this fleeting world - teachinginsanity.net fleeting world--an... · this fleeting world an overview...

This Fleeting WorldAn Overview of Human History

David ChristianProfessor of History

San Diego State University

2004

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.• The Diamond Sutra

blank page

Introduction iv

Beginnings: The Era of Foragers 1Studying the Era of Foragers 1Beginnings of Human History 4

Out of Africa, into Controversy 4What Makes Us Different? 5

Foraging Lifeways 6Kith and Kin 7Living Standards 8Leisurely but Brief 9

Major Changes during the Era of Foragers 9Technological Change 10Migrations from Africa 11Human Impacts on the Environment 11Picking up the Pace 12Affluent Foragers 12

The Era of Foragers in World History 14

Acceleration: The Agrarian Era 15Origins of Agriculture 15

Earliest Evidence of Agriculture 16Affluent Foragers 18Full-Blown Agriculture 19Seeds of Change 19

General Characteristics and Long Trends 20Village-Based Societies 20Demographic Dynamism 20Accelerated Technological Innovation 21Epidemic Diseases 22Hierarchies of Power 23Relations with Nonagrarian Communities 23

Agrarian Communities before Cities: 8000–3000 BCE 24

A World of Villages 24Emergence of Hierarchy 24Early Glass Ceiling 25Leaders and Leadership 25

The Earliest Cities and States: 3000 BCE–500 BCE 26Afro-Eurasia and the Americas 26Agrarian Civilizations 27Imperial States 28

Agriculture, Cities, and Empires: 500 BCE–1000 CE 29

Afro-Eurasia 29The Americas 30Expansion in Other Areas 31

Agricultural Societies on the Eve of the ModernRevolution: 1000–1750 31

Creation of Global Networks 32Impact of Global Networks 34

Agrarian Era in World History 35

Our World: The Modern Era 36Major Features and Trends of the Modern Era 37

Increases in Population and Productivity 37City Sprawl 38Increasingly Complex and Powerful

Governments 38Growing Gap between Rich and Poor 39Improved Opportunities for Women 40Destruction of Premodern Lifeways 40

Explaining the Modern Revolution 41Accumulated Changes of the Agrarian Era 42Rise of Commercial Societies 42Development of a Single Global Network 42Western Europe’s Emergence as a Global Hub 43Other Factors 43

Industrial Revolution: 1750–1914 43Three Waves of the Industrial Revolution 44Economic Developments 45Democratic Revolution 45Cultural Changes 46

Twentieth-Century Crisis: 1914–1945 47Global Upheaval 48Rearmament 49Buying into Consumerism 49Crisis and Innovation 50

Contemporary Period: 1945–Present 51Rockets and Rubles 52China Adapts 52Coca-Cola Culture and the Backlash 54Burning the Candle 55

Modern Era in World History 55

Contents

tfw-iii

World history focuses on the interconnectionsbetween people and communities in all eras of

human history. Instead of telling the history of this nationor that community, it explores the histories of womenand men across the entire world, the stories that all hu-mans share just because they are human. Creating the his-tory of humanity is one of the larger and more importantgoals of world history. Encyclopedias, however, encour-age more sharply focused enquiries into the past. By con-vention, they divide their subject matter into manageablechunks, and then rearrange those chunks in alphabeticalorder, which is wonderful if you are researching particu-lar topics, or just grazing. But such an organization canalso obscure the larger picture. The overview of humanhistory that follows in this section is designed to helpreaders keep sight of the unity of human history even asthey enjoy the rich diversity of details, questions andapproaches in the body of the encyclopedia.

Of course, no survey this brief can do more thansketch some of the main lines of development of our re-markable species, and it is probable that different histo-

rians would have drawn the lines in different ways. Nev-ertheless, as world history has evolved during the last fiftyyears or so, some consensus has emerged on the crucialturning points in human history.The three essays that fol-low are intended to distil something of that consensus,leaving more detailed treatments to the articles in thebody of the encyclopedia. Besides, brevity has its advan-tages. Above all, it should be possible to read this surveyin one or two sittings, a short enough period to remem-ber the beginning of the story as you reach the end. Cross-references and bibliographical references will lead youquickly to other essays if you want to find out more aboutany particular subject.

My fellow editors (William McNeill, Jerry Bentley,Karen Christensen, David Levinson, John McNeill, HeidiRoupp, and Judith Zinsser) have been extremely gener-ous in commenting on earlier drafts of these essays, andI want to thank them formally for their suggestions. How-ever, I was stubborn enough not to accept all of theiradvice, so I alone must accept responsibility for remain-ing errors of fact, emphasis and balance.

David Christian

Introduction

tfw-iv

Comparing the Three Eras of Human History

Era 1: 250,000–8000 BCE Most of human history; small communities; global migrations; megafaunal

FORAGING extinctions; slow population growth

Era 2: 8000 BCE–1750 CE Intensification; rapid population growth; cities, states, empires; writing; different

AGRARIAN histories in different world zones

Era 3: 1750–Present Single, global system; rapid growth in energy use; increasing rate of extinctions;

MODERN increased life expectancies

The era of foragers was the time in human historywhen all human communities lived by searching out

or hunting food and other things they needed, ratherthan by growing or manufacturing them. Such people arealso called “hunter-gatherers.” The era of foragers is alsoknown as the “Paleolithic era” (Paleolithic means “oldStone Age”). The era of foragers was the first and by farthe longest era of human history. It was the time whenthe foundations of human history were laid down.

Foragers gather the resources they need for food, forshelter and clothing, and for ritual activities and otherpurposes. For the most part they do so without trying totransform their environment.The exceptional cultural andtechnological creativity of human foragers distinguishestheir lifeways (the many different ways in which peoplerelate to their environments and to each other) from thesuperficially similar lifeways of nonhuman species, suchas the great apes. Only humans can communicate usingsymbolic language. Language allows men and women toshare and accumulate knowledge in detail and with greatprecision. As a result of this constant sharing of knowl-edge, the skills and lifeways of ancient foragers graduallyadapted to a huge variety of environments, creating a cul-tural and technological variety that has no parallel amongany other large species. The extraordinary facility withwhich human communities adapted to new circum-stances and environments is the key to human history.

As far as we know, the earliest human beings were for-agers; thus, the era of foragers began about 250,000 yearsago, when modern humans—members of our ownspecies,Homo sapiens—first appeared on Earth.Althoughsome foraging communities exist even today, the era of

foragers ended about ten thousand years ago with theappearance of the first agricultural communities becauseafter that time foraging ceased to be the only lifeway prac-ticed by human societies.

Studying the Era of ForagersHistorians have had a difficult time integrating the era offoragers into their accounts of the past because most his-torians lack the research skills needed to study an era thatgenerated no written evidence.Traditionally the era of for-agers has been studied not by historians, but rather byarchaeologists, anthropologists, and prehistorians.

In the absence of written evidence scholars use threeother fundamentally different types of evidence to under-stand the history of this era. The first type consists ofphysical remains from past societies.Archaeologists studythe skeletal remains of humans and their prey species, left-over objects such as stone tools and other manufacturedobjects or the remains of meals, as well as evidence fromthe natural environment that may help them understandclimatic and environmental changes.We have few skele-tal remains for the earliest phases of human history; theearliest known skeletal remains that are definitely ofmodern humans date from around 160,000 years ago.

tfw-1

Beginnings:The Era of

Foragers

For more on these topics, please see the following articles:

Archaeology p. 107 (v1)

Art, Paleolithic p. 180 (v1)

Dating Methods p. 487 (v2)

Human Evolution—Overview p. 930 (v3)

Paleoanthropology p. 1412 (v4)

However, archaeologists can extract a surprising amountof information from fragmentary skeletal remains. Aclose study of teeth, for example, can tell us much aboutdiets, and diets can tell us much about the lifeways ofearly humans. Similarly, differences in size between theskeletons of males and females can tell us somethingabout gender relations. By studying fossilized pollens andcore samples taken from sea beds and ice sheets that havebuilt up during thousands of years, archaeologists havemanaged to reconstruct climatic and environmental

changes with increasing precision. In addition, the datingtechniques developed during the last fifty years havegiven us increasingly precise dates, which allow us to con-struct absolute chronologies of events during the entirespan of human history.

Although archaeological evidence tells us mostly about

tfw-2 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Key Events in the Foraging Era

300,000– Modern human beings appear in Africa.200,000 BCE

250,000 BCE Stone tool technology becomes more sophisticated.

200,000 BCE Humans have spread across Africa.

100,000 BCE Humans begin migrating out of Africa to Eurasia.

50,000 BCE Development of more sophisticated technologies begins to accelerate.

Large-scale extinction of many large land animals begins.

50,000– Australia is settled.40,000 BCE

30,000 BCE Siberia is settled.

30,000– More sophisticated tools such as the bow and arrow are invented.20,000 BCE

13,000 BCE North America is settled.

12,000 BCE South America is settled.

10,000 BCE The foraging era ends with the development of agriculture.


Foraging Societies, Contemporary p. 764 (v2)

Genetics p. 809 (v2)

250,000 Years of Human History (not drawn to scale)

= 10 billion humans

250,000 bce 200,000 bce

Foraging Eran >95% of human historyn 12% of population

Mod

ern

hum

ans

spre

ad a

cros

s A

fric

a

the material life of our ancestors, it can occasionally giveus tantalizing glimpses into their cultural and even spiri-tual lives. Particularly revealing are the astonishing artis-tic creations of early human communities, althoughprecise interpretations of artifacts such as the great cavepaintings of southern France and northern Spain remainbeyond our grasp.

The second major type of evidence used to study earlyhuman history comes from studies of modern foragingcommunities. Such studies must be used with cautionbecause modern foragers are modern; their lifeways areall influenced in varying degrees by the modern world.Nevertheless, by studying modern foraging lifeways, wecan learn much about basic patterns of life in small for-aging communities; thus, such studies have helped prehis-torians interpret the meager material evidence available.

Recently a third type of evidence, based on compara-tive studies of modern genetic differences, has providednew ways of studying early human history. Genetic stud-ies can determine degrees of genetic separation betweenmodern populations and can help us estimate both theage of our species and the dates at which different pop-ulations were separated by ancient migrations.

Integrating these different types of evidence into a co-herent account of world history is difficult not only be-cause most historians lack the necessary expertise andtraining, but also because archaeological, anthropologi-

cal, and genetic evidence yields types of information thatdiffer from the written sources that are the primary re-search base for most professional historians.Archaeolog-ical evidence from the era of foragers can never give usthe intimate personal details that can be found in writtensources, but it can tell us much about how people lived.Integrating the insights of these different disciplines is one

this fleeting world / beginnings: the era of foragers tfw-3

Carbon DatingCarbon 14 (hereafter C 14) was developed by theAmerican chemistWillard F. Libby at the Univer-sity of Chicago in the ’50s, for which he receivedthe Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960. C 14 dat-ing provided an accurate means of dating a widevariety of organic material in most archaeologicalsites, and indeed in most environments through-out the world.The method revolutionized scien-tists’ ability to date the past. It freed archaeologistsfrom trying to use artifacts as their only means ofdetermining chronologies, and it allowed themfor the first time to apply the same absolute timescale uniformly from region to region and conti-nent to continent. Many older archaeologicalschemes were overturned with the advent of C 14dating. Today it is possible to date sites . . . wellback into the late Pleistocene [Era] with reliableand accurate chronologies.

Source: Hudson, M. (n.d.). Understanding Carbon 14 dating. Retrieved Septem-ber 8, 2004, from http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/vertpaleo/aucilla10_1/Carbon.htm

100,000 bce 40,000 bce12,000 bce

10,000 bce 0 1750 ce

Modern Eran <1% of human historyn 68% of population

Agrarian Eran 4% of human historyn 20% of population

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in E

uras

ia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

ustr

alia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

mer

icas

of the main challenges of world history, and it is facedmost directly in studying the era of foragers.

Beginnings of Human HistoryScholars still debate when our species first appeared. Onehypothesis—the multiregional model, defended today bya minority of physical anthropologists, including MilfordWolpoff and Alan Thorne—states that modern humansevolved gradually, during the last million years, in many

regions of the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Through time,protohumans (early human ancestors) in different regionsdiverged enough to create the genetic foundations formodern regional variants (races) while maintaining suf-ficient genetic contact to remain a single species.The mul-tiregional model implies that human history began, quitegradually, sometime during the last million years.The evi-dence for this model comes mainly from the comparativestudy of skeletal remains.

Out of Africa, into Controversy

A second hypothesis, sometimes known as the “Out-of-Africa hypothesis,” relies mainly on genetic comparisonsof modern humans, although it also claims to be consis-tent with surviving skeletal evidence. It starts from theobservation that modern humans are genetically very sim-ilar to each other, so similar in fact that they cannot havebeen evolving for more than about 250,000 years. Thishypothesis suggests that all modern humans aredescended from just a few ancestors who lived about250,000 years ago. Today the greatest genetic varietyamong humans can be found in Africa, which suggeststhat Africa is where humans evolved and where they livedfor the longest time before some began to migrate aroundthe world. If the Out-of-Africa hypothesis is correct, mod-ern humans evolved in Africa from later forms of Homoergaster.The new species probably emerged quite rapidlyin a remote, isolated group.

The Out-of-Africa hypothesis itself comes in two mainvariants.The first variant, which has long been defendedby the archaeologist Richard Klein and others, suggeststhat even if modern humans evolved in Africa perhaps250,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of distinctivelyhuman behaviors, including improved hunting skills andartistic activities of various kinds, dates from no earlierthan about fifty thousand to sixty thousand years ago. Inthis variant humans were not fully human, and human


Who Does What in theStudy of Human HistoryArchaeologists excavate, preserve, study, andclassify artifacts of the near and distant past inorder to develop a picture of how people lived inearlier cultures and societies.The profession com-bines a broad understanding of history withsophisticated digging procedures and plain oldhard work, making it one of the most demandingand competitive branches of the social sciences.

Source: Princeton Review. (2004). Retrieved September 8, 2004, from http://www.princetonreview.com/cte/profiles/dayInLife.asp?careerID=10

Prehistorian: An archaeologist who specializesin prehistory—the study of prehistoric human-kind.

Source: Merriam-Webster Online. (2004). Retrieved September 8, 2004, fromhttp://www.m-w.com

The word anthropology itself tells the basicstory—from the Greek anthropos (“human”) andlogia (“study”)—it is the study of humankindfrom its beginnings millions of years ago to thepresent day. . . .Though easy to define, anthro-pology is difficult to describe. Its subject matteris both exotic (e.g., star lore of the Australianaborigines) and commonplace (anatomy of thefoot). And its focus is both sweeping (the evolu-tion of language) and microscopic (the use-wear of obsidian tools). Anthropologists maystudy ancient Mayan hieroglyphics, the music ofAfrican Pygmies, and the corporate culture of aU.S. car manufacturer.

Source: American Anthropological Association. (2004). Retrieved September 8,2004, from http://www.aaanet.org/anthbroc.htm


Afro-Eurasia p. 44 (v1)

Human Evolution—Overview p. 930 (v3)

Periodization—Overview p. 1453 (v4)

history did not really begin until some minor geneticchanges made available the full range of modern sym-bolic languages.This variant of the Out-of-Africa hypoth-esis depends on the proliferation of new types of toolsand artifacts that is evident in the archaeology of Eurasiafrom about fifty thousand years ago.

