a hole big enough to store a meaningful amount of an entire family’s calorific intake’ is probably a bit of a bigger undertaking.”
As a very useful rule of thumb (from an old RE manual), one man with a shovel can move one cubic yard of earth in one hour. So digging a cellar six feet deep, six feet wide and twelve feet long is 16 man-hours of work. Couple of hard days and you’re there. Yes, you also have to shift the spoil and revet the sides and put a roof on top (if it isn’t just under your house) but it’s not impractically demanding.
Cellars are a routine thing in colder Europe (ground temperare stays stable, so warmer in winter, cooler in summer – a lot of neolithic houses were dug down presumable for this reason). A layer of oil on top of the veg is one old method of preserving.
Something missing from this comparison of hours worked is that modern people work for fewer years of their lives, due to education and retirement being more of a thing.
Not so much as you might think, simply because of of lifespan. There is definitely *some* truth to it (mainly in the early end: IE: Children don’t really work in modern societies) but death would mean that you’d ended up working roughly the same number of years anyway. Now, we still get to *live* those extra 20+ years, rather than dying, which is of course a major distinction.
This is a big reason why Keynes 15-hour work week has never come to pass. Instead of working less as we got richer, society decided to save up for longer retirements.
“(though the response to getting new land is often not to create a bunch of freeholding large-farm homesteaders, but rather to replicate the patterns of tenancy and non-free agricultural labor these societies already have to the point of – as in the Americas – forcibly trafficking enormous numbers of enslaved laborers at great cost, suffering and horror, to create a non-free dependent class whose exploitation can enable those patterns. Most conquering armies dream of becoming landlords, not peasants”
I don’t really get the impression that the parts of the Americas most of those slaves went to – the Caribbean, Brazil etc – replicated Europe very well. OTOH, I gather this is just a quirk of epidemiology giving those parts of the Americas a middle and bottom layer recruited from the bottom layer of West African society, rather than the bottom layer of European, society.
Can anyone recommend a comparative history of New France, New England, New Spain and Argentina?
Greg Grandin’s America! América! A History of the New World. (2025). It is impossible to do the history of anywhere in the “new world” without dealing with the enslavement of both African and Native Americans. Canada was the least affected, of course, for it wasn’t hospitable for the extractive wealth creation agriculture, didn’t have huge reserves of gold, silver, precious gems, or even precious woods. It had furs and lumber, which at least the first depended on free indigenous labor.
Partially it’s just that these were cash-crop agriculture, not grain growing agriculture. (though there was a secondary layer of plantations who grew grain for the sugar/cotton/indigo/etc. plantations)
Sugar especially was *profitable* per unit in a way that grain wasn’t to an almost incredible extent. Europe had an unceasing demand for it and was willing to pay a premium, and that changed the dynamics somewhat.
AIUI, it is fairly basic conclusion of economic theory that in any market no investment can long have a risk adjusted rate of return higher than any other. If one industry seems to have a higher rate of return that is because it is also riskier, and the higher average return is needed to compensate investors for the extra risk.
For example: the peasants discussed above could almost all have increased their average per-year output by planting a different range of crops, finding a more remunerative employment than sharecropping etc. If they had done so they would, in an average year, have been better off.
But in the bad years they would have been worse off, and it was the bad years that decided how likely their family members were to live. Therefore they tended to prefer the low-risk option, at cost to the average output. It is all a question of what value you place on a risk to your families lives.
Likewise, the people who moved to New England could almost all have raised their expected annual income by moving to the West Indies or West Africa instead. But if they had moved to West Africa their chances of surviving their first year in Africa without dying of some tropical disease were about one in two. If they had gone to the West Indies instead, they might have had a similar chance over five years. Again, the higher profit margin was needed to compensate people for near-certain death. Hence the need for workers who had already been exposed to, and could be presumed resistant to, tropical illnesses (West Africans).
The peasants and the colonists were acting as perfectly in accord with economic theory as any modern merchant banker. Given that they were risking their own lives and fortunes rather than someone elses, probably more in accordance.
Looking at this from the other angle, every English temperate-zone colony from the days of the Virginia Company to those of the New Zealand Company, funded itself by land sales to colonists. They were as much profitable enterprises as any slave plantation. You just didn’t have to sacrifice your life to oversee your investment. And since the workforce could be recruited from your own society, the new society replicated the old one in a way the West Indian colonies never could.
Note that growing sugar beet in Europe never produced the profits of growing sugar cane in the West Indies – but people running a sugar beet farm didn’t need to be compensated well enough to risk near-certain death.
This assumes individual choice, and neglects power relations. One can absolutely transfer risk to someone else and enjoy high less risky returns. Or coerce people to take less. Both in fact the most common arrangements in history, and not unknown today.
This is why I was talking about the decisions of the people in England who could freely decide which colony to settle or invest in.
Besides hunting, people must have relied on forests for wood both as a source of fuel and as a construction material. Was there a tragedy of the commons situation where too many forests were cleared for farmland for people to stay warm in the winter sometimes?
On the face of it, that would require the woodland to be held in common. But land that commands valuable economic resources tends to produce owners. At least, if it is valuable, sooner or later someone will claim ownership.
The thing is, europe had A LOT of woodland. It slowly gets cleared during the middle-ages and early modern period, but often it was just… kinda the default state? This goes to extremes in places like scandinavia, but even central europe was to large extent just covered in trees, and while lords sometimes claimed ownership it was often not seen as particularly valuable economically: (there’s a 16th century poetry book that suggests epiteths like “Desolate”, “barren” etc. as good words to hang on “forest”)
People did claim it (either villages for holding it in common, or BIg Men) but it was oftens een as…. kind of low-value? Certainly compared toa gricultural land. (there were some exceptions, oak forests in particular, or other ones that produced timber suitable for shipbuilding) you got what you could out of the forest (which wasn’t that much comparatively)
(England is, to my understanding a bit special here since de- and re-forestation gets started earlier)
Though it should be noted that common land wasn’t neccessarily *unregulated* Sweden seems to have had a general principle that what you could tkae from the commons was in proportion to your actual land ownership f.ex.
“Common” generally meant “common among the locals”.
If you were an outsider and tried to get acorns etc. from so-called common land, the locals would not be happy with you.
Common ownership of resources like this – woods, streams, fishing rights, rough grazing land – was very, well, common. Sometimes – as in Venice – state-owned and heavily regulated, sometimes under some other form. Simply because over time systems develop to prevent over-exploitation of a resource vital to the whole community. The numerous stake-holders lead to common management.
Wood for fuel was typically made sustainable by practices such as coppicing. You don’t chop down the whole tree where nothing will grow again; you chop off portions of the tree and then let the main body regrow in a form that will be even more convenient to chop portions off for fuel next time.
Yeah, you tend to see irreversible deforestation in only two cases, and sometimes the irreversibility only only kicks in if animals are pastured on the land while it is recovering: logging for shipbuilding, and post-conquest expansion of a metallurgical operation. Peasants expect to get firewood in the exact same place that their grandfathers got firewood.
As noted by other commenters (and has been noted by plenty of other people as well), every “commons” that last for a reasonable amount of time ends up being heavily regulated to avoid over-exploitation. Either by the state or by smaller-scale communities.
In the macro-sense the Big Man-peasant relationship was almost always quite exploitive, but it mattered quite a bit whether when you came for aid the Big Man or his agent would welcome you with a sympathetic smile or an evil grin (or the door). Of course, given how these societies worked, even if they were genuinely sympathetic, their cutting you a break created a favor owed/sense of moral obligation on your end.
Its also worth noting the extent to which there was a sense of noblesse oblige could vary quite bit over time periods. The medieval nobility could be very callous toward the peasantry, but concern for their immortal souls generated quite a lot of alms. As much as 15% of the population in Medieval England was at least partially dependent on alms. The Reformation tore that apart. But then by the 1800s things swung the other way again. Poor houses became widespread and while they have a not-great reputation, the alternative was more likely to be nothing than something better. The stopping by and visiting the sick by the well-to-do was also much more an 1800s than 1700s thing.
Which brings me to one of the most underrated Austen characters! Emma Woodhouse is basically a female Mr. Darcy (they share a *lot* of the same strengths/weaknesses) and stuck up women are unpopular! But she’s very active charitably in Highbury which is more than you can say for other Austin heroines (to be fair, eg that’s more Mrs. Bennet’s than Elizabeth’s obligation, and Fanny Price does charity sewing). Highbury is Mr. Knightley’s estate, not her father’s so it isn’t even like there would be that strong an expectation she do that. Also, she’s also of course been managing a household and a hypochondriac father quite successfully since her early teens! Where Emma and Mr. Darcy both really fall down is people who are not dependents/low enough to feel a moral obligation, but are not high enough for a snob to consider social equals…
Aha! A quote I always liked:
“That may be—and I may have seen him fifty times, but without having any idea of his name. A young farmer, whether on horseback or on foot, is the very last sort of person to raise my curiosity. The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it.”
That part about farmland owned “by the god” in polytheistic societies (not to mention by the king directly) got me thinking. Can we stretch draw comparisons to settings such as, say, the kolkhoz in the Soviet Union? In addition to working on the Big Mustachioed Man’s land, the farmworkers had their personal plots. (Infamously more efficient, but that’s a different thing.)
If one’s not into Richard Pipes, we can settle for Ursula K. le Guin and treat it purely as a fantastical mental exercise.
(Just in case, I’m posting before I read through the whole article.)
One thedistinction is exactly *how* these big men extract the value, the basic difference between “extensive” and “intensive” tenancy.
Eg. An “extensive” landlord probably keeps a relatively small farm for himself (suitable to be farmed by his servants and maybe the occasional corveé laborer for bigger projects like diking) the rest of his land he hands out to tenants and basically lives off the fees they pay him.
The “Intensive” landlord OTOH probably hands out relatively small parcels, keeps a lot of the land for himself, and then has it worked directly by either serfs or tenant farmers (or the small-parcel farmers who owes him corveé) (he might also have to give some of his harvest back to his laborers in payment for thier labour or as “gifts”)
“Clearing large sections of forest by land”
-> by hand
“And we should that of course”
-> we should note
Another thing is that this (shortage of agricultural land compared to labour on smaller peasant households) also explains why someone would become a serf: I can’t remember who said (I think it was one of the Professor’s in the Great Courses series) who said that “If you were asked if you’d rather be a serf or a free peasant you’d probably ask “Well, how much land do I get?”. *Getting access to the Big Man’s land was an immensely valuable thing*. Even in some cases worth sacrificing your social and political status for.
When talking about how important grain is, this also helps explain how important *animals* are, because animals *produce fertilizer*. There’s an in-built tension between intensive grain cultivation (much higher yield) and pasturage (much lower yield, but also lets the land recover *and* provides fertilizer, not to mention you can sometimes do it to mariginal land that isn’t worth growing grain on in the first place)
Checking up my venerable old “Economic History of Sweden” textbook from my uni days from the 2000’s:
(there’s a fascinating thing about the agricultural cycle where you get increased population>increased grain cultivation>Reduced herding>decreased grain production from lack of fertilizer>reduced population) Some swedish laws even had a system where meadow (IE: pasture) was tied to farmland, so for each area of farmland “belonged” a proportional area of meadow.
(also: While it varied *wildly* according to region, the swedish seed ratio seems to have been around 1:3 on average, though some areas like the east-geatish plain got get up to 1:6)
The various field-systems varied depending on area: In Småland and Northern sweden you often simply *didn’t* let fields lay fallow (instead you kept a relatively speaking huge amount of meadow and pastureland) which makes some amount of sense in these relatviely barren areas. Meanwhile two or three- field systems were much more popular in the agricultural heartlands around the plains.
One of the things that Bret talks about is also how households tended to be larger in areas dominated by the nobility: There was simply more work availible (both in terms of tenant farming, or doing work for the Big Man in various ways) than in more peripheral areas.
Also, a quote from the east-geatish law: “Now is someone wrong and does not want to harvest when all others in the village have brought in the harvest, they shall sue him.” One thing that seems o be the case is that these big works (mianly harvest, sometimes plowing) was often done collectively. You *owned* your own parcel of land, but the village would bring in the harvest as a unit. This also explains how people could survive accidents/becoming widows etc: *The Village worked as a unit* even if the actual fields and products were owned privately.
(there’s also an entire thing about people who are almost invisible who are “outside” of this system because they technically don’t own any land: Generally these are thorpers, cottars, etc. who live on the commons and maybe work for the actual peasants, sometimes called “farmer tenants” because they’re tenants of other farmers rather tahn nobles or the church, etc.) The government *hated* those because they were really hard to tax.
Oh yeah, and ownership was not ownership in the sense we think of it: Land was *heavily* regulated in who you could sell it (generally your family had first dibs) for how much, who could inherit, etc. (and the village council also had a say in this)
“It’s striking that the Romans could have set up a system of rents and tribute extraction in Italy but didn’t”
The Romans extracted some rents in Italy – and they definitely extracted some tributum in Italy before 168 BC.
For rents: Cato writes about running various villas stocked entirely with slaves, owned by the landowner (bought, not rented from a slaveowner distinct from the landowner), up to the slave supervisor. Varro and Columella also discuss villae worked by the landowner-owned chattel slaves.