More recently, however, some supporters of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis have argued that the significance ofthese changes may have been exaggerated by virtue of thefact that scholars have conducted so much more archae-ological research in Eurasia than in Africa, the presumedhomeland of modern humans. In a careful analysis of theavailable archaeological evidence from Africa, the anthro-pologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks have arguedthat evidence of distinctively human activities appears inAfrica as early as 200,000 to 300,000 years ago andcoincides with the appearance of skeletal remains thatmay be those of the earliest modern men and women. IfMcBrearty and Brooks are right, our species appeared inAfrica between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, andthese dates mark the real beginnings of human history.The periodization adopted in this essay is based onthese findings. It adopts the compromise date of 250,000years ago for the appearance of the first humans and forthe beginnings of human history. However, we shouldremember that this date remains subject to revision.

What Makes Us Different?

What distinguishes us so markedly from other species?What distinguishes human history from the histories ofall other animals? Many answers have been given to thesefundamental questions. Modern answers include the abil-ity to walk on two legs (bipedalism), the use of tools, theability to hunt systematically, and the development ofexceptionally large brains. Unfortunately, as studies ofclosely related species have become more sophisticated,

we have learned that many of these qualities can be foundto some degree in closely related species such as chim-panzees. For example, we now know that chimpanzeescan make and use tools and can also hunt.

At the moment the most powerful marker, the featurethat distinguishes our species most decisively from closelyrelated species, appears to be symbolic language. Manyanimals can communicate with each other and shareinformation in rudimentary ways. However, humans arethe only creatures who can communicate using symboliclanguage: a system of arbitrary symbols that can belinked by formal grammars to create a nearly limitlessvariety of precise utterances. Symbolic language greatlyenhanced the precision of human communication andthe range of ideas that humans can exchange. Symboliclanguage allowed people for the first time to talk aboutentities that were not immediately present (includingexperiences and events in the past and future) as well asentities whose existence was not certain (such as souls,demons, and dreams).

The result of this sudden increase in the precision, effi-ciency, and range of human communication systems wasthat people could share what they learned with others;thus, knowledge began to accumulate more rapidly thanit was lost: Instead of dying with each person or genera-tion, the insights of individuals could be preserved forfuture generations. As a result, each generation inheritedthe accumulated knowledge of previous generations,and, as this store of knowledge grew, later generationscould use it to adapt to their environment in new ways.Unlike all other living species on Earth, whose behaviorschange in significant ways only when the genetic makeupof the entire species changes, humans can change theirbehaviors significantly without waiting for their genes tochange. This cumulative process of collective learningexplains the exceptional ability of humans to adapt tochanging environments and changing circumstances andthe unique dynamism of human history. In human his-tory culture has outstripped natural selection as the pri-mary motor of change.

These conclusions suggest that we should seek thebeginnings of human history not only in the anatomical



Creation Myths p. 449 (v2)

Engines of History p. 654 (v2)

Language, Classification of p. 1106 (v3)

Language, Standardization of p. 1111 (v3)

The further you get away from any period, the better you canwrite about it. You aren’t subject to interruptions by peoplethat were there. • FINLEY PETER DUNNE (1867–1936)

details of early human remains, but also in any evidencethat hints at the presence of symbolic language and theaccumulation of technical skills. The findings ofMcBrearty and Brooks link the earliest evidence of sym-bolic activity (including hints of the grinding of pigmentsfor use in body painting) and of significant changes instone tool technologies (including the disappearance ofthe stone technologies associated with most forms ofHomo ergaster) with the appearance of a new speciesknown as “Homo helmei.” The remains of this species areso close to those of modern women and men that wemay eventually have to classify them with our ownspecies, Homo sapiens. The earliest anatomical, techno-logical, and cultural evidence for these changes appearsin Africa between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Foraging LifewaysArchaeological evidence is so scarce for the era of for-agers that our understanding of early human lifeways hasbeen shaped largely by conclusions based on the study of


modern foraging communities. Indeed, the notion of aforaging mode of production was first proposed by theanthropologist Richard Lee during the late 1970s on thebasis of his studies of foraging communities in southernAfrica. However, the scanty archaeological evidence canbe used to discipline the generalizations suggested bymodern anthropological research.

The scarcity of remains from this era, combined withwhat we know of the ecology of modern foragers, makesus certain that levels of productivity were extraordinarilylow by modern standards. Humans probably did notextract from their environment much more than the3,000 kilocalories per day that adult members of ourspecies need to maintain a basic, healthy existence. Low



Indigenous Peoples p. 963 (v3)

Kinship p. 1083 (v3)

Marriage and Family p. 1195 (v3)

This plate shows a variety of tools of increasing technological complexity used by humans atdifferent times and places to shape stone. Tools 1–5 are used to flake or abrade stone. Tools6 and 7 (long horizontal instruments and accompanying square to the right) are differentparts of drills used with sand and tool 8 is a slate saw.

productivity ensured that population densities were lowby the standards of later eras, averaging perhaps as littleas one person per square kilometer.This fact meant thatsmall numbers of humans were scattered over largeranges. Modern studies suggest that foragers may havedeliberately limited population growth to avoid over-exploitation of the land; modern foragers can limit pop-ulation growth by inhibiting conception through pro-longed breast feeding, by using various techniques ofabortion, and sometimes by killing excess children orallowing the sick and unhealthy to die.

Because each group needed a large area to supportitself, ancient foragers, like modern foragers, probablylived most of the time in small groups consisting of nomore than a few closely related people. Most of thesegroups must have been nomadic in order to exploit theirlarge home territories. However, we can also be sure that

many links existed between neighboring groups. Almostall human communities encourage marriage away fromone’s immediate family. Thus, foraging communitieslikely met periodically with their neighbors to swap gifts,stories, and rituals, to dance together, and to resolve dis-putes. At such meetings—similar, perhaps, to the corro-borees of aboriginal Australians—females and malesmay have moved from group to group either sponta-neously or through more formal arrangements of mar-riage or adoption.

Kith and Kin

Exchanges of people meant that each group normallyhad family members in neighboring groups, creating tiesthat ensured that people usually had some sense of soli-darity between neighboring groups as well as some lin-guistic overlapping.Ties of kinship created local networks


This plate shows the variety of stabbing tools used over the course of human history and thedifferent sizes, shapes, and materials used to make the weapons. Tools 1–2 are made fromflaked stone, 2 from antler, 3 from animal bone, 4 from antler, 5 through 8 from chippedstone, and 9 through 15 from copper, bronze, and iron.

that smoothed the exchange of goods, people, and ideasbetween neighboring groups.

Studies of modern foraging societies suggest thatnotions of family and kinship provided the primary wayof thinking about and organizing social relations. Indeed,in Europe and the People without History (1982), theanthropologist Eric Wolf proposed describing all small-scale societies as “kin-ordered.” Family was society in away that is difficult for the inhabitants of modern soci-eties to appreciate. Notions of kinship provided all therules of behavior and etiquette that were needed to livein a world in which most communities included just afew persons and in which few people met more than afew hundred other people in their lifetime.

The idea of society as family also suggests much aboutthe economics of foraging societies.Relations of exchangewere probably analogous to those in modern families.Exchanges were conceived of as gifts.This fact meant thatthe act of exchanging was usually more important thanthe qualities of the goods exchanged; exchanging was away of cementing existing relationships.Anthropologistssay that such relationships are based on “reciprocity.”Power relations, too, were the power relations of familiesor extended families; justice and discipline—even violentretribution for antisocial behavior—could be imposedonly by the family. Hierarchies, insofar as they existed,were based on gender, age, experience, and respect withinthe family.

Studies of modern foraging societies suggest that,although males and females, just like older and youngermembers of society, may have specialized in differenttasks, differences in the roles people played did not nec-essarily create hierarchical relations. Women probablytook most responsibility for child rearing and may alsohave been responsible for gathering most of the food (atleast in temperate and tropical regions, where gatheringwas more important than hunting), whereas men special-ized in hunting, which was generally a less reliable sourceof food in such regions. However, no evidence indicatesthat these different roles led to relationships of domi-nance or subordination. Throughout the era of foragers


human relationships were personal rather than hierarchi-cal. In a world of intimate, personal relationships peoplehad little need for the highly institutionalized structuresof the modern world, most of which are designed to reg-ulate relationships between strangers.

Burials and art objects of many kinds have left us tan-talizing hints about the spiritual world of our foragingancestors but few definitive answers. Modern analogiessuggest that foragers thought of the spiritual world andthe natural world as parts of a large extended family, fullof beings with whom one could establish relations of kin-ship, mutual obligation, and sometimes enmity. As aresult, the classificatory boundaries that foragers drewbetween human beings and all other species and entitieswere less hard and fast than those we draw today. Suchthinking may help make sense of ideas that often seembizarre to moderns, such as totemism—the idea that ani-mals, plants, and even natural geological objects such asmountains and lakes can be thought of as kin.The beliefthat all or most of reality is animated by spirit may be thefundamental cosmological hypothesis (or model of theuniverse) of foraging societies, even if particular represen-tations of spirits differ greatly from community to com-munity.The hypothesis helped make sense of a world inwhich animals and objects often behave with all theunpredictability and willfulness of human beings.

Living Standards

In an article published in 1972 the anthropologist Mar-shall Sahlins questioned the conventional assumptionthat material living standards were necessarily low in for-aging societies. He argued, mainly on the basis of evi-


Disease and Nutrition p. 538 (v2)

Diseases—Overview p. 543 (v2)

Food p. 757 (v2)


Animism p. 90 (v1)

Shamanism p. 1696 (v4)

What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostlyuncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably neverhappened and those which do not matter. • WILLIAM RALPH INGE (1860–1954)

dence from modern foragers, that from some points ofview we could view foragers (certainly those living in lessharsh environments) as affluent. Nomadism discouragedthe accumulation of material goods because people hadto carry everything they owned; so did a lifeway in whichpeople took most of what they needed from their imme-diate surroundings. In such a world people had no needto accumulate material possessions. Absence of posses-sions may seem a mark of poverty to modern minds, butSahlins argued that foragers probably experienced theirlives as affluent because the things they needed could befound all around them. Particularly in temperate regions,the diets of foragers can be varied and nutritious; indeed,the variety of the diets of ancient foragers shielded themfrom famine because when their favorite foodstuffs failed,they had many alternatives to fall back on.

Leisurely but Brief

Studies by paleobiologists (paleontologists who study thebiology of fossil organisms) have confirmed that the

health of foragers was often betterthan that of people in the earliestfarming communities.The small com-munities in which foragers lived insu-lated them from epidemic diseases,and frequent movement preventedthe accumulation of rubbish thatcould attract disease-carrying pests.Modern analogies suggest that theyalso lived a life of considerableleisure, rarely spending more than afew hours a day in pursuit of thebasic necessities of life—far less thanmost people either in farming com-munities or in modern societies.However, we should not exaggerate.In other ways life was undeniablyharsh during the era of foragers. Forexample, life expectancies were prob-ably low (perhaps less than thirtyyears): Although many persons un-

doubtedly lived into their sixties or seventies, high ratesof infant mortality, physical accidents, and interpersonalviolence took a greater toll from the young in foragingsocieties than in most modern societies.

Major Changes during the Era of ForagersThe small size of foraging communities and the limitedpossibilities for exchanging ideas over large areas mayexplain why, to modern minds, technological change dur-ing this era appears to have been so slow. Nevertheless,change was extremely rapid in comparison with thechanges that took place among our hominid (erectbipedal primate mammals comprising recent humansand extinct ancestral and related forms) ancestors oramong other large animal species.To give just one exam-ple, the Acheulian hand axes (a type of stone tool origi-nating in Africa almost 2 million years ago) used by ourimmediate ancestors, Homo ergaster, changed little dur-ing a million and more years. Yet, during the 200,000


Shamanism is a form of religiontraced back to the foraging era.This drawing depicts a SiberianShaman.

were doubling approximately every eight thousand tonine thousand years. This rate of growth can be com-pared with an average doubling time of about fourteenhundred years during the agrarian era and eighty-fiveyears during the modern era.

Technological Change

Rates of growth during the era of foragers are striking intwo contradictory ways. Insofar as population growth isan indirect sign of technological innovation, it providesevidence for innovation throughout the era and somesigns that innovation was accelerating. However, by com-parison with later eras of human history, rates of growthwere extremely slow. This difference is partly becauseexchanges of information were limited by the small sizeand the wide dispersion of foraging communities.Indeed, change occurred so slowly that a person couldhardly notice it within a single lifetime, and this fact maymean that ancient foragers, like modern foragers, had lit-tle sense of long-term change, seeing the past mainly asa series of variations on the present.

Migrations into new environments requiring new tech-nologies and new skills probably began quite early dur-ing the era of foragers, while all humans still lived withinthe African continent. Unfortunately, studying technolog-ical change during the earliest stages of human history isdifficult because surviving objects tell us little about thetechnological knowledge of those who made them.Todaywe depend upon objects such as cars and computers,which embody a colossal amount of specialized knowl-edge. However, modern anthropological studies suggestthat among foragers knowledge was primarily carried inthe head rather than embodied in objects.Thus, the toolsthat foragers left behind can give us only the palestimpression of their technological and ecological skills.

Nevertheless, the evidence of change is powerful.Thefirst piece of evidence that humans were migrating intonew environments is the fact that human remains startappearing in all parts of the African continent. By100,000 years ago some groups had learned to live offthe resources of seashore environments, such as shellfish;whereas others were adapting to lifeways in other new


The smallest human societies that we can identify either among living groups or among the populationsof prehistory do not live up to the romantic images we sometimes paint of them . . . [but they] do

surprisingly well if we compare them to the the actual record of human history rather than to

years or more of the era of foragers, our ancestors createda remarkable variety of new technologies and new life-ways. Indeed, the relatively sudden replacement of Acheu-lian stone technologies by more varied and preciselyengineered stone tools in Africa from about 200,000years ago is one of the most powerful reasons for think-ing that modern humans existed by that date. Many ofthese new stone tools were so small that they may havebeen hafted (bound to handles), which would havegreatly increased their versatility and usefulness.

The technological creativity of our foraging ancestorsenabled them to explore and settle lands quite differentfrom those in which they had evolved. Indeed, this cre-ativity is one of the most decisive differences between ourspecies and other species, including our closest relatives,the great apes.As far as we know, the great apes have notmanaged to modify their behaviors enough to migrateinto new habitats. This fact is precisely why we do notcustomarily think of these species as having histories inthe way that humans have a history. In contrast, the his-tory of our species during the era of foragers is a story ofmany unrecorded migrations into new environments,made possible by tiny technological changes, the accumu-lation of new knowledge and skills, and minor adjust-ments in lifeways.