But there were at least some tenants in Italy. At some point Plinius the Younger discusses buying up an estate which was for sale cheaply because it was badly run. The land had been leased for some tenants – who could not pay. The estate manager distrained the oxen of the tenants – with the result that the tenants predictably could not return to solvency.
This clearly refers to tenants who owned the oxen they used to plough – but not the land they ploughed with the oxen.
Which was the common practice for the Big Men, senators and knights of Republican and Early Imperial Italy – estates worked by chattel slaves like Cato´s, or leased by free tenants, like the one Plinius bought?
Before 168 BC, socii were free of cash taxes – but Roman citizens who received land plots to become rich peasants and heavy infantrymen/legionaries were liable to declare the land at census and therefore pay tributum for it. The Roman citizens who became Big Men as knights and senators also had to declare their lands at census and pay tax on it.
I understand that Roman slaveowners were required to declare their slaves at census as taxable wealth and pay tributum for them. (But free workforce was free!).
I find myself kind of amazed at the level of rents elites were apparently able to extract. What was happening to all that grain? In a highly urbanized society I realize the answer might be “getting sent to cities”, but high levels of urbanization weren’t the norm until quite recently. Is it going to feed “prestigious” animals like horses and cattle?
I kind of have to wonder to what extent the picture we’re getting here is skewed by relying a lot of data on Egypt, where the land was exceptionally fertile. Or if notional tax rates were basically only possible to pay in a good year, greasing the slides toward debt bondage.
A lot of it would be going to feeding the nobles and their households, and also whatever artisans exist. (who wouldn’t neccessarily be living in cities! but either spread out in villages, or on noble’s estates) who then produced various goods (again, a lot of it for elites)
Cities would consume a lot, and depending on the situation so would armies (if not directly then by feeding them in peacetime, etc.). It would also be traded, even if not internationally so at least regionally (some regions did already in the middle ages did not grow enough grain to support themselves but provided other things: In Sweden a big chunk of grain would go not to the cities (who were pretty small at this point) but rather to the mining districts in Bergslagen, f.ex.
While we tend to count “grain” taxes and rents in kind could also be all sorts of other things like cloth, animals, milk or eggs, and, especially in certain areas, furs.
Remember that even in a rural society not everyone is doing food production (or at least, not *primarily* doing food production) while they are a minority artisans, etc. are still needed for the entire thing to function.
One thing to point out is that noble estates were in some ways *more* “self sufficient” than a peasant household. Your average peasant would probably have to go “outside” his household for eg. metal goods or some types of cloth, while the local lord would have a craftsman on retainer to produce those things for him. (Which does not mean they didn’t *also* import luxury goods anyway!)
Would grain be used to feed cattle or other meat animals, or is that only a modern thing?
(But I believe warhorses need grain, so that’s one use.)
Feeding grain to cattle and meat animals on a large scale is definitely a modern thing. Being a herbivore gives you a much more efficient food chain: eating the plants that grow, rather than eating the animals that eat the plants, supports a much larger population. (There’s a good environmental argument that our modern industrial societies shouldn’t be feeding grain to cattle either.)
I guess very rich people could show off by having grain fed cattle. In emergencies of course you might sacrifice some grain to keep a few stock alive, but in general ancient and medieval societies ate the grain themselves.
Warhorses for knights and other armoured cavalry are the pro athletes of horses and need a special diet to keep them strong enough, so yeah they eat a lot of grain. Other working horses that carry people or pull heavy loads will benefit from grain supplements.
Steppe nomads are very mobile because their horses just graze, but they can’t really carry armoured riders. In the history of Temujin’s early campaigns against other steppe tribes it’s an important operational decision whether to let your horses graze for a while to build up their strength, or not and be able to attack sooner.
If you’re carrying supplemental food for animals on an army march or a trade mission, that might be grain. Logistics.
A certain amount of stored grain spoils every year, but you can still feed most of that to livestock and people did; I’ve seen modern silage described as being like sauerkraut made of husks, and that is a CAFO feed today, but it started with trying to reclaim some grain calories as animal food.
However, we know from a surprising source that grain and silage was never a major source of food for food animals before farming industrialization. Grass herbivore stomachs are distinct environments with reliably similar features between individuals. This is important, because E. coli have host-specific strains adapted to the host’s gut environment; human E. coli is harmless to humans and can’t survive in cow stomachs, cow E. coli is harmless to cows and can’t survive in human stomachs. If you do something to change the gut environment of a cow to resemble an omnivore stomach instead of a grass herbivore stomach, you create a strain of E. coli that is not adapted to be harmless to humans but is adapted to grow in humans…for most of human history getting cow poo in your lettuce was not deadly, it became deadly because of the move to a majority-grain animal feed diet, and so we know that didn’t really happen until the 20th century.
Later Mongol records report large amounts of grain as fodder going from China to Karakorum. Keeping the larger mounts of the Mongol elite fed through the winter. China and other nomad neighbours timed attacks on the steppe tribes for spring, when the horses were weak.
I wonder if there is a similar “subsistence/respectibility” needs level analysis for say, a relatively less significant Roman equites or an early medieval cavalryman or something similar, the “smaller” Big man. Especially in a less urbanized society they might be the majority to drain away a decent amount of the rent to maintain their status, whether it be keeping around craftsman, armed retainers or horses. Their “needs” probably varies a lot more across ages though.
I think the perspective on what it means for a society to be “highly urbanised” may be a bit skewed. Sure, most people do not live in urban centres, and those that exist are generally on the small side compared to today. But towns and cities are still abundant, and their collective populations are still high relative to the food productivity of the surrounding countryside. If most farmers are producing subsistence and a little more, and only a few farming estates are producing a noteworthy surplus, it takes consolidating a lot of those things to sustain a population of several thousand that does not farm at all.
Still, I’d say abundance of available food is part of why throwing feasts for peers is a way of life for the elite. Arguably, you can even afford to be a bit wasteful in the name of highest quality. Indeed, from what I gather, the products of pre-modern lavish ceremony (whether the edibles or the attire) tend not to be made to last.
I’m rereading THE GOOD EARTH and for your next column, you can contrast the contribution of O-Lan vs. Lotus/Cuckoo to the household of Wang Lu.
I would greatly enjoy a very brief summary of what you think those main contributions are, and the implications thereof.
The number for the one case in the non-industrial farming studies where the tenant supplies everything beside the lands seems close to relatively common tax values, which seems to make sense because ancient taxes are often just the inhabitants using “the king’s land” and supplying everything themselves.
All of this discussion of crop yields and hours of work and exploitation by Big Men has me wanting an analysis of the rare societies that did not operate this way. (Or did not seem to, anyway.)
Not to romanticize and orientalize all indigenous tribes of the “new world”, but many that appeared to just subsist on hunting and gathering were actually engaged in land management and forestry to optimize productivity without needing intensive agricultural practices. First, how did those populations not balloon in the same way as European populations and force the issue of intensive agriculture? And second, was the luxury of living off the land (which, unlike peasantry really does seem to involve much less labor, even less than today) simply down to population management, or was the lack of social stratification also a factor?
This is not to say that all cultures in the new world had little social stratification – the Incas and Maya are obvious counter-examples – or that even a majority survived without some degree of intensive agriculture – all those new world crops that were ready to be imported to the old world didn’t come from straight from nature, untouched by human hands – but we don’t typically think of most indigenous peoples as peasants ground down under the thumbs of the elite rent-seeking nobility. Why?
I think part of the picture is that the colonisation of North America occurred in a period almost immediately post-collapse of these sorts of arrangements in the places that were amenable to it.
From what I understand, the place that was most suited to the mesoamerican-originating Three Sisters agricultural complex was the Mississippi. All along the lower reaches of this river, you found complex agricultural cultures which in all likelihood had exactly these sorts of arrangements. This is the Mississippian Culture that built places like Cahokia.
Shortly before the arrival of the first European colonists, this culture experienced a widespread (but not total) collapse. Some people from the periphery of the Mississippian cultural zone carried on their way of life (the Natchez), but most of them seemed to have adopted different lifestyles that weren’t quite so centralised (the Lakota, Dakota, Muskogee, Creek and Seminole).
It’s a bit like turning up in Britain in the time window between the Romans leaving and the Anglo-Saxons arriving and thinking ‘huh, where are all the elites?’.
For more northerly cultures, they were sort of at the end of the tether of the Three Sisters viability, and it hadn’t been viable at those latitudes for all that long, not leaving much time for these sorts of arrangements to crystalise. There was an older agricultural complex (the Eastern Agricultural Complex), but that was a fair bit less efficient. I don’t know enough about that period to describe what the political landscape was like then.
I think between them (and the plains cultures and hunter-gatherers of the northern woodlands), these cultures sort of set the cultural tone of what ‘native American’ lifestyles were like in North America from an anglo-centric perspective. I expect the Spanish and Portuguese perceptions are quite different.
Oh, there was also another decently-sized agricultural cultural complex in aridoamerica (think Chaco Canyon), though that also experienced a widespread collapse prior to European arrival. IIRC that happened around 1150AD which is a fair bit earlier than contact, but they seemingly didn’t recover significantly in the intervening centuries.
“It’s a bit like turning up in Britain in the time window between the Romans leaving and the Anglo-Saxons arriving and thinking ‘huh, where are all the elites?’.”
And yet we do know of some Big Men of that era, who either popped up in the power vacuum as warlords-turned-kings, or were just Romans who stuck around… I imagine we’d know of many more, were that era not so notably poorly documented…
That said, yeah, a lot of history was also lost in the new world thanks to plague, famine, and the arrival of much Bigger Men, so answers to the question of what life was like for ‘peasants’ of those cultures are spotty at best.
It’s not a perfect analogy, no, but it works in terms of ‘we turned up at a specific point in time that was highly unusual and assumed it was the status quo’.
There had been about 800 years of complex hierarchical civilisation in the Mississippi valley, which collapsed about 50 years before European contact. So the situation that got impressed in the minds of the anglosphere about North America was far from representative.
All of that doesn’t really answer the point of ‘why didn’t these sorts of fractionalising patterns of land use occur in cultures that operated more of a mixed agriculture/silviculture/hunting system’.
Of that I really don’t know. The answer might even be something a long the lines of ‘they did, but not in a way that our sources immediately recognised, so it didn’t filter into the public consciousness’.
I will note that it *did* happen in some of the complex fishing cultures in North America. I’m thinking specifically of the Chumash with their tomol-owning elites, though I’m not 100% sure who precisely rowed the tomols and whether it was family members of the elites or if there was an equivalent of tenancy but for rowing instead. I know less about other complex fishing societies like the Calusa and Pacific Northwest, maybe someone else can chime in on those.
Semi-nomad: ballpark of 20 hours of work per week x 50 weeks = 1000 hours per year. Highly variable, see the pre-Columbian people of Tierra del Fuego. The mortality rates were higher, and they didn’t invest much time in developing technology.
The semi-nomads look at agriculturalists as overworked idiots. The agriculturalists out-breed, out-number, and out-technology the semi-nomads; and take over the most productive lands.
“Why?”
Myths, to a large extent.
The groups in North America were building structures that would be called castles and fortifications in Europe. I’ve seen the remnants myself, and spoken with archeologists who specialize in this stuff. They had the typical city style that Europe had–large cities being fed by smaller cities and towns being fed by farms.
The problem is, detailed information on their social structure was lost. Some of this was due to the loss of so many people by disease–they lost so many people that the societies had to restructure themselves, often in fundamental ways. Some of this was due to genocide–there was a campaign to wipe out the natives, and part of every genocidal campaign is the dehumanization of the victims. Part of this is keeping them alien. Some of this was also due to culture–they didn’t record things the way Europeans and Chinese did, so a lot of the information was lost. (Note that this isn’t universal.)
And don’t forget, a huge part of this mythos–including the dehumanizing part–is portraying the natives of the Americas as monolithic. We should assume that there would be as much variance between groups in North America as we see anywhere else; some would be more egalitarian, some less. Some lifestyles lend themselves to more egalitarianism than others. If you survive via hunting you’re going to have a fairly egalitarian society because everyone will be a warrior-elite (this also keeps the numbers small). Farming societies are going to be less egalitarian (though still with significant variability) because that’s how subsistence farming works. Food-forest living is something that Europe really doesn’t have a good analogue for–it was certainly practiced, but not as a main subsistence strategy–so I’m not sure how it would impact social structures.
I also think that part of what’s happening is that Bret over-sells the evilness of the Big Man. The Big Man comes off as a villain in these descriptions, and that’s not always the case. I’ll grant that the 1990s aren’t the 1320s, but still, I grew up around tenant farmers and the relationships were often far more symbiotic. Some of the records I’ve seen from the past agree with this (not all peasants were illiterate and priests tended to everyone). Sure, the Big Man took a large chunk of the produce–but he also provided all the military support, ran the courts, supported the Church (remember, these people believed their religion), and did other things necessary to society. In a healthy group the relationship between the peasants and the Big Man was far more of a division of labor than it appears to be from this description. You also have to remember that these people literally knew no other way of life; they took the norms of their society for granted as much as we do. It wasn’t exploitation that the Big Man took his cut; it was right and proper and even moral. This can make the Big Man hard to identify if you’re not intimately familiar with the structures of a society.