As humans spread over more and more of the Earth,human numbers surely increased. Estimates of popula-tions during the era of foragers are based largely onguesswork, but one of the more influential recent esti-mates by demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci suggests thatthirty thousand years ago just a few hundred thousandhumans existed, whereas ten thousand years ago theremay have been as many as 6 million. If we assume thatapproximately 500,000 humans existed thirty thousandyears ago, this implies a growth rate between thirty thou-sand and ten thousand years ago of less than 0.01 per-cent per annum, which implies that human populations



Migrations p. 1247 (v3)

Population p. 1484 (v4)

environments, including tropical forests and deserts. Evi-dence that communities exchanged objects over dis-tances up to several hundred kilometers suggests thatcommunities were also exchanging information overconsiderable distances, and these exchanges may havebeen a vital stimulus to technological experimentation.

Migrations from Africa

From about 100,000 years ago humans began to settleoutside Africa; communities of modern humans existedin southwestern Asia, and from there humans migratedwest and east to the southern, and warmer, parts of theEurasian landmass. These migrations took humans intoenvironments similar to those of their African homeland;thus, they do not necessarily indicate any technologicalbreakthroughs. Indeed, many other species had madesimilar migrations between Asia and Africa. However, theappearance of humans in Ice Age Australia by fortythousand to fifty thousand years ago is a clear sign ofinnovation because traveling to Australia demandedsophisticated seagoing capabilities, and within Australiahumans had to adapt to an entirely novel biologicalrealm.We know of no other mammal species that madethis crossing independently.

Equally significant is the appearance of humans inSiberia from about thirty thousand years ago. To live inthe steppes (vast, usually level and treeless tracts) of InnerAsia during the last ice age, you had to be extremely goodat hunting large mammals such as deer, horse, and mam-moth because edible plants were scarcer than in warmerclimates.You also had to be able to protect yourself fromthe extreme cold by using fire, making close-fittingclothes, and building durable shelters. By thirteen thou-sand years ago humans had also reached the Americas,traveling either across the Ice Age land bridge of Beringia,which linked eastern Siberia and Alaska, or by sea aroundthe coasts of Beringia.Within two thousand years of en-

tering the Americas, some groups had reached the farsouth of South America.

Each of these migrations required new technologies,new botanical and biological knowledge, and new waysof living; thus, each represents a technological break-through, within which numerous lesser technologicaladjustments took place as communities learned to exploitthe particular resources of each microregion. However,no evidence indicates that the average size of humancommunities increased. During the era of foragers, tech-nological change led to more extensive rather than moreintensive settlement; humans settled more of the world,but they continued to live in small nomadic communities.

Human Impacts on the Environment

The technological creativity that made these migrationspossible ensured that, although foragers normally had alimited impact on their environments, their impact wasincreasing. The extinction of many large animal species(megafauna) and the spread of what is known as “fire-stick farming” provide two spectacular illustrations of theincreasing human impact on the environment, althoughcontroversy still surrounds both topics.

Megafaunal ExtinctionsWithin the last fifty thousand years many species of largeanimals have been driven to extinction, particularly inregions newly colonized by humans, whether in Aus-tralia, Siberia, or the Americas. Australia and the Ameri-cas may have lost 70–80 percent of all mammal speciesweighing more than 44 kilograms; Europe may have lostabout 40 percent of large-animal species; whereas Africa,where humans and large mammals had coexisted formuch longer, lost only about 14 percent. As archaeolo-gists pinpoint the date of these extinctions more precisely,they appear to coincide with the first arrival of modern


our romantic images of civilized progress. . . . Hobbes was probably wrong by almost any measure when hecharacterized primitive life as “nasty, brutish and short” while speaking from the perspective of urbancenters of seventeenth-century Europe. • Mark Cohen, Medical Anthropologist



Asia p. 184 (v1)

Europe p. 691 (v2)


Art, Paleolithic p. 180 (v1)

Extinctions p. 722 (v2)

Fire p. 745 (v2)

Technology—Overview p. 1806 (v5)

humans, increasing the probability that they were causedby humans.

Similar extinctions during recent centuries, such as theextinction of the large birds known as “moas” in NewZealand, offer a modern example of what may have hap-pened as humans with improved hunting techniquesand skills encountered large animals who had little expe-rience of humans and whose low reproduction ratesmade them particularly vulnerable to extinction. Theloss of large-animal species in Australia and the Americasshaped the later histories of these regions insofar as thelack of large animals meant that humans were unable toexploit large animals as beasts of burden and sources offoodstuffs and fibers.

Fire-Stick FarmingA second example of the increasing environmentalimpact of early foragers is associated with what the Aus-tralian archaeologist Rhys Jones called “fire-stick farming.”Fire-stick farming is not, strictly, a form of farming at all.However, it is, like farming, a way of manipulating theenvironment to increase the productivity of animal andplant species that humans find useful. Fire-stick farmersregularly burn off the land to prevent the accumulationof dangerous amounts of fuel. Regular firing also clearsundergrowth and deposits ash. In effect, it speeds up thedecomposition of dead organisms, which encouragesthe growth of new shoots that can attract grazing animalsand the animals that prey on them.

Humans systematically fired the land on all the conti-nents they settled, and through time the practice proba-bly transformed local landscapes and altered the mix oflocal animal and plant species. In Australia, for example,fire-stick farming through tens of thousands of yearsprobably encouraged the spread of eucalyptus at theexpense of species that were less comfortable with fire,creating landscapes very different from those encounteredby the first human immigrants.

Picking up the Pace

From about fifty thousand years ago the rate of techno-logical change began to accelerate. Migrations to new

continents and new environments are one expression ofthat acceleration. However, new technologies and tech-niques also proliferated. Stone tools became more preciseand more varied, and many may have been hafted. Peo-ple made more use of new materials such as bone,amber, and vegetable fibers. From about twenty thousandto thirty thousand years ago, new and more sophisticatedtools appeared, including bows and arrows and spearthrowers.

Foragers in tundra (level or rolling treeless plain thatis characteristic of arctic and subarctic regions) regionsused bone needles to make carefully tailored clothesfrom animal skins; sometimes they covered their clothingwith elaborate ornamentation made from animal teeth orshells.The remains of prey species show that hunters, par-ticularly in cold climates, became more specialized intheir hunting techniques, suggesting increasingly sophis-ticated understanding of different environments. Cavepaintings and sculptures in wood or bone began toappear in regions as disparate as Africa, Australia, Mon-golia, and Europe.

Affluent Foragers

Accelerating technological change accounts for one moredevelopment that foreshadowed the changes that wouldeventually lead to the agrarian era. Most foraging tech-nologies can be described as “extensive”: They allowedhumans to occupy larger areas without increasing the sizeof individual communities. Occasionally, though, for-agers adopted more intensive techniques that allowedthem to extract more resources from a given area and tocreate larger and more sedentary communities. Evidencefor such changes is particularly common from abouttwenty thousand to fifteen thousand years ago and is bestknown from the corridor between Mesopotamia (theregion of southwestern Asia between the Tigris andEuphrates rivers) and Sudan—the region that links Africaand Eurasia. Anthropologists have long been aware thatforagers living in environments of particular abundancewill sometimes become less nomadic and spend longerperiods at one or two main home bases. They may alsobecome more sedentary if they devise technologies that


By providing a coherent, intelligible account of the past, [history] satisfies aprofound human yearning for knowledge about our roots. It requires no

justification other than that. • THEODORE S. HAMEROW (b. 1920)

increase the output of resources from a particular area.Anthropologists refer to such foragers as “affluent for-agers.”

The examples that follow are taken from Australiafrom a region in which foraging lifeways can be studiedmore closely because they have survived into moderntimes. During the last five thousand years new, smaller,and more finely made stone tools appeared in many partsof Australia, including small points that people mayhave used as spear tips. Some tools were so beautifullymade that they were traded as ritual objects over hun-dreds of miles. New techniques meant new ways ofextracting resources. In the state of Victoria people builtelaborate eel traps, some with canals up to 300 meterslong.At certain points people constructed nets or taperedtraps, using bark strips or plaited rushes, to harvest thetrapped eels. So many eels could be kept in these eel

farms that relatively permanent settlements appearednearby. One site contains almost 150 small huts built ofstone. In addition to eels, the inhabitants of these smallsettlements lived off local species of game, from emu tokangaroo, as well as local vegetable foods such as daisyyam tubers, ferns, and convolvulus (herbs and shrubs ofthe morning glory family).

Some communities began to harvest plants such asyams, fruit, and grains in ways that suggest early stepstowards agriculture.Yams were (and are today) harvestedin ways that encouraged regrowth, and people deliber-ately planted fruit seeds in refuse heaps to create fruitgroves. In some of the more arid areas of central Aus-tralia, early European travelers observed communitiesharvesting wild millet with stone knives and storing it inlarge haystacks. Archeologists have discovered grind-stones, which were used to grind seeds as early as fifteenthousand years ago in some regions. In many coastalregions of Australia fishing using shell fishhooks andsmall boats also allowed for denser settlement. In gen-eral, the coasts were more thickly settled than inlandareas.

The appearance of communities of affluent foragersprepared the way for the next fundamental transition inhuman history: the appearance of communities that sys-tematically manipulated their environments to extractmore resources from a given area.The set of technologiesthat these people used is often called “agriculture”; werefer to the era in which agriculture made its appearanceas the “agrarian era.”

The Era of Foragers inWorld HistoryHistorians have often assumed that little changed duringthe era of foragers. In comparison with later eras ofhuman history this assumption may seem to be true. It isalso true that change was normally so slow that it wasimperceptible within a single lifetime; thus, few men andwomen in the era of foragers could have appreciated thewider significance of technological changes. Nevertheless,in comparison with the prehuman era, the pace of tech-nological change during the era of foragers was striking.


Indigenous peoples of the North Americannorthwest subsisted from fishing andexhibited a way of life called affluentforaging. The illustration is of the designs on a large Tsimshian box used to storeblankets, an important form of wealth.

Exploiting the technological synergy (the creative powergenerated by linking people through language) that wasmade available to humans by their capacity for symboliclanguage, human communities slowly learned to livesuccessfully in a wide variety of new environments. Agradual accumulation of new skills allowed foragingcommunities to settle most of the world in migrationsthat have no precedent either among other primatespecies or among our hominid ancestors.

During the course of 250,000 years the pace ofchange was slowly accelerating. During the last fiftythousand years or so, the variety and precision of forag-ing technologies and techniques multiplied throughoutthe world. Eventually foraging technologies becamesophisticated enough to allow groups of people in someregions to exploit their surroundings more intensively, achange that marks the first step toward agriculture.

Further ReadingBurenhult, G. (Ed.). (1993). The illustrated history of mankind:Vol. 1.The

first humans, human origins and history to 10,000 BC. St. Lucia, Aus-tralia: University of Queensland Press.

Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berke-ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Fagan, B. M. (2001). People of the Earth:An introduction to world prehis-tory (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Flannery, T. (1995). The future eaters: An ecological history of the Aus-tralasian lands and peoples. Port Melbourne, Australia: Reed Books.

Flood, J. (1983). Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The story of prehistoricAustralia and her people. Sydney, Australia: Collins.

Johnson,A.W., & Earle,T. (2000). The evolution of human societies (2nded.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jones, R. (1969). Fire-stick farming. Australian Natural History, 16(7),224–228.

Klein, R. G. (1999). The human career: Human biological and cultural ori-gins (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Livi-Bacci, M. (1992). A concise history of world population. Oxford, UK:Blackwell.

McBrearty, S., & Brooks,A. S. (2000).The revolution that wasn’t: A newinterpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal ofHuman Evolution, 39(5), 453–563.

McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web: A bird’s-eyeview of world history. New York: W.W. Norton.

Richerson, P. T., & Boyd, R. (2004). Not by genes alone: How culturetransformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Roberts, N. (1998). The Holocene: An environmental history (2nd ed.).Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age economics. London: Tavistock.Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press.


A selection of Foraging Era flaked arrowheads from (1) Ireland; (2) France; (3) North America; (4) SouthAmerica; and (5) Japan.

The agrarian era began ten thousand to eleven thou-sand years ago with the appearance of the first agri-

cultural communities. We can define the agrarian era as“the era of human history when agriculture was the mostimportant of all productive technologies and the founda-tion for most human societies.” It ended during the last250 years as modern industrial technologies overtookagriculture in productivity and began to transformhuman lifeways. Although the agrarian era lasted a mereten thousand years, in contrast to the 250,000 years ofthe era of foragers, 70 percent of all humanity may havelived during the agrarian era, their burgeoning numberssustained by the era’s productive technologies.

The agrarian era was characterized by greater diversitythan either the era of foragers or the modern era. Para-doxically, diversity was a product both of technologicalinnovations and of technological sluggishness becausealthough new technologies such as agriculture and pas-toralism (livestock raising) created new ways of living, thelimits of communications technologies ensured that dif-ferent parts of the world remained separate enough toevolve along independent trajectories.At the largest scalewe can identify several distinct “world zones,” or regionsthat had no significant contact with each other beforeabout 1500 CE. The most important were the Afro-Eurasian landmass from the far south of Africa to the farnortheast of Siberia, the Americas, Australia, and theislands of the Pacific.

Within each world zone long and sometimes tenuouswebs of cultural and material exchanges linked local com-munities into larger networks of exchanges. In some ofthe world zones the dense networks of political, cultural,

and economic exchanges known as “agrarian civiliza-tions” emerged, and through time these civilizationslinked with other agrarian civilizations and with peoplesliving between the main zones of agrarian civilization.However, we know of no significant contacts between thedifferent world zones before 1500 CE.The great diversityof lifeways and the relative isolation of different regionsexplain why we have more difficulty making generaliza-tions that apply to the entire world during this era thanduring the era of foragers or the modern era.

Despite this diversity, striking parallels exist betweenthe historical trajectories of different parts of the world.Agriculture appeared quite independently in severalregions; so did states, cities, monumental architecture,and writing. These parallels raise deep questions aboutlong-term patterns of historical change. Does human his-tory have a fundamental shape, a large trajectory that isapparent in all regions and under diverse social and eco-logical conditions? If such a shape exists, does it arisefrom the nature of our species or from basic principles ofcultural evolution? Or are the similarities misleading?Do the diversity and open-endedness of human histori-cal experience deserve most emphasis on the large scalesof world history?

Origins of AgricultureThe word agriculture is used here to describe an evolvingcluster of technologies that enabled humans to increasethe production of favored plant and animal species. Eco-logically speaking, agriculture is a more efficient way thanforaging to harvest the energy and resources stored in thenatural environment as a result of photosynthesis.

tfw-15

Acceleration:The Agrarian

Era

Because farmers interfere with their surroundings moredeliberately than foragers, agriculture magnified thehuman impact on the natural environment and also onthe cultures and lifeways of humans themselves. Agricul-turalists manipulated plant and animal species so in-tensely that they began to alter the genetic makeup ofprey species in a process commonly referred to as “domes-tication.” By clearing forests, diverting rivers, terracinghillsides, and plowing the land, agriculturalists createdlandscapes that were increasingly anthropogenic (shapedby human activity).

Finally, by altering their own lifeways, agriculturalistscreated new types of communities, radically different inscale and complexity from those of the era of foragers.Humans did not domesticate just other species; they alsodomesticated themselves.

Agriculture does not automatically increase the biolog-ical productivity of the land. Indeed, agriculturalists oftenreduce total productivity by removing the many speciesfor which they have no use.They increase the productiv-ity only of those plants and animals that they find mostuseful; removing undesired plants leaves more nutrients,sunlight, and water for domesticated crops such as corn,wheat, or rice, while killing wolves and foxes allows cat-tle, sheep, and chickens to flourish in safety. By increas-ing the productivity of favored prey species, humans

could feed more of themselves from a given area thanwould have been possible using foraging technologies.

Whereas technological change during the era of for-agers was extensive (it allowed humans to multiply byincreasing their range), technological change during theagrarian era was intensive (it allowed more humans tolive within a given range). As a result, humans and theirdomesticates began to settle in larger and denser commu-nities; as they did so they transformed their ecologicaland social environments. The result was a revolution inthe pace and nature of historical change.

Earliest Evidence of Agriculture

Dates for the earliest evidence of agriculture remain sub-ject to revision. At present the earliest clear evidencecomes from the corridor between Sudan and Mesopo-tamia that links Africa and Eurasia. In the Fertile Crescent(the arc of highlands around the great rivers of Meso-potamia) grain crops were cultivated from about 8000BCE (ten thousand years ago). In the Sahara Desert westof the Nile River, in lands that then were much less aridthan they are today, communities may have domesticatedcattle as early as 9000 or 8000 BCE, and within a thou-sand years these same communities may have started cul-tivating sorghum. In west Africa yam cultivation may alsohave begun around 8000 BCE. In China people were


Agriculture represents the single most profound ecological change in theentire 3.5 billion-year history of life. • NILES ELDREDGE (b. 1943)


= 10 billion humans

250,000 bce 200,000 bce


Mod

ern

hum

ans

spre

ad a

cros

s A

fric

a

this fleeting world / acceleration: the agrarian era tfw-17

Key Events in the Agrarian Era

13,000– Some humans begin to live in settled communities.11,000 bce

9000– Cattle are domesticated in the Sahara region of Africa.8000 bce

8000 bce Grain crops are cultivated in Mesopotamia.

Yams are cultivated in West Africa.

7000 bce Grains and rice are cultivated in the north and south of China.

Yams and taro are cultivated in Papua New Guinea.

Squash is cultivated in Mesoamerica.

4000 bce The secondary products revolution takes place in parts of Afro-Eurasia.

3000 bce Plants are cultivated in the Andes region of South America.

Cities and states appear in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

2500 bce Cities and states appear in India, Pakistan and northern China.

2000 bce Eurasian trade networks develop.

1000 bce Cities and states appear in Mesoamerica and the Andes.

500 bce– New cities and states emerge, population increases, and interregional trade 1000 ce networks develop.

500–1200 ce Many of the Pacific islands are settled.

1200 ce Europeans reach the Americas.

1500 ce All major world regions are linked through migration and trade.

1750 ce The Agrarian Era begins to decline with the appearance and spread ofindustrialization.

100,000 bce 40,000 bce12,000 bce

10,000 bce 0 1750 ce



Mod

ern

hum

ans

in E

uras

ia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

ustr

alia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

mer

icas

probably cultivating rice in the south and other grains inthe north by 7000 BCE. By this time farming based on thecultivation of taro (a large-leaved tropical Asian plant)and yam evidently existed in Papua New Guinea in theMalay Archipelago. Communities probably farmed rootcrops early in many coastal communities in the tropics,although most traces of such communities would havebeen submerged as sea levels rose at the end of the lastice age. In Mesoamerica (the region of southern NorthAmerica that was occupied during pre-Columbian timesby peoples with shared cultural features) people probablydomesticated squash as early as 7000 BCE, but clearer evi-dence of systematic agriculture does not appear before5000 BCE; in the Andes region the earliest evidencecomes after about 3000 BCE. From these and perhaps afew other regions in which agriculture appeared quiteindependently, agricultural technologies and ways of lifeeventually spread to most of the world.

At present we lack a fully satisfactory explanation forthe origins of agriculture. Any explanation must accountfor the curious fact that, after 200,000 years or more dur-ing which all humans lived as foragers, agricultural life-ways appeared within just a few thousand years in partsof the world that had no significant contact with eachother. The realization that agriculture arose quite inde-pendently in different parts of the world has underminedthe once-fashionable view that agriculture was a brilliantinvention that diffused from a single center as soon aspeople understood its benefits.That view was also under-mined after researchers realized that foragers who knowabout agriculture have often preferred to remain for-agers. Perhaps foragers resisted change because thehealth and nutritional levels of the first farmers were oftenlower than those of neighboring foragers, whereas theirstress levels were often higher. If agriculture depressed liv-



Andean States p. 86 (v1)

China p. 332 (v1)

Egypt, Ancient p. 629 (v2)

Mesoamerica p. 1230 (v3)

Mesopotamia p. 1235 (v3)

ing standards, then an explanation of the origins of agri-culture must rely more on “push” than on “pull” factors.Rather than taking up agriculture willingly, we must as-sume that many early agriculturalists were forced to takeit up.

Affluent Foragers

The outlines of such an explanation are now available,even if many details remain to be tested in particularinstances. The origins of agriculture have been studiedmost thoroughly in Mesopotamia and in Mesoamerica.In both areas the first agricultural villages appeared aftermany centuries during which foragers intensified theirexploitation of particular favored resources, adaptingtheir tools and techniques with increasing precision andefficiency to local environments. This was the first steptowards agriculture. When taken far enough, such tech-niques can turn conventional foragers into what anthro-pologists call “affluent foragers.” Affluent foragers extractmore resources from a given area than traditional for-agers. Eventually they may extract enough resources tobecome semisedentary, living in one place for much of theyear. This development is particularly likely where preyresources such as fish or wild grains are unusually abun-dant.The appearance of such communities in many partsof the world toward the end of the last ice age tempts usto link such changes with the erratic global warming thatbegan sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand years ago.

In both temperate and tropical zones warmer climatesmay have created local “gardens of Eden”—regions ofexceptional abundance—where highly nutritious plantssuch as wild wheats that had once been scarce thrivedand spread. Indeed, intensive agriculture may have beenimpossible under the harsh conditions of the last ice age;if so, the end of the last ice age was a crucial enabling fea-ture, making agriculture possible for the first time in per-haps 100,000 years.


Carrying Capacity p. 297 (v1)


Indigenous Peoples p. 963 (v3)

In truth, the historian can never get away from the questionof time in history: time sticks to his thinking like soil to a

gardener’s spade. • FERNAND BRAUDEL (1902–1985)

The end of the last ice age also coincided with the finalstages of the great global migrations of the era of for-agers. As the anthropologist Mark Cohen has pointedout, by the end of the last ice age few parts of the worldwere unoccupied, and some parts of the world mayhave been overpopulated, at least by the standards of for-agers. Perhaps the coincidence of warmer, wetter, andmore productive climates with increasing populationpressure in some regions explains why, in several parts ofthe world beginning ten thousand to eleven thousandyears ago, some communities of foragers began to settledown.The classic example of this change comes from theNatufian communities of the fertile highlands aroundMesopotamia fourteen thousand to twelve thousandyears ago. Natufian communities were largely sedentarybut lived as foragers, harvesting wild grains and gazelle.Similar communities, harvesting wild sorghum, mayhave existed even earlier in modern Ethiopia, east of theNile River.

Full-Blown Agriculture

Eventually some sedentary or semisedentary foragersbecame agriculturalists.The best explanation for this sec-ond stage in the emergence of agriculture may be demo-graphic.As mentioned earlier, modern studies of nomadicforagers suggest that they can systematically limit popu-lation growth through prolonged breast feeding (whichinhibits ovulation) and other practices, including infanti-cide and senilicide (killing of the very young and the veryold, respectively). However, in sedentary communities inregions of ecological abundance such restraints were nolonger necessary and may have been relaxed. If so, thenwithin just two or three generations sedentary foragingcommunities that had lived in regions of abundance fora generation or two may have found that they were out-stripping available resources once again.

Overpopulation would have posed a clear choice:Migrate or intensify (produce more food from the samearea).Where land was scarce and neighboring communi-ties were also feeling the pinch, people may have had nochoice at all; sedentary foragers had to intensify. How-ever, even those foragers able to return to their traditional,

nomadic lifeways may have found that in just a few gen-erations they had lost access to the lands used by theirforaging ancestors and had also lost their traditional skillsas nomadic foragers. Those communities that chose tointensify had to apply already-existing skills to the task ofincreasing productivity. They already had much of theknowledge they needed:They knew how to weed, how towater plants, and how to tame prey species of animals.The stimulus to apply such knowledge more precisely andmore systematically was provided by overpopulation,whereas global warming made intensification feasible.

These arguments appear to explain the curious near-simultaneity of the transition to agriculture at the end ofthe last ice age. They also fit moderately well what isknown of the transition to agriculture in several regions,particularly temperate regions where agriculture wasbased primarily on grains. They also help explain why,even in regions where developed agriculture did notappear, such as Australia, many of the preliminary stepstoward agriculture do show up in the archaeologicalrecord, including the appearance of affluent, semiseden-tary foragers.

Seeds of Change

After agriculture had appeared in any one region, itspread, primarily because the populations of farmingcommunities grew much faster.Although agriculture mayhave seemed an unattractive option to many foragers,farming communities usually had more resources andmore people than foraging communities. When conflictoccurred, more resources and more people usually meantthat farming communities also had more power.Agricul-ture spread most easily in regions that bordered estab-lished agricultural zones and that had similar soils,climates, and ecologies. Where environmental condi-tions were different, the spread of agriculture had to await



Agricultural Societies p. 52 (v1)

Cereals p. 321 (v1)


Water Management p. 2036 (v5)

new techniques such as irrigation or new crops betteradapted to the regions of new settlement.

Such changes are apparent, for example, as agriculturespread from southwestern Asia into the cooler and usu-ally wetter environments of eastern, central, and northernEurope or as maize cultivation spread northward fromMesoamerica, a process that depended in part on subtlegenetic changes in local varieties of maize. Where newtechniques were not available, foragers survived muchlonger, and the spread of agriculture could be checked,sometimes for thousands of years, as it was at the edgeof the Eurasian steppes, which were not brought into cul-tivation until modern times. Usually agriculture spreadthrough a process of budding off as villages became over-populated and young families cleared and settled suitableland beyond the borders of their home villages.

General Characteristicsand Long TrendsAgricultural communities share important characteris-tics that give the agrarian era an underlying coherencedespite its extraordinary cultural diversity. These charac-teristics include societies based on villages, demographicdynamism, accelerated technological innovation, the pres-ence of epidemic disease, new forms of power and hier-archy, and enduring relations with nonagrarian peoples.

Village-Based Societies

At the base of all agrarian societies were villages, more orless stable communities of farming households.Althoughthe crops, the technologies, and the rituals of villagersvaried greatly from region to region, all such peasantcommunities were affected by the annual rhythms of har-vesting and sowing, the demands of storage, the need for


cooperation within and among households, and theneed to manage relations with outside communities.

Demographic Dynamism

The increased productivity of agriculture ensured thatpopulations grew much faster than they had during theera of foragers. Rapid population growth ensured that vil-lages and the technologies that sustained them wouldeventually spread to all regions in which agriculture wasviable. Modern estimates suggest that during the agrarianera world populations rose from 6 million ten thousandyears ago to 770 million in 1750.Although these figureshide enormous regional and chronological differences,they are equivalent to an average growth rate of approx-imately 0.05 percent per annum; on average, populationswere doubling every fourteen hundred years.This rate canbe compared with doubling times of eight thousand tonine thousand years during the era of foragers andapproximately eighty-five years during the modern era.


Agricultural Societies p. 52 (v1)

Carrying Capacity p. 297 (v1)

Disease and Nutrition p. 538 (v2)


Diseases, Animal p. 551 (v2)

Diseases, Plant p. 558 (v2)

Long Cycles p. 1160 (v3)

Matriarchy and Patriarchy p. 1218 (v3)


Secondary-Products Revolution p. 1680 (v4)

Water Management p. 2036 (v4)

This drawing shows what an ancient lake-dweller community in Denmark might havelooked like.

Accelerated Technological

Innovation

Local population pressure, expansion into new environ-ments, and increasing exchanges of ideas and goodsencouraged many subtle improvements in agriculturaltechniques. Most improvements arose from small changesin the handling of particular crops, such as earlier or laterplanting, or the selection of better strains. However, on abroader scale, increased productivity arose from wholeclusters of innovation that appeared in many environ-ments. Swidden agriculturalists cleared forest lands by fireand sowed crops in the ashy clearings left behind; after afew years, when the soil’s fertility was exhausted, theymoved on. In mountainous areas farmers learned how tocultivate hillsides by cutting steplike terraces.

Secondary-Products RevolutionOne of the most important of these clusters of innovationhad its primary impact only in the Afro-Eurasian worldzone:The archaeologist Andrew Sherratt has called it the“secondary-products revolution.” From about 4000 BCE aseries of innovations allowed farmers in Afro-Eurasia tomake more efficient use of the secondary products of largelivestock—those products that could be exploited withoutslaughtering the animals. Secondary products include fi-bers,milk,manure for fertilizer, and traction power to pullplows, carry people, and transport goods. In arid regions,such as the steppes of Eurasia, the deserts of southwesternAsia, or the savanna lands of east Africa, the secondary-products revolution generated the entirely new lifeway ofpastoralism as entire communities learned to live off theproducts of their herds. Unlike members of the farmingcommunities that were most typical of the agrarian era,pastoralists were usually nomadic because in the drygrasslands in which pastoralism flourished livestock hadto be moved constantly to provide them with enough feed.

However, the main impact of the secondary-productsrevolution was in farming areas, where horses, camels,and oxen could be used to pull heavy plows and to trans-port goods and humans. The domestication of llamasmeant that South America had some experience of thesecondary-products revolution, but its major impact was

felt in the Afro-Eurasian world zone because most poten-tial domesticates had been driven to extinction in theAmericas during the era of foragers. Many of the criticaldifferences between the histories of Afro-Eurasia and theAmericas may depend, ultimately, on this key technolog-ical difference.

Just Add WaterThe techniques of water management known collectivelyas “irrigation” had an even greater impact on agricultural


The “Secondary-Products” RevolutionAs illustrated by the excerpt below from the Uni-versity of Oxford website, the “secondary-products”revolution is a theory that continues to be tested onartifacts dating back more than 6,000 years.

The first [project] involves the participation ofProfessor Andrew Sherratt of the School ofArchaeology of the University of Oxford andcurator of the European prehistoric collections inthe Ashmolean Museum. It was he who sug-gested that the first domestic animals may havebeen used not for their “secondary products”(milk, wool, hair and traction), but for meat, andthat milking and the exploitation of other second-ary animal products became part of prehistoricfarming practices only around 4000 BCE. Thissocio-economic transition helped promote socialevolutionary changes such as the birth of pastoralnomadic communities, the emergence of theMediterranean farming economy and the rise ofcomplex State-level societies.

The Oxford Levantine Archaeology laboratoryhas provided pottery sherds from vessels found in Israel’s Negev desert dating from c. 4500–4000 BCE to test Sherratt’s “secondary-products-revolution” hypothesis by analysing residues forevidence of milk.The samples are currently beingtested in Professor Richard Evershed’s Biogeo-chemistry Research Centre at the University ofBristol.