Eastern North America (ENA) didn’t have horses or weaponized metallurgy; we’re talking pre-Bronze Age societies. This in itself is not sufficient explanation, since the same is true of the Inca or Aztec empires. But my impression is that ENA, whether due to ecological differences or simply the recently of agriculture, still had lots of supplemental hunting, particularly by bow, and resulting “every man a warrior” societies, as opposed to the “those who farm and those who fight” division of other societies.
I’ve often wondered why things like acorns were viewed as a famine food in medieval Europe considering how they seem so incredibly useful.
For some background, even leached acorn flour (which you need to do to make it palatable) is *significantly* more calorie-dense than wheat flour. 5010 kcal/kg vs 3324 kcal/kg for wheat. So our wheat-equivalent for a modius of acorns is 10.12kg (vs the baseline of 6.72kg for wheat).
It seems like yields of acorns in British woodland range from 200kg-400kg per hectare (variable cyclically each year).
Converted into hectares and kg, the wheat yield we were working with ranged from 25-60kg per hectare. Adjusted into calories, acorns are an order of magnitude more efficient (each hectare of oak woodland yields 300-600kg of wheat equivalent). No requirement for plowing or sowing.
You need to hull each acorn and there’s a process of leaching (which isn’t very labour intensive, but does benefit from running water), but I’m left wondering if it was *that much more* labour intensive that it wasn’t worth making use of regularly for human consumption. For each hectare of oak woodland you could support 5x as many people, even if you only ever collected half of all the acorns that fell.
There’s the issue of oaks being slow-growing of course, so it’s not really a resource that pays you back in the current generation, but that didn’t seem to stop olive and date palm growers around the Med.
Your math seems off.
“5010 kcal/kg vs 3324 kcal/kg for wheat. So our wheat-equivalent for a modius of acorns is 10.12kg (vs the baseline of 6.72kg for wheat).”
Shouldn’t the acorn modius equivalent mass less if the calorie count is higher per kilogram?
I suspect it really would have been a lot more labor to actually extract 200-400kg of acorns. They’re fallen after all, so you’re going out harvesting multiple times.
I also wonder if that’s a modern estimate, from areas optimized for acorn gathering. Oaks planted just the right distance apart. Trimmed small, so they don’t shade each other out. Other trees removed etc. All this is generally not something you do with hand tools. Which would be iron at best, and not the best iron, not steel.
The maths seems right based on Brett’s calculations of wheat equivalent. The baseline was that 1 modius of wheat should contain 1 modius of wheat’s-worth of calories. So if acorn flour is more calorie dense then it contains more than 1 modius of wheat’s-worth of calories. So 10.12kg of wheat-equivalent.
Seems to be how Brett’s worked out the barley and beans, with each being less calorie dense and thus a lower wheat-equivalent.
Good point about the collection being less ‘all in one go’. Though the estimates were from a standard woodland, not managed. Yarner Wood if that makes any difference, though the estimates from other woodlands (including other European woodlands outside of Britain). The only thing I can find about its history is that it was once used for charcoal production. Nothing like ship-building that would imply mass planting of oaks.
I misread the sentence, so I got it backwards, which is what I thought you did.
So it looks like a modius of acorns is worth 10.12kg of wheat, as opposed to the 6.72kg of wheat that 1 modius of wheat would be.
It does seem odd that no one in Europe (to the best of our knowledge) actually tried this. I seem to remember some New World people using acorns as a food source, but that’s from reading a long time ago and it may have been from a novel.
What stopped them? Was making acorns edible a stretch too far?
And yet we have edible mushrooms, and people developed maize. Which seem to me to involve a lot more work to get to something that will keep you fed.
I’d assume breeding acorns to be made more edible like Maize were not practical given the longer lifecycle of trees. Maize and other such plants take only months to grow to reproductive viability, while oak trees require years, sometimes decades to start producing more acorns. That means you can only go through 3 generations of oaks in a normal lifetime, as opposed to the 60 generations of wheat you can go through with wheat and other plants.
Oh man, don’t get into the mess of the genesis of maize agriculture. That’s a whole new brand of weirdness.
As a brief summary from my partial understanding, maize originated with teosinte grass (which if you look at it, looks absolutely nothing like maize). What people think happened was that people were selectively breeding teosinte for the sugar present in its stalk a la sugarcane, when there was a very rare instance of ‘jumping genes’ which produced maize as we know it today.
Though I do get that the question is more ‘why did people adopt maize’ rather than ‘why did people work to create maize in the first place’, considering that these things happened a long way from each other. That I don’t particularly know the answer to, but certainly feels like it *must* be something to do with either collection, processing, or short-termism (less in terms of ‘can we selectively breed this’ as I talk about in the next paragraph, but more in terms of ‘I don’t have any oaks now, and if I plant one it’s going to be 20-40 years before they start producing acorns’).
I also think that the argument about trees being trickier to selectively breed is probably more of a long-term decision than these people were particularly looking at. Considering the maths of subsistence in all of these various posts (which I gather weren’t wildly different wherever pre-modern agriculture happened), I’d think ‘how many calories can I get out of a plant *now*’ trumped any considerations of ‘how many calories can my grandchildren get out of a plant in 50 years time’. Not least because if you didn’t focus on the former there wouldn’t be any grandchildren.
“I also think that the argument about trees being trickier to selectively breed is probably more of a long-term decision than these people were particularly looking at.”
If we are talking about the origins of domestication, it seems reasonable to assume that people did not start off by deciding to domesticate plants and animals. You are not going to think of that until after some have already been domesticated. Rather, domesticated plants must have evolved by natural selection, as with other cases of commensalism. If the life cycle of oak is a hundred times longer than that of wheat, this process is likely to take a hundred times longer. If it took a thousand years with wheat, it might take a hundred thousand years with oak.
The very fact that oak has mast years would suggest that they are about as undomesticated as they could be.
@ad9 My puzzlement is more due to the fact that in a completely undomesticated state, oaks produce an order of magnitude more calories for a given area than wheat (the most calorie-dense of the old world crops), even after the latter has gone through a couple of thousand years of selective breeding.
Even in the lowest-yield year from a 20 year study I’ve found (2001) it seems to equal wheat yields in kg (so higher calorific value). Though I’ve had to do a bit of fuzzy maths there as that study quotes kg/m2 per tree rather than per area. I’ve tried to be pessimistic in my calculations and it’s still come out as comparable.
Now that’s quite the variation, which isn’t ideal, but for people who are operating under such shockingly tenuous access to calories, I’m just surprised it wasn’t better utilised.