Source: Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. (2004). Retrieved Septem-ber 8, 2004, from http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ochjs/levantine.html

productivity. Irrigation farmers diverted small streamsonto their fields, created new farm land by filling swampswith soil and refuse, or built systematic networks ofcanals and dams to serve entire regions. People practicedirrigation of some kind in Afro-Eurasia, in the Americas,and even in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. Its impactwas greatest in arid regions with fertile soils, such as thealluvial basins (regions whose soils were deposited byrunning water) of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the northern re-gions of the Indian subcontinent, northern China, and thelowlands of the Andean region. In these regions irrigationagriculture led to exceptionally rapid population growth.

As agriculture spread and became more productive, itsupported larger, denser, and more interconnected com-munities.Within these communities population pressureand increasing exchanges of information generated asteady trickle of innovations in building, warfare, recordkeeping, transportation and commerce, and science andthe arts. These innovations stimulated further demo-graphic growth in a powerful feedback cycle that explains

why change was so much more rapid during the agrarianera than during the era of foragers. Yet, innovation wasrarely fast enough to keep up with population growth.This lag explains why, on the scale of decades or evencenturies, all agrarian societies experienced cycles of ex-pansion and collapse that obscured the underlying trendtoward growth. These cycles underlay the more visiblepatterns of political rise and fall, commercial boom andbust, and cultural efflorescence (blooming) and decaythat have so fascinated historians. (Such patterns ofgrowth and decline can be described as “Malthusian cy-cles,” after Thomas Malthus, the nineteenth-century En-glish economist who argued that human populations willalways rise faster than the supply of food, leading to peri-ods of famine and sudden decline.)

Epidemic Diseases

Population growth could be slowed by epidemic diseasesas well as by low productivity. Foraging communitieswere largely free of epidemic diseases because they were


TerracingTerraced fields snaking up hillsides are spectacularsights and major tourist attraction in Southeast Asiannations such as the Philippines and Indonesia. Someof the terraces have been maintained for over 2000years.The following extract describing the types of ter-races built by the Ifugao ethnic group of the northernPhilippines indicates that terracing is more complexthan it appears from a distance.

Habal “swidden” (slope field, camote field, kaingin).Slopeland, cultivated and often contour-ridged (andespecially for sweet potatoes). Other highland dry-field crops (including taro, yams, manioc, corn, mil-let, mongo beans, and pigeon peas, but excluding riceexcept at elevations below 600–700 meters (2,000feet) above sea level) are also cultivated in smallstands or in moderately intercropped swiddens.Boundaries remain discrete during a normal cultiva-tion cycle of several years.When fallow, succession isusually to a canegrass association. . . .

lattan “house terrace” (settlement, hamlet terrace, res-idential site). Leveled terrace land, the surface of which

is packed smooth or paved but not tilled; serving pri-marily as house and granary yards, work space forgrain drying, and so forth; discrete, often fenced orwalled, and named. . . .

qilid “drained field” (drained terrace, ridged terrace).Leveled terrace land, the surface of which is tilled andditch mounded (usually in cross-contour fashion) forcultivation and drainage of dry crops, such as sweetpotatoes and legumes. Drained fields, though pri-vately owned, are kept in this temporary state for onlya minimum number of annual cycles before shifting(back) to a more permanent form of terrace use. . . .

payo “pond field” (bunded terrace, rice terrace, ricefield). Leveled farmland, bunded to retain irrigationwater for shallow inundation of artificial soil, andcarefully worked for the cultivation of wet-field rice,taro, and other crops; privately owned discrete unitswith permanent stone markers; the most valued of allland forms.

Source: Conklin, H. C. (1967–68). Some Aspects of Ethnographic Research in Ifugao.New York Academy of Sciences, Transactions, ser. 2, 30, 107–108.

small and mobile, but farming communities created morefavorable environments for pathogens (causative agentsof disease). Close contact with livestock allowed patho-gens to move from animals to humans, accumulations ofrubbish provided fertile breeding grounds for diseasesand pests, and large communities provided the abundantreserves of potential victims that epidemic diseases needto flourish and spread. Thus, as populations grew andexchanges between communities multiplied, diseasestraveled more freely from region to region.Their impacttook the form of a series of epidemiological decrescendosthat began with catastrophic epidemics and were fol-lowed by less disastrous outbreaks as immune systems inregion after region adapted to the new diseases.

As the historian William McNeill has shown, long-range epidemiological exchanges within the Afro-Eurasian world zone immunized the populations of thiszone against a wide range of diseases to which popula-tions in other world zones remained more vulnerable.Trans-Eurasian epidemiological exchanges may helpexplain the slow growth of much of Eurasia during thefirst millennium CE; they may also explain why, once theworld was united after 1500 CE, epidemiological ex-changes had a catastrophic impact on regions outsideAfro-Eurasia.

Hierarchies of Power

In many tropical regions people harvested root cropspiecemeal as they were needed. However, in regions ofgrain farming, such as southwestern Asia, China, andMesoamerica, plants ripened at the same time; thus,entire crops had to be harvested and stored in a shortperiod. For this reason grain agriculture required people,for the first time in history, to accumulate and store large

surpluses of food. As villages of grain farmers multipliedand their productivity rose, the size of stored surplusesgrew. Conflicts over control of these increasingly valuablesurpluses often triggered the emergence of new forms ofinequality and new systems of power.

Stored surpluses allowed communities for the firsttime to support large numbers of nonfarmers: specialistssuch as priests, potters, builders, soldiers, or artists whodid not farm but rather supported themselves by exchang-ing their products or services for foodstuffs and othergoods. As farmers and nonfarmers exchanged goodsand services, a complex division of labor appeared for thefirst time in human history. Specialization increased inter-dependence between households and communities andtightened the webs of obligation and dependence thatbound individuals and communities together. Eventuallysurpluses grew large enough to support elite groupswhose lives depended primarily on their ability to controland manage the resources produced by others, eitherthrough exchanges of goods and services or through thethreat of force. Human societies became multilayered assome groups began to specialize in the exploitation ofother men and women, who exploited farmers, whoexploited the natural environment.William McNeill hascalled these elite groups “macroparasites,” whereas theanthropologist EricWolf has called them “tribute takers.”

Relations with Nonagrarian

Communities

Finally, the agrarian era was characterized by complexrelations between agrarian communities and other typesof communities.Throughout this era pastoralists and for-agers living outside the main agricultural regions contin-ued to have a significant impact on agrarian communities


A selection of stone and bronzeimplements recovered fromagrarian era state-level centersin Mesoamerica. (1) axe; (2) bracelets; (3) arrow points; (4) stone axe; and (5) bronzeknife.

by mediating exchanges between agrarian regions andsometimes by introducing technologies (such as themany technologies associated with pastoralism, fromimproved saddles to improved weaponry) or by tradingvalued goods such as furs or ivory or feathers.

Agrarian Communitiesbefore Cities: 8000–3000 BCE

The early agrarian era is that time when agrarian commu-nities existed, but no large cities or states. In Afro-Eura-sia this time extended from about 8000 BCE until about3000 BCE, when the first cities emerged; in the Americasthis time began later and lasted longer, and in parts of theAustralasian and Pacific world zones it lasted until mod-ern times.

A World of Villages

During the early agrarian era villages were the largestcommunities on Earth and the most important sources ofdemographic and technological dynamism. In today’sworld, in which villages are marginal demographically,technically, culturally, and politically, we could all too eas-ily forget the crucial historical role that villages played formany millennia. During the early agrarian era most vil-lages practiced forms of agriculture that anthropologistsmight refer to as “horticulture” because they dependedmainly on the labor of humans (and particularly ofwomen, if modern analogies can be relied on), whereastheir main agricultural implements were digging sticks ofmany kinds. However, these communities also pioneeredimportant innovations such as irrigation and terracing,which eventually allowed the appearance of more popu-lous communities. Thus, villages accounted for much ofthe demographic and geographical expansion of theagrarian world through many thousands of years.

Emergence of Hierarchy

Within the villages of the early agrarian era men andwomen first encountered the revolutionary challengesposed by the emergence of larger, denser, and more hier-archical communities. As communities became larger,

people had to find new ways of defining their relation-ships with neighbors, determining who had access tostored resources, administering justice, and organizingwarfare, trade, and religious worship. As specializationspread, communities had to find ways of regulating ex-changes and conflicts between persons whose interestsand needs were increasingly diverse. The simple kinshiprules that had provided all the regulation necessary insmall foraging communities now had to be supplementedwith more elaborate rules regulating behavior betweenpeople whose contacts were more anonymous, morefleeting, and less personal. Projects involving entire com-munities, such as building temples, building canals, andwaging warfare, also required new types of leadership.

The archaeological evidence shows how these pres-sures, all linked to the growing size of human communi-ties, led to the creation of institutionalized political andeconomic hierarchies, with wealthy rulers, priests, andmerchants at one pole and propertyless slaves or vagrantsat the other pole. Archaeologists suspect the presence ofinstitutionalized hierarchies wherever burials or resi-dences begin to vary greatly in size within a community.Where children were buried with exceptional extrava-gance, we can be pretty sure that emerging hierarchieswere hereditary, so parents could pass their status on to


Red Sea

Black Sea

PersianGulf

CaspianSea

MediterraneanSea

Eu

Ep

uhrates R.

Zawi ChemiShanidar

HacilarCatalhoyuk

AbuHureyra

Cayonu

Hassan CemiTepesi

GanjDareh

AliKosh

Ain Ghazal

Netiv HagdudJericho

Merimda

WadiKubbaniya

NabtaPlaya

BirKiseiba

Jarmo

S A H A R A

Anatolia

MesopotamiaMesopotamiaMesopotamiaMesopotamiaMesopotamia

Nile R.

TiTiT ggi rir sR

.Cyprus

NileDelta

EARLY FARMINGCOMMUNITIES inSOUTHWEST ASIA

and EGYPT

N

0 400 mi

0 400 km

Berkshire PublishingAgrarian Eria3.375 in. x 4 in.

8.05.04

their children. Where monumental structures appeared,such as the statues on Easter Island in the Pacific Oceanor giant stone circles such as Stonehenge in Britain, wecan be certain that leaders existed with enough power toorganize and coordinate the labor of hundreds or thou-sands of persons.

Early Glass Ceiling

Gender hierarchies may have been among the earliestforms of institutionalized hierarchies. As members ofhouseholds established more complex relationships withoutsiders, they came under the influence of new rules,structures, and expectations. An emerging division oflabor also created new opportunities outside the house-hold and the village.Yet, in a world where the economicand social success of each household depended on bear-ing and rearing as many children as possible, women usu-ally had fewer opportunities to take on more specializedroles—some of which brought great wealth and power.The linguist and archaeologist Elizabeth Barber hasargued that this fact may explain why men were morelikely to occupy high-ranking positions in emerging hier-archies.Warfare may also have changed gender relationsas population growth intensified competition betweencommunities and as men began to monopolize theorganization of violence.

Whatever the cause, the disproportionate presence ofmen in external power structures reshaped relations andattitudes within the village and the household. Menbegan to claim a natural superiority based on their rolein emerging power structures outside the household,and women were increasingly defined by their role withinthe household and their relationships to men. Even themany women who earned money outside the householdusually did so in jobs associated with the tasks of thehousehold. Within the household the demands of peas-ant life ensured that men and women continued to workin partnership. At this intimate, domestic scale relation-ships owed as much to personal qualities as to gender.However, beyond the household the powerful web of cul-tural expectations and power relations now known as“patriarchy” emerged.

Leaders and Leadership

Hierarchies of power shaped many other relationships aslocal communities were drawn into wider networks ofexchange. In these larger networks traditional kinshipthinking no longer worked. Genealogies began to take onsemifictional forms that allowed entire communities toclaim descent from the same, often mythical ancestor.Such genealogies could generate new forms of hierarchyby ranking descent groups according to their exact rela-tionship to the founder. Where descendants of seniorlines claimed higher status, aristocracies began to appear.However, when people chose leaders, ability usuallycounted for as much as birth. Where high-born peoplelacked leadership skills, persons with more talent as con-ciliators, warriors, or mediators with the gods were cho-sen to support or replace them. Most simple forms ofleadership derived from the needs of the community;thus, they depended largely on popular consent.This con-sent made early power structures fragile because thepower of leaders could evaporate all too easily if theyfailed in the tasks for which they were chosen.

However, as communities expanded, the resourcesavailable to their leaders increased until leaders began toset aside a share of those resources to support specialistenforcers or rudimentary armies. In this way leaderswhose power originated in the collective needs of theirsubjects eventually acquired the ability to coerce at leastsome of those they ruled and to back up the collection ofresources and the control of labor with the threat of force.The details of such processes are largely hidden from us,although archaeological evidence and anthropologicalresearch can give us many hints of how some of theseprocesses played out in particular communities. Theseprocesses prepared the way for the more powerful polit-ical structures that we know as “states.” States appeared in


The agrarian era was marked by morepermanent settlements and accompanying

graveyards. This photo is of the remains of astone burial mound in Scotland.

greatly increased the need for specialist leaders. Rapidgrowth also multiplied the resources available to leaders.Thus, by and large the earliest cities appeared at about thesame time as the earliest states. Cities can be defined as“large communities with a complex internal division oflabor.” (In contrast, villages, and even some early towns,such as the town of Catalhuyuk in Turkey, which datesfrom 6000 BCE, normally consisted of roughly similarhouseholds, mostly engaged in agriculture, with limitedhierarchies of wealth and little specialization of labor.)States can be defined as “power structures that rest on sys-tematic and institutionalized coercion as well as on pop-ular consent.”

Cities and states appeared as part of a larger cluster ofsocial innovations, all of which were linked to the increas-ing scale and complexity of human societies in regions ofhighly productive agriculture.These innovations includedthe organization of specialized groups of officials and sol-diers, writing, coercive forms of taxation, and monumen-tal architecture.

Afro-Eurasia and the Americas

Because such an intimate connection existed betweenagricultural intensification and the appearance of citiesand states, we should not be surprised that the earliestevidence for cities and states comes from regions withancient agricultural traditions.The earliest clear evidencefor communities large enough to be called “cities” andpowerful enough to be called “states” comes from theancient corridor from Sudan to Mesopotamia that linksAfrica and Eurasia. Some of the earliest states appeared


parallel with the large, sedentary communities we knowas “cities.”

The Earliest Cities andStates: 3000 BCE–500 BCE

For those people who define history as “the study of thepast through written records,” the period from 3000 BCE

to 500 BCE was when history truly began because thiswas when the first written documents appeared in thetwo largest world zones: Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.From the perspective of world history this period markeda new stage in the complexity and size of human commu-nities. In Afro-Eurasia, the largest and most populous ofall world zones, the first cities and states appeared about3000 BCE. In the Americas they appeared more than twothousand years later, in Mesoamerica and Peru. In theAustralasian zone neither cities nor states appeared dur-ing the agrarian era; but in the Pacific zone embryonicstates emerged on islands such as Tonga or Hawaiiwithin the last thousand years.