No doubt there are things that would temper that surprise, considering that these people weren’t stupid.
For ad9: Some steps of the domestication of wheat and other cereals are thought to have been fairly rapid, on the order of tens of generations. In particular, wild wheat drops its grains when ripe. Humans created (not deliberately) a strong selection pressure against that – only those seeds that made it to the store could be planted in the next season, favoring those that stayed attached to the stalks.
“My puzzlement is more due to the fact that in a completely undomesticated state, oaks produce an order of magnitude more calories for a given area than wheat (the most calorie-dense of the old world crops), even after the latter has gone through a couple of thousand years of selective breeding…”
The missing piece may be that the wheat harvest is much more predictable. A quick google gives this: “Studies show that during bumper crop years, which occur on average two out of ten years, there can be more than 250,000 acorns per acre. That translates into more than five acorns per square foot. During poor years, there may be only 20,000 to 65,000 acorns per acre”
So your yield varies by a factor of ten from year to year, and you don’t know in advance how good this year is going to be.
Some cultures did of course use acorns as food but looking at it https://www.fao.org/4/y4351e/y4351e0c.htm a lot of them seem to have been fairly nomadic – maybe that’s the key. If it isn’t a mast year in this forest, you can just move to the next valley over. But if your oak farm doesn’t have a mast year, you’re in trouble.
The preparation factor may have something to do with it as well.
Yes, we use a lot of plants that require prep, but the tendency is to breed them to require less.
There’s also a novelty factor.
And the bit about the ones using acorns being at least semi-nomadic is also a factor.
If you have a large territory within which you roam and get varied foods, then you can experiment. Though experimenting can be dangerous.
If you have a small area within which you’re more or less confined for getting food, you want something reliable.
“My puzzlement is more due to the fact that in a completely undomesticated state, oaks produce an order of magnitude more calories for a given area than wheat ”
Ynneadwraith, in that case, it might be as well to explore why more use is not made of them now. It should, after all, be easier to find an answer for the present than for the distant past.
A big problem is just scaleability: Oaks grow *sloowly* so you’re basically limited to collecting whatever wild acorns there are. You can’t really grow new ones or expand them because by the time you’ve got new productive oaks you could’ve harvested dozens, if not hundreds of wheat harvests.
My understanding is also that while acorn meal is calorie-rich it’s also not really pleasant to eat.
I guess the ususal way to make acorns fit for human consuption in europe was feeding them to pigs.
Driving pig herds through the forest has the benefit that pigs are able to eat stuff like chess nuts and acorns with out preperation. And cured or smoked prok is almost as shelve stable as dry grain.
But yeah, acorns were a food replacement in times of need. In Germany acorns were used as a coffee replacement as late as WWII.
Yeah my next thought was ‘I wonder how many pork-calories they would get out of a woodland’. If they’re eating an appreciable proportion of the acorns then it could be significant.
Though that prompts the question ‘who owned the pigs’ or ‘who owned the rights to have how many pigs in the forest’. If it’s not our peasants then it’s not much use to them. I know the house my folks live in has commons rights to graze 1 pig and 2 sheep on a nearby commons. So potentially not altogether that significant.
Part of the reason why I’ve found it confusing that acorns are a famine food is that they’re really quite tasty (in addition to being calorie dense).
Perhaps it simply is that time consuming to process them.
I know some oak trees vary how many acorns they make just to screw with the squirrels. Producing few acorns for a couple of years so the squirrels die off, and then producing tons of acorns one year to make sure there are too many for them all to get eaten.
This might be a problem for acorn farmers. Of course, you’d try to breed the oak trees out of this habit, but that might take a long time.
(Bamboo in Southeast Asia tries this trick too, which is why chickens can lay so many eggs continuously.)
Yeah lots of trees do it (synchronised across species even). We’ve just had a mast year this year, which is the bumper crop they do after they’ve starved everything out with low yields the previous year.
It’s a cyclical thing so no doubt people could work it out and work it into their subsistence patterns, but yes it does add a hurdle.
Interesting about bamboo and chickens. Didn’t know that!
I don’t understand the bamboo/chicken connection.
As for acorns… this discussion suggests that an easy nut-orchard life would be quite feasible for fantasy elves, if they have enough magic to manage the tree output, and magic or hunting to keep the squirrels away.
I suggest that looking at risk reduction is more likely to show why ancient and medieval peasants didn’t make much use of acorns.
One risk is that the acorn harvest happens just once a year, and you can’t really do anything at all about the timing. Part IVb noted that peasants space out planting and harvesting to reduce the peak workload. If the acorns fall all at once – and the trees prefer it that way – there’s the risk you can’t gather enough before they rot or get eaten by something else.
If the peasants have some notice of bad weather, or an advancing army, or an aggressive tax collection, it’s relatively easy to harvest your grain or dig up your beans earlier than planned. Not ideal, but better than losing the lot. Climbing all the oak trees to knock the acorns off their branches? Nope.
If some of your fields are devastated by blight or an army, you can replant and have something to eat in half a year or less. If some of your oaks are cut down to make a feasting hall or a boat or a bridge, replanting means waiting a decade or more.
Actually that is far far worse than a decade. After decade oak will be tiny, and it will take more than human lifetime to grow fully.
(there are oaks older than 500 years, but such age is likely not needed for optimal acorn production)
I would suspect one big reason is also the durability. An acorn contains more moisture than a wheat grain and is also considerably softer. Which means it’s easier for both mold and insect larva to find hold in stored acorns, and thus they will likely not last through the entire year without spoiling the way wheat does.
One wonders if acorns could be baked/dried, perhaps cracked first for easier exposure. But that raises another issue: the high fat content, which can oxidize and go rancid.
It sounds like the situation was usually near-Malthusian, that is, there was a hard upper limit on the population based on the yield of the available land, and the population wasn’t too far from that. A difference may have been maintained due to celibacy, contraception, or infanticide, or alternatively due to disease or war, but it doesn’t seem to have been large in historically attested peasant societies. Though I’ve read that in west Africa, disease was so bad that there was a chronic shortage of labor relative to what could have been productively used on the land, so land wasn’t particularly valuable relative to labor.
Most interesting though is your discussion of how the produce of the land was split. There’s a tendency in “big picture” economics to talk of Labor and Land. But in your discussion of sharecropping and farming inputs, it looks like labor alone got 1/5 of the produce. OTOH, land along also got 1/5 of the produce. A whopping 3/5 of the produce went to traction, water, and seed. And it’s easy to overlook who owns or controls those as important players in the economy.