If a single process accounts for the emergence of thefirst cities and states, it is increasing population density.The earliest cities and states appeared where people weremost closely packed together, often because of the rapidexpansion of irrigation agriculture. Sudden increases inpopulation density intensified all the problems of coordi-nation and control posed by large communities and



Babylon p. 229 (v1)

China p. 332 (v1)

Egypt, Ancient p. 629 (v2)

Harappan State and Indus Civilization p. 889 (v3)


Mesopotamia p. 1235 (v3)

Pacific, Settlement of p. 1406 (v4)

Sumerian Society p. 1796 (v4)

Trading Patterns, Ancient American p. 1848 (v5)

Trading Patterns, Ancient European p. 1852 (v5)

Trading Patterns, Mesoamerican p. 1874 (v5)

Writing Systems and Materials p. 2095 (v5)

A carving of Kaban-Puuc,the ancient Mayan god of

maize (corn) and rain.

during the centuries before 3000 BCE in southernMesopotamia in the region known to archaeologists as“Sumer” and also along the Nile River in modern Egyptand Sudan. During the next thousand years evidence ofcities and states appeared also in the Indus River valleyin modern Pakistan and in northern China.

In the Americas we can trace a similar pattern of evo-lution from villages toward cities and states, but the ear-liest evidence for both changes came much later.Althoughlarge communities and powerful leaders existed in Meso-america in the lands of the Olmecs (in Mexico’s southerngulf coast) by the second millennium BCE, most archaeol-ogists would argue that the first true cities and states in theAmericas appeared late during the first millennium BCE,in regions such as the OaxacaValley or farther south in theheartland of Mayan civilization. In the Andes, too, state-like communities, such as the Moche culture, appeared atthe end of the first millennium BCE.

Agrarian Civilizations

From these and other core areas the traditions of earlystatehood spread to adjacent regions as populationsexpanded and networks of material and culturalexchanges knit larger regions together, generating greater

concentrations of wealth and power. As they spread,states carried with them a core set of institutions andpractices associated with what are often called “agrariancivilizations.” Directly or indirectly, the spread of agrariancivilizations reflected the increasing scale and density ofhuman populations. Cities were simply the most concen-trated and largest of all human communities. States werethe large, coercive power structures that were necessary toadminister and defend city-scale communities, and theywere funded by the large concentrations of wealth foundin cities and their hinterlands.

Collecting that wealth by force often began with crudeforms of looting that eventually turned into the more for-malized looting that we call “taxation.” Managing largestores of wealth required new forms of administrationand new forms of accounting; indeed, in all emergingstates writing apparently emerged first as a technique tokeep track of large stores of wealth and resources. Evenin the Inca state, where no fully developed system of writ-ing emerged, rulers used a system of accounting based onintricately knotted strings (quipu).

Defending large concentrations of wealth and main-taining order within and between cities and city-states(autonomous states consisting of a city and surrounding


Documenting a Neolithic Settlement in the Electronic AgeSince 1993, an international team of archaeologistshas been excavating the ancient city of Catalhoyuk inpresent-day Turkey, resuming an effort first begun inthe 1960s. In an effort to bring alive the 9,000-year-old artifacts being found at the Catalhoyuk “dig,” teammember Rebecca Daly maintains a weblog (blog) onthe excavation website. Below is her entry for 28 July2004.

Bleda is beginning the burial that was next to thesheep today, which thrills both of us, because we bothsuspect that there is some incredible stuff in that bur-ial. There are a lot of burials coming out now, thehuman remains lab are tearing their hair out trying toget everything done. Just when they think they’regoing to catch up, more things appear! Sure enough,Bleda has come up with an interesting bird bonething that both he and Lori, who’s from the human

remains lab doing the burial, think is a flute. It’s cer-tainly the right shape, and it has had both of the endsknocked off which suggests they wanted to use theinside for something. I have high hopes, Bleda seemsto attract the interesting objects. It would be reallyamazing if this is actually a flute of some sort, itwould be the earliest musical instrument. The burialwas sprinkled with ochre both under and over it,which suggests that it was a really important part ofthe burial process in this case. This was obviously avery significant burial anyway, what with the wholelamb, but this makes it even more so—there is somesuggestion of the order in which the burial activitiestook place.

Source: Mysteries of Catalhoyuk. (2004). Retrieved September 8, 2004, from http://ltc.smm.org/catal/updates/

territory) required the creation of armies. In Sumer andelsewhere invading armies possibly established the firststates, and certainly all early states engaged enthusiasti-cally in warfare. The rulers of the earliest states alsoengaged in symbolic activities that were equally vital tothe maintenance of their power.They organized extrava-gant displays of wealth, often involving human sacrifices,and built palaces, temples, and monuments to the dead,often in the form of pyramids or ziggurats (temple tow-ers consisting of a lofty pyramidal structure built in suc-cessive stages with outside staircases and a shrine at thetop).These elaborate structures were designed to raise theprestige of local rulers and of the cities they ruled and thegods they worshiped.

Imperial States

Through time the scale of state systems expanded as city-states traded with and sometimes absorbed other city-states. Eventually imperial systems emerged in which asingle ruler controlled a large region of many cities andtowns. Sargon of Akkad (reigned c. 2334–2279 BCE) mayhave established the first imperial state, in Mesopotamia,north of Sumer. By the middle of the second millenniumBCE the Shang dynasty (approximately 1766–1045 BCE)had created an imperial state in northern China.Throughtime such states became more common. As states ex-panded, they taxed and administered larger areas, eitherdirectly or indirectly through local rulers. Improvements

in transportation and communications, such as theappearance of wheeled vehicles in Afro-Eurasia during thesecond millennium BCE, extended the reach of states, theirofficials, and their armies.

However, their influence reached much further thantheir power, as traders bridged the gaps between states,creating large networks of commercial and culturalexchange. Indeed, some experts have claimed that asearly as 2000 BCE exchanges along the Silk Roads con-necting China and the Mediterranean had already createda single, Eurasiawide system of exchanges.

As impressive as these large and powerful communitieswere, we should remember the limits of their power andinfluence. Few agrarian states took much interest in thelives of their citizens as long as they paid taxes. Maintain-ing law and order outside of the major cities was usuallyleft to local power brokers of various kinds. Huge regionsalso lay beyond the direct control of imperial rulers.Thescholar Rein Taagepera has estimated that early duringthe first millennium BCE states still controlled no morethan about 2 percent of the area controlled by statestoday. Beyond this tiny area, which probably includedmost of the world’s population, smaller communities offoragers, independent farmers, and pastoralists existed.

Although agrarian civilizations usually regarded theseoutside communities as barbarians, they could play a cru-cial role in providing sources of innovation and in link-ing agrarian civilizations. For example, steppe pastoralistsin Eurasia transported religious ideas, metallurgical tradi-tions, and even goods between China, India, and theMediterranean world, and they may also have pioneeredsome of the military and transportation technologies ofagrarian civilizations, such as the wheeled chariot. Themost innovative naval technologies of this period werefound in the western Pacific, where peoples of the Lapitaculture, using huge double-hulled canoes, settled a vastarea from New Guinea to Fiji and Tonga between 3000and 1000 BCE.

Long-term growth in the number, size, and power ofcities and states reflected not only innovations in state-craft and warfare, but also the sustained demographic


This drawing shows four progressively moreintricate European bronze implements: (1) a hand axe with wooden handle; (2) decorated hair pin; (3) razor knife blade; and (4) curved knife blade.

buoyancy of the entire agrarian era. Our figures are toovague to allow much precision, but clearly, at least in thelong trend, populations grew faster in areas of agriculturethan elsewhere. However, they probably did not growmuch faster than during the early agrarian era. Particu-larly in the cities, with their appalling sanitary conditions,bad air, and filthy water, death rates were extraordinarilyhigh. Although cities offered more opportunities, theyalso killed people far more effectively than the villages.Population growth was also slowed by periodic demo-graphic collapses. The spread of diseases into regionswhose populations lacked immunities may have causedsome of these collapses; overexploitation of the land,which could undermine the productive basis of entire civ-ilizations, may have caused others. In southern Mesopo-tamia toward the end of the second millennia, popula-tions fell sharply, probably as a result of overirrigation,which created soils too salty to be farmed productively.Archaeologists can trace the progress of salinization lateduring the second millennium through the increasing useof barley, a more salt-tolerant grain than wheat.

Agriculture, Cities, andEmpires: 500 BCE–1000 CE

Most of the long trends that began after 3000 BCE con-tinued during the period from 500 BCE to 1000 CE.Global populations rose (although they did so slowlyduring the middle of this period), the power, size, andnumber of states increased, and so did the extent ofexchange networks. As agriculture spread, cities andstates appeared in once-peripheral regions in northwest-ern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, southern India, andsouthern China. Increasingly, agrarian civilizationsencroached on regions inhabited by foragers, independ-ent peasants, and pastoralists. Similar processes occurredin the Americas but with a time lag of approximately twothousand years.

Afro-Eurasia

The Achaemenid empire, created in Persia (modern Iran)during the sixth century BCE, marked a significant en-hancement in state power because the empire controlled

a region five times as large as the greatest of its predeces-sors. During the next fifteen hundred years empires onthis scale became the norm. They included the Handynasty in China (206 BCE–220 CE), the Roman empirein the Mediterranean (27 BCE–476 CE), and the Mauryanempire (c. 324–c. 200 BCE) in India.The Muslim Abbasidempire, which ruled much of Persia and Mesopotamiafrom 749/750 to 1258, controlled a slightly larger areathan its Achaemenid predecessors. Contacts also flour-ished between imperial states. During the sixth centuryBCE Cyrus I, the founder of the Achaemenid empire,invaded parts of modern central Asia.When the Chineseemperor, Han Wudi, invaded the same region three cen-turies later, the separate agrarian civilizations of theMediterranean world and eastern Asia came into closer




Assyrian Empire p. 200 (v1)

Buddhism p. 267 (v1)

Byzantine Empire p. 278 (v1)

Catholicism, Roman p. 310 (v1)

China p. 332 (v1)

Confucianism p. 426 (v1)

Greece, Ancient p. 858 (v3)

Hinduism p. 902 (v3)

Islam p. 1024 (v3)

Judaism p. 1058 (v3)

Manichaeism p. 1179 (v3)


Mississippian Culture p. 1283 (v3)

Persian Empire p. 1462 (v4)

Roman Empire p. 1624 (v4)

State,The p. 1776 (v4)

Steppe Confederations p. 1782 (v4)

Trading Patterns, China Seas p. 1855 (v5)

Trading Patterns, Indian Ocean p. 1864 (v5)

Trading Patterns, Mediterranean p. 1870 (v5)

Trading Patterns, Pacific p. 1879 (v5)

Trading Patterns,Trans-Saharan p. 1883 (v5)

Turkic Empire p. 1905 (v5)

Zoroastrianism p. 2120 (v5)

contact than ever before, binding the whole of Eurasiainto the largest system of exchange on Earth.

The increased reach of political, commercial, and intel-lectual exchange networks may explain another impor-tant development during this era: the emergence ofreligious traditions that also extended over huge areas—the first world religions. Whereas earlier religious tradi-tions usually claimed the allegiance of particular commu-nities or regions, world religions claimed to expressuniversal truths and to represent universal gods—reflec-tions, perhaps, of the increasing scale of imperial states.

The first world religion was probably Zoroastrianism,a religion whose founder may have come from centralAsia during the sixth century BCE, at about the time whenCyrus I founded the Achaemenid empire. Buddhism wasfounded soon after in northern India during a period ofrapid urbanization and state expansion. Its great periodof expansion came early during the first millennium CE,when it began to spread in central Asia, China, andsoutheastern Asia.The influence of Christianity expandedwithin the Roman empire until, during the fourth centuryCE, it became the official religion of the state. Both Bud-dhism and Christianity spread into central Asia andeventually reached China, although of the two only Bud-dhism made a significant impact on Chinese civilization.

Even more successful was Islam, founded in southwest-ern Asia during the seventh century. Islam spread intonorth Africa, central Asia, India, and southeastern Asia,carried first by armies of conquest and later by the Mus-lim missionaries and holy men known as “sufis.”

The same forces that gave rise to the first world reli-gions may also have spurred some of the first attempts atuniversal generalizations about reality in embryonicforms of philosophy and science. Although normallyassociated with the philosophical and scientific traditionsof classical Greece, such ideas can also be found withinthe astronomical and mathematical traditions ofMesopotamia and the philosophical traditions of north-ern India and China.

The Americas

In the Americas, too, political systems expanded in size,in military power, and in cultural and commercial reach.During the first millennium CE complex systems of city-states and early empires emerged in Mesoamerica. At itsheight the great city of Teotihuacan in Mexico had a pop-ulation of more than 100,000 people and controlledtrade networks reaching across much of Mesoamerica.However, we cannot be certain that it had direct controlof any other cities or states. Farther south, Mayan civiliza-


P a c i f i c O c e a n A t l a n t i cO c e a n

I n d i a nO c e a n

A S I A

AUSTRALIA

MESO-AMERICA

SOUTHAMERICA

NORTHAMERICA

EUROPE

A F R I C A

Arctic Circle

Equator

N

Direction of spread0 3,000 mi

0 3,000 km

DISTRIBUTION ofAGRICULTURE by 500 BCE

Berkshire PublishingAgrarian Era7 in. x 4 in.

8.02.04

tion consisted of a large number of regional states, someof which may have established at least temporary controlover their neighbors. Both these powerful systems col-lapsed, however, during the second half of the first mil-lennium CE. As in southern Mesopotamia early duringthe second millennium BCE, the collapse may have beencaused by overexploitation of the land.

However, just as the political traditions of Sumer wereeventually taken up in Babylon and Assyria, so, too, inMesoamerica the political traditions of Teotihuacan andthe Maya provided the cultural foundations for evenmore powerful states during the next period of the agrar-ian era. In the Andes, too, cities and states began to ap-pear; the first may have been the Moche state of northernPeru, which flourished for almost eight hundred yearsduring the first millennium CE. Like Teotihuacan, theMoche kingdom influenced a large area, although wecannot be certain how much direct political power it hadover other cities and states. During the later half of thefirst millennium statelike powers also emerged farthersouth in the lands near Lake Titicaca in South America.

Expansion in Other Areas

Populations also grew beyond the zone of agrarian civi-lization, generating new forms of hierarchy. In the thinlypopulated steppe zones of Eurasia, pastoral nomads be-gan to form large, mobile confederations that raided andtaxed neighboring agricultural zones. In Mongolia in cen-tral Asia the Xiongnu people created spectacular empiresduring the second century BCE, as did the founders of thefirst Turkic empire during the sixth century CE. At itsheight the first Turkic empire reached from Mongolia tothe Black Sea. In the Pacific zone migrants from theislands near Fiji began to settle the islands of Polynesia,scattered through the central and eastern Pacific. Hawaiiand remote Easter Island may have been settled by 600CE, but New Zealand seems to have been the last part ofPolynesia to be settled, some time after 1000. Polynesiawas settled by farming peoples, and in some regions,including Tonga and Hawaii, population growth createdthe preconditions for significant power hierarchies.

Finally, significant changes occurred even in regions

where agriculture had still made few inroads. In NorthAmerica the slow northward spread of maize cultivationled to the establishment of numerous agricultural orsemiagricultural communities, such as those known as the“Anasazi” (on the Colorado Plateau at the intersection ofpresent-day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah).In the eastern parts of North America, too, farming com-munities emerged in regions such as the Ohio River val-ley, where they cultivated local plants such as sunflowers.Even in Australia foraging communities intensified pro-duction and settled in denser communities, particularlyalong the coasts.

Agricultural Societies on the Eve of the ModernRevolution: 1000–1750During the last period of the agrarian era, from 1000 to1750, earlier trends continued, but fundamental changesalso prefigured the modern era.

Agriculture spread into previously marginal regionssuch as North America, southern Africa, and westernChina. Often migrant farmers settled new lands with the


A sixteenth-century Native Americanagricultural village as depicted by early

English settlers in Virginia.

active support of metropolitan merchants or govern-ments. World populations continued to grow, despitesharp declines in much of Eurasia after the Black Death(bubonic plague) of the fourteenth century and in theAmericas during the sixteenth century after the arrival ofAfro-Eurasian diseases such as smallpox. The sixteenth-century economic and demographic collapse in the Amer-icas was offset in the long run by the arrival of immi-grants, livestock, and new crops from Eurasia and thesubsequent expansion of land under cultivation. In agri-culture, weaponry, transportation (particularly seabornetransportation), and industry, a steady trickle of innova-tions sustained growth by gently raising average produc-tivity and enhancing state power. The economist AngusMaddison has estimated that global gross domestic prod-uct (GDP, the total production of goods and services)

rose from approximately $120 billion (in 1990 interna-tional dollars) in 1000 to almost $700 billion in 1820.

Creation of Global Networks

The most important change during this era was the uni-fication of the major world zones during the sixteenthcentury.This unification created the first global networksof exchanges.The linking of regions that previously hadno contact for many thousands of years generated a com-mercial and intellectual synergy that was to play a criti-cal role in the emergence of the modern world.

In Afro-Eurasia the most striking feature of the earlypart of the last millennium was the increasing scale andintensity of international contacts. Viking raiders andtraders traveled in central Asia, in the Mediterranean,along the coast of western Europe, even in distant Icelandand Greenland, and in 1000 they even created a short-lived colony in Newfoundland, Canada.The astonishingconquests of the Mongols early during the thirteenth cen-tury created a huge zone of relative peace extending fromManchuria to the Mediterranean, and, with Mongol pro-tection, the trade routes of the Silk Roads flourished dur-ing the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Searoutes were equally active, and exchanges of goods by seafrom the Mediterranean through southern and southeast-ern Asia to China became routine. Briefly during the earlyfifteenth century Chinese fleets made a series of expedi-tions to the West, some of which took them to Arabia insouthwestern Asia and east Africa.

Control of the Eurasian heartlands of Persia and cen-tral Asia—first by the Muslim empire of the Abbasids lateduring the first millennium and then by the Mongols—encouraged the exchange of technologies, goods, and reli-gious and cultural traditions throughout Eurasia. In theAmericas the first imperial states appeared.The most suc-cessful and best known were those of the Aztecs, based atTenochtitlan in Mexico, and of the Incas, based at Cuzcoin Peru. These were the first American polities (politicalorganizations) to exert direct political and military controlover very large areas.

However, the small, highly commercialized states ofwestern Europe, not imperial states, eventually linked the



Aztec Empire p. 221 (v1)

Biological Exchanges p. 249 (v1)

China p. 332 (v1)

Columbian Exchange p. 386 (v1)

Crusades,The p. 453 (v1)


Diseases, Animal p. 551 (v2)

Economic Growth, Extensive and Intensive p. 610 (v2)

Expansion, European p. 700 (v2)

Exploration, Chinese p. 712 (v2)

Firearms p. 750 (v2)

Inca Empire p. 958 (v3)

Islamic World p. 1036 (v3)

Labor Systems, Coercive p. 1094 (v3)

Maritime History p. 1188 (v3)

Mongol Empire p. 1295 (v3)

Navigation p. 1363 (v4)

Ottoman Empire p. 1401 (v4)


Slave Trades p. 1717 (v4)


Trading Patterns, Mesoamerican p. 1874 (v5)

Viking Society p. 1936 (v5)

War and Peace—Overview p. 1943 (v5)

The perfect knowledge of history is extremely necessary; because, as it informsus of what was done by other people, in former ages, it instructs us what to

do in the like cases. Besides, as it is the common subject of conversation, it is a shame to be ignorant of it. • LORD CHESTERFIELD (1694–1773)


A display of burial goods recovered from the burial mounds of agrarian erafarmers in southeastern Missouri.

separate world zones of the agrarian era.The first signif-icant states had emerged in western Europe during thefirst millennium CE as the region had been absorbedwithin the commercial and cultural hinterland of theRoman empire. Early during the ninth century the firstholy Roman emperor, Charlemagne, tried to create arevived Roman empire from a base on the borderbetween modern France and Germany. His failure helpsexplain why Europe emerged as a region of competingmedium-sized states. Because such states had a more lim-ited tax base than great imperial powers such as theAbbasid empire or China’s Tang (618–907 CE) empire,they had to seek alternative sources of revenue, includingrevenues from trade, to survive the vicious warfare thatbecame the norm in this region.

Not surprisingly, a tradition of predatory, militaristictrading states emerged, epitomized by the Vikings.Blocked in the eastern Mediterranean, European powerssought new ways of cutting into the great markets ofsouthern and eastern Asia, and this search, backed aggres-sively by European governments, eventually encouragedEuropean merchants, led by the Portuguese, to circle theglobe. This search also encouraged the technologicalinnovations needed to create ships capable of navigatingthe world. The wealth that European states secured asthey cut in on the profits of the great trading systems ofsoutheastern Asia and the even more spectacular gainsthey made by conquering the great civilizations of Cen-tral and South America repaid the initial investment ofmoney and resources many times over.

Impact of Global Networks

The Americas and Europe were the first regions to betransformed by the new global system of exchanges. Ineastern Eurasia the incursions of Europeans had a limitedimpact for a century or more. Portuguese and Spanishships, followed a century later by Dutch and Englishships, seized important trading ports and began to cut inon local trade, particularly in spices. However, they hadlittle impact on the major polities of the region. In theAmericas European weaponry, the breakdown of tradi-tional political and economic structures, and, perhaps

most important of all, the impact of Eurasian pathogenssuch as smallpox crippled the Aztec and Inca empires andsecured for the Spanish government an astonishing wind-fall of trade goods and precious metals that funded thefirst empire to straddle the Atlantic Ocean. European dis-eases were particularly destructive in the Americas be-cause most natives lacked immunity to the diseases thathad spread through Afro-Eurasia through many cen-turies. Estimates of the population decline during the six-teenth century in the most densely populated regions ofthe Americas range from 50 percent to almost 90 percent.

Control of global trade networks brought Europeanstates great commercial wealth,but it also brought an influxof new information about geography, the natural world,and the customs of other societies.The torrent of new infor-mation available to European intellectuals may have playeda critical role in undermining traditional certainties and cre-ating the skeptical, experimental cast of mind that we asso-ciate with the so-called scientific revolution.

However, no region on Earth was entirely unaffectedby the creation of the first global system of exchanges.The exchange of goods between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia stimulated population growth throughout Afro-Eurasia as crops such as maize, cassava, and potatoesspread to China, Europe, and Africa, where they supple-mented existing crops or allowed people to cultivatelands unsuitable for other crops. The abundant silver ofthe Americas gave a huge boost to international trade,particularly after Chinese governments began to demandthe payment of taxes in silver from the 1570s, pullingmore and more silver toward what was still the largestsingle economy in the world. New drugs such as tobaccoand coca became available for the first time to Afro-Eurasian consumers, whereas older drugs, such as coffee,circulated more widely, stimulating consumer demand incities from Istanbul to Mexico City.

Perhaps most important of all, the position of Europewithin global networks of exchange was transformed.Aslong as the world was divided into separate zones,Europe could be little more than a marginal borderlandof Afro-Eurasia. The hub of Eurasian networks of ex-change lay in the Islamic heartland of Persia and Meso-


potamia. In the integrated world system that emergedduring the sixteenth century, European states found them-selves at the hub of the largest and most vigorousexchange networks that had ever existed.The huge flowsof wealth and information that coursed through thesenetworks would transform the role and significance ofEurope and the Atlantic region in world history, andeventually they would transform the entire world.

Agrarian Era in World HistoryThe introduction of agricultural technologies raised pro-ductivity, increased populations, and stimulated innova-tion. These developments explain why change was somuch more rapid during the agrarian era than during theera of foragers. Larger, denser communities created newproblems that were solved by forming the large, hierar-chical structures that we call “states,” “empires,” and “civ-ilizations.” Within these structures the very nature ofhuman communities was transformed as families andhouseholds found themselves incorporated in, and disci-plined by states, religions, and market forces. Theexchange of technologies and goods between largerregions and larger populations stimulated many smallimprovements in agrarian techniques, communicationstechnologies, and the technologies of information storageand warfare. However, although innovation was muchfaster than it had been during the era of foragers, it wasrarely fast enough to keep pace with population growth,which is why, on the smaller scales that meant most torulers and their subjects, the characteristic rhythm ofchange during the agrarian era was cyclical.

The modern world built on the slow accumulation ofpeople, resources, and information that took place dur-ing the agrarian era, but it was marked out from this eraby another sharp acceleration in rates of innovation thatwould lead to one more fundamental transformation inhuman lifeways.

Further ReadingBarber, E.W. (1994). Women’s work:The first 20,000 years:Women, cloth

and society in early times. New York: W.W. Norton.


Bentley, J. H., & Ziegler, H. F. (1999). Traditions and encounters:A globalperspective on the past. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Bulliet, R., Crossley, P. K., Headrick, D. R., Hirsch, S.W., Johnson, L. L.,& Northrup, D. (2001). The Earth and its peoples: A global history(2nd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Burenhult, G. (Ed.). (1993–1995). The illustrated history of mankind(Vols. 3–4). St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press.


Cohen, M. (1977). The food crisis in prehistory. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Cohen, M. (1989). Health and the rise of civilization. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel:The fates of human societies.London: Vintage.

Ehret, C. (2002). The civilizations of Africa: A history to 1800. Char-lottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Fagan, B. M. (2001). People of the Earth:An introduction to world prehis-tory (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Heiser, C. B. (1990). Seed to civilization: The story of food. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

Ladurie, E. L. (1974). The peasants of Languedoc (J. Day,Trans.). Urbana:University of Illinois Press.

Livi-Bacci, M. (1992). A concise history of world population. Oxford, UK:Blackwell.

Maddison, A. (2001). The world economy: A millenial perspective. Paris:OECD.

McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web: A bird’s-eyeview of world history. New York: W.W. Norton.

McNeill,W. H. (1977). Plagues and people. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.McNeill,W. H. (1982). The pursuit of power:Technology, armed force and

society since A.D. 1000. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Mears, J. (2001). Agricultural origins in global perspective. In M. Adas

(Ed.), Agricultural and pastoral societies in ancient and classical his-tory (pp. 36–70). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Piperno, D. R., & Pearsall, D. M. (1998). The origins of agriculture in thelowland neotropics. London: Academic Press.

Richerson, P. T., & Boyd, R. (2004). Not by genes alone: How culturetransformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sherratt, A. (1981). Plough and pastoralism: Aspects of the secondaryproducts revolution. In I. Hodder, G. Isaac, & N. Hammond (Eds.),Patterns of the past (pp. 261–305). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Sherratt, A. (1997). The secondary exploitation of animals in the OldWorld. World Archaeology, 15(1), 90–104.

Smith, B. D. (1995). The emergence of agriculture. New York: ScientificAmerican Library.

Taagepera, R. (1978). Size and duration of empires: Growth-declinecurves, 3000 to 600 BC. Social Science Research, 7, 180–196.

Taagepera, R. (1978). Size and duration of empires: Systematics of size.Social Science Research, 7, 108–127.

Taagepera, R. (1979). Size and duration of empires: Growth-declinecurves, 600 BC to 600 AD. Social Science Research, 3, 115–138.

Taagepera, R. (1997). Expansion and contraction patterns of large poli-ties: Context for Russia. International Studies Quarterly, 41(3), 475–504.

Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press.

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought aboutby rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. • Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)

The modern era is the briefest and most turbulent ofthe three main eras of human history. Whereas the

era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and theagrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era haslasted just 250 years.Yet, during this brief era change hasbeen more rapid and more fundamental than ever before;indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percentof all humans may have lived during these two and a halfcenturies.The modern era is also the most interconnectedof the three eras. Whereas new ideas and technologiesonce took thousands of years to circle the globe, todaypeople from different continents can converse as easily asif they lived in a single global village. History has becomeworld history in the most literal sense.

For our purposes the modern era is assumed to beginabout 1750.Yet, its roots lay deep in the agrarian era, andwe could make a good case for a starting date of 1500

or even earlier. Determining the end date of the modernera is even trickier. Some scholars have argued that itended during the twentieth century and that we now livein a postmodern era.Yet, many features of the modern erapersist today and will persist for some time into thefuture; thus, it makes more sense to see our contemporaryperiod as part of the modern era.This fact means that wedo not know when the modern era will end, nor can wesee its overall shape as clearly as we might wish.

The fact that we cannot see the modern era as awhole makes it difficult to specify its main features, andjustifies using the deliberately vague label “modern.” Atpresent the diagnostic feature of the modern era seems tobe a sharp increase in rates of innovation. New technolo-gies enhanced human control over natural resources andstimulated rapid population growth. In their turn, tech-nological and demographic changes transformed life-

Our World:The Modern

Era


= 10 billion humans

250,000 bce 200,000 bce


Mod

ern

hum

ans

spre

ad a

cros

s A

fric

a

ways, cultural and religious traditions, patterns of healthand aging, and social and political relationships.

For world historians the modern era poses distinctivechallenges. We are too close to see it clearly and objec-tively; we have so much information that we have diffi-culty distinguishing trends from details; and change hasoccurred faster than ever before and embraced all partsof the world.What follows is one attempt to construct acoherent overview, based on generalizations that haveachieved broad acceptance among world historians.

Major Features and Trendsof the Modern EraThe modern era is the first to have generated a large bodyof statistical evidence; thus, it is also the first in which wecan quantify many of the larger changes.

Increases in Population

and Productivity

Human populations have increased faster than everbefore during the modern era, although growth ratesslowed during the late twentieth century. Between 1750and 2000 the number of men and women in the worldrose from approximately 770 million to almost 6 bil-lion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years.This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time

of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with esti-mated doubling times of fourteen hundred years duringthe agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousandyears during the era of foragers.) An eightfold increasein human numbers was possible only because produc-tivity rose even faster. The estimates of the economistAngus Maddison suggest that global gross domesticproduct rose more than ninetyfold during three hun-dred years, whereas production per person rose nine-fold.