Yes… and no. There is presumably a hard upper limit but we never really quite seem to reach it. (though the 1300’s seem to come close) because while taking new land under cultivation is expensive, difficult, time consuming and gives a lower return… It’s still *possible* for most of these periods. Population is, in the long term, *increasing*. It varies year by year and often one year will wipe out the gains of preceeding years (and sometimes a lot more than that, like the Black Death) but looking at it long-term the line goes up, it never reaches an equilibrium. (by 1500 the estimated european population is twice what it was in 1000, and that’s *after* the big crash!) And by 1000 AD it was probably a bit more than what it was during roman times. A lot of this is just new areas taken under cultivation and becoming more densely populated, etc.
I think this blog more than any other made me understand just why the social relationships between communities are so important to maintain. It’s been mentioned many times the tradition of banqueting your neighbors during the good times, in hopes of being banqueted in return during your lean. I the economics of starvation here far better explains just how vital it was to maintain good relations with the neighbors is, however.
The lack of balance I think is the most important part. No one in the village is sitting on the sweet spot of labour/land/capital to be consistently comfortable, and if by some fluke some household is it isn’t a situation that will survive more than a couple years. Everyone around you is a potential employee and employer as circumstances shift, with the exception of the local big man who is always going to be an employer of last resort.
Which nicely explains how the big man gathers so much social, legal and political power. You have to play nice with the lord/abbot/factor because if you don’t you don’t get access to the furrows you need one year and then your family starves. It’s also why the rich families with lots of power have the ability to throw their weight around. The poorer families aren’t envious, they need the sharecropping arrangement with the wealthy peasants to survive so of course disrupting those relationships is always a catastrophe.
You don’t have to play that nice. The peasant population bled labour every year (as the surplus younger members left), plus their expertise was a large part of how much surplus there was. Lawsuits, go-slows, evasion etc were a routine part of the peasant-landlord relationship in medieval times. There was continuous effort involved in extracting dues, and often it was easier to yield a bit – more so when other outlets were available.
I think we can hold both positions at once: On the one hand, the Big Men did provide something to their community, in the form of security (they can provide charity to people who have fallen on hard times), safety (they can afford to feed, train and arm fighting men), justice (they have the local power and reputation to serve as arbiters in disputes), technology (they can afford to buy a better plow, patronize a full-time blacksmith or provide the resources to build a watermill) and representation (in whatever political system, it’s these people who have the time to actually engage in it). And many of these things, because of economies of scale or time requirement, a community *without* a Big Man could not get at all.
And on the other hand, the process of bargaining for the price for providing these services (whether that’s actual bargains over land, lawsuits, riots or just a process of evolving societal expectations) between Big Men and the other villagers happened under a strong power imbalance favouring the Big Man. Thus, the smallholders always got the worse end of the deal.
So here’s what I don’t quite understand, specifically with regards to medieval manorialism (which is not exactly what you’re covering but seems to fall under the same general umbrella).
You’re describing a situation where a peasant owns his land and gets to keep 100% of the yield, and then works the Big Man’s land (and on public works projects, and as a soldier, or whatever else) in exchange for a portion of the yield from Big Man’s land, to “use up” the rest of his labor and to cover the rest of his needs.
But my understanding is that the manorial peasant often has “his land” under tenancy and gets 100% of the yield, but then must work a certain number of days on his lord’s demesne and get *none* of the yield, as payment for the privilege of working “his land” (and getting to flee to the castle in times of war). So if he’s not getting payment for his excess labor and he’s only getting the yield from his own few acres of land, how is he possibly meeting his needs? I know the easy answer is “not well”, but with the arrangement you described barely accounting for survival, I’m struggling to understand how the villein arrangement is even possible. Unless I’m misunderstanding the terms of their tenancy.
In a manorial villein system, as I understand it, you’re going to have some land owned by the lord and farmed using effectively corvee labor (though not generally called that), some lands where the lord had some claim – either labor or a portion of the crop – on the workers of the land and some land held free from other obligations but under the legal jurisdiction of the lord. So when we’re looking at peasant holdings, we’d be counting ‘owned’ land for only the third category, while the second category would be effectively our tenant relationships.
It should also be noted that a single peasant could very well end up in all three categories: You have some land you personally own (but is under jurisdiction of your local nobleman) and then different parcels of land who you owe different types of obligations too (“For this plot of land I have to work 3 days a year at the manor, for this one I have to pay 20% of the harvest, for this field I need to deliver X amount of firewood…”)
One of the confusing things is also that quite often these obligations weren’t tied to individuals but to the *plot of land* which could get complicated really, really quickly.
I mean, the situation is not that far removed from what you describe in the post right?
The peaseant family works around 52 days on their own land, and does a set number of days of forced labour on their lords manor, let’s say 40. They still can go to their lord and negotiate what split they get for more work. Which would look like them getting assigned a field, that carries some cost to them, either in a percentage of the harvest, or some service they have to perform.
It really depends on a whole bunch of factors, often there’s a combination of all of these arrangements going on.
I talked about the distinction between extensive and intensive manorialism above, but one thing to note is that the peasant probably isn’t working *that* many days a year doing corveé. (partially because peasants hated it) at least under an extensive system, remember the Big Man has a LOT of peasants so he can spread out the labour between them if he has to.
And no, the peasant doesen’t get 100% of the yield from “his” land. He probably pays taxes to the crown, tithe and other church fees to the church, and fees to his local BIg Man. (though in some places, like scandinavia, one of the “advantages” of renting your land from a noble was that you were exempt from (some) taxes)
I should also note that this is what happens around a noble manor: Big Men also often owned “stray farms” all over the place, who usually generally didn’t do labour because well, it would be impractical since they’d be too far away. (though there seems to have been a conscious strategy to try to concentrate landownership around the big manors, all sorts of factors could lead to someone acquiring these stray farms)
This is precisely why mediaeval mechanisation when it starts to multiply windmills, watermills and their various uses. Invention of machines.
Step by step increasing the efficiency of Labor and decreasing physical load to do the same amount of Labor. Was a long term God-send. The precursor to Industrialization.
These were Roman inventions. Folks in the Middle Ages certainly advanced the technology, don’t get me wrong! But they were older than the Middle Ages.
Further, they were of fairly limited use. You could use them to saw wood/stone, or grind grain, and that was about it. The work of planting, harvesting, thrashing, spinning, weaving, and the like still had to be done by hand. Which means that while these were labor-saving devices, they could only nibble at the edges. Until mobile engines were invented fully half the labor of these societies wasn’t amenable to machination.
Spinning and weaving were–and were among the first things to be mechanized. I’d be curious to know if there’s a technological reason precluding machination of these via water/wind power. The twisting motion provided by water and wind mills would seem to lend itself to spinning, at least, and it’s not like the concept was novel–rope walks work on precisely the same principle, and there were various (hand-powered) machines to make rope.
One exception to all this was the process of beating the cloth after it had been woven (I forget what it’s called). This was mechanized. So it doesn’t look like the people of that time were unaware of the benefits of machines.
My guess–and it’s only a guess–is that there was no incentive, or there was incentive to NOT mechanize. These were societies with surplus labor, which can be dangerous for the society. Too many people without enough to do get ideas, like the idea that they, rather than the current Big Man, should rule. As such it’s to the benefit of the Big Man (who has the military to support him) to keep people working instead of using machines to do the work.
There’s also something Tolkien pointed out–it doesn’t help you to be able to process more grain if you can’t GROW more grain. If you have mechanized spinning wheels but you can’t grow more sheep, it seems like a waste of resources. (It’s not, this is an area where I strongly disagree with Tolkien, but it would appear so at the time.)
This is actually one of the famous stories of the industrial revolution: The Flying Shuttle increased production by weavers by a lot, but spinning still had to be done by hand until the invention of the Spinning Jenny. The increases in production in one area would create new bottlenecks in others.
The surplus was traditionally bled off into emigration, soldiering (which had a very high rate of death/non-return) or display (maintenance). Simply, technologies spread slowly, wooden stuff needs a lot of maintenance and wears quickly. But there was a lot of minor but significant improvements – better wind and water mills and more applications, better harnesses, better carts, more iron (first versions of blast furnace in the 9th century) and so on.
> One exception to all this was the process of beating the cloth after it had been woven (I forget what it’s called). This was mechanized. So it doesn’t look like the people of that time were unaware of the benefits of machines.
So I know the German term it is “walken”, the internet gives me “to chrun” “to felt” and to “to tumble” as translations. Since I know “felt” is english noun for the product of fetling wool, I would use that term. But it might be fabric specific.
The English words here are waulking or fulling, the process of beating the cloth to make it softer. There are even songs that go along with the motion, since it would usually be done in a group and singing would help keep up the rhythm .
Churn and tumble are good words for the motion, and felting is a specific fabric process which would involve beating fibers until they’re kind of matted together (which makes it sturdy but not stretchy, which is usually not what you want with fulling).
I must say that the landholdings calculated for here are quite on the small side. But this was not always the case in medieval Europe. An example of a different situation would be the Manor of Brimpsfield in Gloucestershire from which we have the manor roll of 1299. For a total of 59 tenants it lists:
– 28 free tenants holding either half-yardlands (20 acres) or quarter yardlands (10 ac.). These would just pay rent.
– 14 villeins, most holding half yardlands each. These payed rent and had labour obligations.
– 17 smallholders holding roughly 3 acres or less each. Minimal rent and not labour obligations.
So in Brimpsfield 29% of the households fall around that three acre range and would sell much of their time to get by. But the remaining households have substantially larger holdings! About 47% held 20 acres, and half of those had no villeinage obligations to the lord either and all were free to sell their surplus to the market (which they would, the city of Gloucester was nearby). Given the numbers of this post it is likely many of them could get close to their respectability needs. Especially considering that we are not counting their livestock.
Brimpsfield does not seem to have been a very exceptional manor for low-land England. Its biggest peculiarity is that there are not tenants who hold full yardlands (30-40 ac.), of which there would usually be a few in a community.
I note the main exception to the infeasibility of “demilitarized peasant republic”: if you are in a place with natural defenses such that, with the military technology of the time, it is possible to defeat a far superior force by fighting defensively, this kind of arrangement becomes viable. The result is that economic surplus could be used on higher-value consumption and also re-invested instead of expended on an unproductive military, leading to actual economic growth that could exponentially exceed that of neighboring areas – even more so if the place becomes known as a center of commerce. So such places tended to be wealthier than their neighbors – some, extreme outliers in that regard. Obvious examples include Venice (the lagoon), parts of the Netherlands (swamps), Dithmarschen (also swamps), Switzerland (mountains), and (later) the UK (the Channel).
This also continues to apply in the present day – i.e. Spain getting into headlines recently for its unwillingness to match defence expenditures of those allied countries which lack the convenient presence of the Pyrenees at the border.
Moreover, perhaps one of the more hypocritical political trends of the recent years had been the “mainstream center” on both sides of the Atlantic closing ranks and claiming they knew all along post-Cold War European leaders were reckless for neglecting defence. Typically, this blame-shifting omits any mention of what the trade-offs would have looked like, in essence pretending Europe would have looked the same as now, but with a lot more military. Of course, the most basic understanding of compound interest reveals that cannot be true – even fractions of a percent being devoted to unproductive sectors do in fact add up over time. As a thought experiment, if we assume “an ideal NATO country in a vacuum”, whose average defence spending over the 1992-2022 period fell by exactly 1% of the GDP, then that country would have had a 2023 economy 34.8% smaller had it kept defence spending the same and made no other changes!
https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/visualisation/nato-countries-defence-spending-over-time_en
The above is nowhere near as comprehensive as what I would have liked, only covering years 2009, 2014 and 2017, but it is still the most useful graphic I found on the subject. It is also already sufficient to reveal that a good number of the NATO countries actually were at or fairly close to 2% back in 2009 – then they got further away from it because of that little inconvenience called the GFC. One stark example is Slovenia, which was apparently at 1.6% or 1.7% in 2009 (the chart isn’t very clear for finer fractions of a percent), but was at exactly 1% in 2014 and 2017. Even assuming a lower bound of a 0.6% reduction in defence spending, that works out to 4.9% of GDP – i.e. Slovenia would have been this much poorer had it kept defence spending the same over that period. It might also not be a coincidence that the European country with a highest percentage of GDP going to defence in 2009, at exactly 3%, was…Greece – the one wracked with by far the worst developed-country crisis. One could easily see how a Greece which had followed Germany in spending the same percentage of GDP on defence (1.5% around 2009) would have had been sufficiently wealthy to skip the whole humiliating drama entirely. (Of course, those Greek expenditures were prompted by their fear of a fellow NATO member, but given how much Türkiye’s military capabilities have grown anyway – particularly at the time Greece was crippled by austerity – I don’t think this strategy was very successful.)
“to actual economic growth that could exponentially exceed that of neighboring areas”
But it’s not exponential growth the way we think of it; the pre-modern tech level simply doesn’t allow for that. Wealth is still capped by the biomass (food and fibers and biomass) available; there’s no sucking in ever higher levels of fossil fuels (apart from the Dutch peat boom) or intense (but limited) period of achieving massively higher levels of efficiency (apart from blips like blast furnaces, spinning wheel, and better looms.) It’s more like getting to a somewhat higher equilibrium, as Bret has said of the peak Roman period (awash in abundant metal armor).