These astonishing increases in productivity lie behind

this fleeting world / our world: the modern era tfw-37

Key Features and Trends of the Modern EraRapid Population Growth

Technological Innovation

Large Increase in Productivity

Harnessing of Fossil and other Forms of Energy

Large Communities

Bureaucracy

Nationalism

Longer Life Expectancy

Broader Role for Women

Commercialization

Global Networks

Destruction of Foraging and Agrarian Lifeways

100,000 bce 40,000 bce12,000 bce

10,000 bce 0 1750 ce



Mod

ern

hum

ans

in E

uras

ia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

ustr

alia

Mod

ern

hum

ans

in A

mer

icas

all the most significant changes of the modern era.Productivity rose in part because new technologies wereintroduced. In agriculture, for example, food productionkept pace with population growth because of improvedcrop rotations, increased use of irrigation, widespreadapplication of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and theuse of genetically modified crops. However, productivityalso rose because humans learned to exploit new sourcesof energy. During the agrarian era each human con-trolled, on average, 12,000 kilocalories a day (about fourtimes the energy needed to sustain a human body), andthe most powerful prime movers available were domes-tic animals or wind-driven ships. During the modern erahumans have learned to harvest the huge reserves ofenergy stored in fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and naturalgas and even to exploit the power lurking within atomicnuclei.Today each person controls, on average, 230,000kilocalories a day—twenty times as much as during theagrarian era. A world of planes, rockets, and nuclearpower has replaced a world of horses, oxen, and woodfires.

City Sprawl

As populations have increased, so has the average size ofhuman communities. In 1500 about fifty cities had morethan 100,000 inhabitants, and none had more than amillion. By 2000 several thousand cities had more than100,000 inhabitants, about 411 had more than a mil-lion, and 41 had more than 5 million. During the agrar-ian era most people lived and worked in villages; by theend of the twentieth century almost 50 percent of theworld’s population lived in communities of at least fivethousand people.The rapid decline of villages marked afundamental transformation in the lives of most peopleon Earth. As during the agrarian era, the increasing sizeof communities transformed lifeways, beginning with pat-terns of employment: Whereas most people during theagrarian world were small farmers, today most peoplesupport themselves by wage work in a huge variety ofoccupations.

Innovations in transportation and communicationshave transformed relations between communities andregions. Before the nineteenth century no one traveledfaster than the pace of a horse (or a fast sailing ship), andthe fastest way to transmit written messages was by state-sponsored courier systems that used relays of horses.Today messages can cross the world instantaneously, andeven perishable goods can be transported from one endof the world to another in just a few hours or days.

Increasingly Complex and

Powerful Governments

As populations have grown and people’s lives havebecome more intertwined, more complex forms of regu-lation have become necessary, which is why the businessof government has been revolutionized. Most premoderngovernments were content to manage war and taxes, leav-ing their subjects to get on with their livelihoods more orless unhindered, but the managerial tasks facing modernstates are much more complex, and they have to spendmore effort in mobilizing and regulating the lives of thosethey rule. The huge bureaucracies of modern states areone of the most important by-products of the modern



Colonialism p. 381 (v2)

Democracy, Constitutional p. 508 (v2)

Diasporas p. 521 (v2)

Empire p. 640 (v2)

Global Imperialism and Gender p. 838 (v2)

Global Migration in Modern Times p. 844 (v3)

Indigenous Peoples Movements p. 970 (v3)

Industrial Technologies p. 981 (v3)

Information Societies p. 985 (v3)

Modernity p. 1287 (v3)



Urbanization p. 1925 (v5)

Western Civilization p. 2041 (v5)

Women’s and Gender History p. 2046 (v5)

World Cities in History—Overview p. 2066 (v5)

World System Theory p. 2075 (v5)

All history is necessarily written from the standpoint of thepresent, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only ofthe present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be

important in the present. • JOHN DEWEY (1859–1952)

revolution. So, too, are the structures of democracy,which allow governments to align their policies moreclosely with the needs and capabilities of the large andvaried populations they rule. Nationalism—the closeemotional and intellectual identification of citizens withtheir governments—is another by-product of these newrelationships between governments and those they rule.

The presence of democracy and nationalism may sug-gest that modern governments are more reluctant toimpose their will by force, but, in fact, they have muchmore administrative and coercive power than did rulersof the agrarian era. No government of the agrarian eratried to track the births, deaths, and incomes of all thepeople it ruled or to impose compulsory schooling; yet,many modern governments handle these colossal tasksroutinely. Modern states can also inflict violence moreeffectively and on a larger scale than even the greatestempires of the agrarian era. Whereas an eighteenth-century cannon could destroy a house or kill a closelypacked group of soldiers, modern nuclear weapons candestroy entire cities and millions of people, and the con-certed launch of many nuclear weapons could endhuman history within just a few hours.

A subtler change in the nature of power is the in-creased dependence of modern states on commercial suc-cess rather than raw coercion. Their power depends somuch on the economic productivity of the societies they

rule that modern governments have to be effective eco-nomic managers. The creation of more democratic sys-tems of government, the declining importance of slavery,the ending of European imperial power during the twen-tieth century, the collapse of the Soviet command econ-omy in 1991, and the ending of apartheid (racial segre-gation) in South Africa in 1990 and 1991 all reflected agrowing awareness that successful economic manage-ment is more effective than crudely coercive forms of rule.

Growing Gap between

Rich and Poor

Although wealth has accumulated faster than ever before,the gap between rich and poor has widened, both withinand between countries.The estimates of Angus Maddisonsuggest that in 1820 the GDP per person of the UnitedStates was about three times that of all African states; by1998 the ratio had increased to almost twenty times thatof all African states.Yet, some of the benefits of moderntechnologies have been shared more generally. Improve-ments in the production and supply of food and in san-itation, as well as improved understanding of diseasesand the introduction of vaccinations (during the nine-teenth century) and antibiotics (during the twentieth cen-tury) help explain why, for the first time in human history,so few people die in infancy or childhood that average lifeexpectancies have more than doubled, rising from about


This plate shows a variety oftools of increasing technologicalcomplexity used by humans atdifferent times and places totwist fiber. Spindles 1 and 2 arethe simplest forms (other thanhuman fingers) with fiber woundaround a wooden peg. Spindles 3through 7 are more complex,with a whorl added to thespindle. Spindle 9 marks thetransition to modern spindlesshown in 10 and 11 withflywheels.

twenty-six years in 1820 to about sixty-six years at theend of the twentieth century. These gains have not beenshared equally, but all parts of the world have felt theirimpact.

Improved Opportunities

for Women

Relations between men and women have been renegoti-ated in many parts of the world. New energy sources havereduced the importance of physical strength in employ-ment, new forms of contraception have given women andmen more control over reproduction, and new technolo-gies, such as bottle feeding, have allowed parents tomore easily share the task of caring for infants. Reducedinfant mortality and new forms of socialized old-age sup-port have reduced the pressure to have many children as

a form of old-age insurance. Finally, urbanization andcommercialization have created more varied forms ofemployment for women as well as men.Women are lessclosely tied to their traditional role as child rearers, par-ticularly in the most industrialized regions of the world.Nevertheless, gender inequality still survives even inthose societies most deeply transformed by the modernrevolution. Even in the United States and western Europethe average wages of women lag behind those of men.

Destruction of

Premodern Lifeways

Finally, the modern revolution has destroyed premodernlifeways. Until the twentieth century independent com-munities of foragers survived in many parts of the world,but by the end of the twentieth century no foragers lived


This interesting plate of knives shows the development of the hand knife used throughouthuman history for working wood. Knives 1 through 7 are all of stone, each one morecarefully finished than earlier ones. Knives 8 through 10 show specialized use of bamboo,ivory, and clam shell. The remainder of the knives all have metal blades and show increasingsophistication with handles, hinges, springs, and several blades in one knife.

outside a modern state, and their lifeways had beentransformed as they had been forcibly brought into themodern world. Peasant farming—the lifeway of mostwomen and men throughout the agrarian era—declinedas peasant households were unable to compete withlarge, industrial agribusinesses or the commercial farm-ers of more industrialized countries. By the end of thetwentieth century peasant farming had vanished in muchof the world. Even where it survived—in much of eastAsia and Africa, for example, as well as in much of LatinAmerica—it was in decline. These changes marked the

end of traditions, cultures, and lifeways that had shapedthe lives of most humans throughout the earlier eras ofhuman history.

Explaining the ModernRevolutionThe key to these momentous changes was a sudden risein the productivity of human labor caused by increasingrates of innovation. So, to explain modernity we mustexplain why rates of innovation have risen so fast duringthe modern era.As yet no general agreement exists on the


UN Commemoration of the Abolition of Slave TradeWhile acknowledging that slavery has existed sinceantiquity and continues to exist in modern form, theUnited Nations declared 2004 as International Year toCommemorate the Struggle against Slavery and itsAbolition. Below are excerpts from a message deliveredby Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO(the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cul-tural Organization), on 23 August 2004.

The celebration of 23 August, International Day forthe Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Aboli-tion, has particular symbolic value this year, 2004,which was proclaimed International Year to Com-memorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Aboli-tion by the United Nations General Assembly. Thepurpose of the Year is to remind humanity of the fightof the slaves for freedom, justice and dignity, a fightthat led to the independence of Haiti and the procla-mation in 1804 of the first Black republic.

The date of 23 August refers to the insurrectionthat started in the night of 22 to 23 August 1791 onthe island of Saint-Domingue (today divided betweenHaiti and the Dominican Republic), led by ToussaintLouverture, the first Black major general.The insurrec-tion was to lead to the first decisive victory for slavesagainst their oppressors in the history of humanity.

On 23 August 2004, we are thus commemoratingtwo key events: the revolt of 1791 and its culminationin 1804.

The Day gives us the opportunity to reflect together

on the historical causes, processes and consequencesof the unprecedented tragedy that was slavery and theslave trade, a tragedy that was concealed for manyyears and is yet to be fully recognized.

It also provides us with an opportunity to under-stand more clearly the interactions that the slavetrade generated throughout the world between thedifferent peoples involved. It not only disrupted thelives of millions of human beings uprooted fromtheir land and deported in the most inhuman condi-tions, but it brought about cultural exchanges whichdeeply and lastingly influenced morals and beliefs,social relations and knowledge on several continents.

[ . . . ]Beyond these retrospective dimensions, the Day

aims to sensitize and alert public opinion to the newtrade in human beings, for slavery, although abol-ished and penalized in international instruments, isstill practised in new forms, that today affect millionsof men, women and children across the world.

I therefore call on the whole population in allMember States, in particular intellectuals, political,religious and community leaders, educators, artistsand young people, to mark the Day with acts of med-itation, awareness-raising and exchange about thetragedy of slavery that we cannot forget, and that wecan never again tolerate.

Source: Message of the director-general of UNESCO. (August 23, 2004). RetrievedSeptember 8, 2004, from http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=22385&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

causes of the modern revolution or, indeed, on the gen-eral causes of innovation in human history. However,widespread agreement exists on some of the more impor-tant contributing factors.

Accumulated Changes

of the Agrarian Era

First, the modern revolution clearly built on the accumu-lated changes of the agrarian era. Slow growth duringseveral millennia had led to incremental technologicalimprovements in agriculture and water management, inwarfare, in mining, in metalwork, and in transportationand communications. Improvements in transportationand communications—such as the development of moremaneuverable ships or the ability to print with movabletype—were particularly important because they increasedthe scale of exchanges and ensured that new technolo-gies, goods, and ideas circulated more freely. Methods oforganizing large numbers of humans for warfare or taxcollection also improved during the agrarian era. In waysthat are not yet entirely clear, these slow technologicaland organizational changes, together with a steady ex-pansion in the size and scale of global markets, createdthe springboard for the much faster changes of the mod-ern era. During the final centuries of the agrarian era thepace of change was already increasing. InternationalGDP grew almost sixfold between 1000 and 1820,whereas hardly any growth had occurred at all during theprevious millennium.

Rise of Commercial Societies

Second, most historians would agree that the modernrevolution is connected with the rise of more commercial

societies. From the Scottish economist Adam Smithonward economists have argued that a close link existsbetween innovation and commercial activity. Smithargued that large markets allow increased specializa-tion, which encourages more precise and productivelabor. Equally important, entrepreneurs buying and sell-ing in competitive markets faced competition of a kindthat landlords and governments of the agrarian era couldusually avoid.To survive, entrepreneurs had to undercuttheir rivals by selling and producing goods at lowerprices. To do that meant trading and producing withmaximum efficiency, which usually meant finding andintroducing the most up-to-date technology. As commer-cial exchanges spread, so did the number of wage work-ers: people who took their own labor to market. Becausethey competed with others to find work, wage workersalso had to worry about the cheapness and productivityof their labor.

For these reasons the slow commercialization ofeconomies that occurred throughout the agrarian eraprobably raised productivity by stimulating innovation.As the wealth, influence, and number of entrepreneursand wage earners increased, the societies in which theylived became more open and receptive to innovation.

Development of a Single

Global Network

Third, the linking of world zones into a single global net-work from the sixteenth century provided a sharp stimu-lus to commercial growth and technological innovation.In just a century or so the scale on which goods and ideascould be exchanged almost doubled, and a huge varietyof new goods and ideas entered into global circulation.Maize, sugar, silver, coffee, cotton, tobacco, potatoes, andthe productive and commercial expertise that went withthese commodities were no longer confined to particularregions but instead were available throughout the world.Even the trade in people was internationalized. Before thesixteenth century the most active slave traders operated inthe Islamic world, and most of their slaves came fromSlavic or Turkic peoples to their north. From the sixteenthcentury European slavers began to capture or buy African


A modern Chinese market in Beijingcombines the traditional market with many modern features.

slaves and to ship them to plantations in the Americas.For better or worse, such global exchanges stimulatedcommerce throughout the world.

Western Europe’s Emergence

as a Global Hub

Although change was rapid, it did not transform allparts of the world at once, and the order in which differ-ent regions were transformed had a profound effect onthe course of modern history. This fact is the fourth fac-tor contributing to the modern revolution. The societiesof western Europe had been at the margins of the greattrading systems of the agrarian era, but they were at thecenter of the global networks of exchange created duringthe sixteenth century because they controlled the ocean-going fleets that knit the world into a single system.West-ern Europe was better placed than any other region toprofit from the vast flows of goods and ideas within theemerging global system of exchange. The European sci-entific revolution was, in part, a response to the torrentof new ideas pouring into Europe as a result of its ex-panded contacts with the rest of the world.Awareness ofnew ideas, crops, religions, and commodities under-mined traditional behaviors, cosmologies, and beliefs andposed sharply the question of how to distinguish betweenfalse and true knowledge of the world. The reinventionand spread of printing with movable type ensured thatnew information would circulate more easily in Europethan elsewhere.

At the same time European states, in an environmentof almost continuous warfare, desperately needed newsources of revenue; thus, they were keen to exploit thecommercial opportunities created within the global eco-nomic system.They did so partly by seizing the resourcesof the Americas and using American commodities such assilver to buy their way into the markets of southern andeastern Asia, the largest in the world.The increasing scaleof commercial and intellectual exchanges within Europecreated an environment that was particularly open toinnovation because European innovators could draw onthe intellectual and commercial resources of the entireworld. The primacy of western Europe during the early

stages of the modern revolution allowed it and the NorthAmerican region to put their distinctive stamp on themodern revolution and to achieve a global hegemonythat has so far lasted almost two centuries. Because ofEurope’s primacy English is the universal language ofmodern diplomacy and business rather than Persian orChinese, and suits and ties rather than kaftans are wornin the United Nations.

Other Factors

Fifth, more particular factors must enter into any detailedexplanation of the modern revolution. The peculiarlycommercialized nature of European states undoubtedlyhelps explain their receptiveness to innovation, but geo-graphical factors, such as climatic changes, or the pres-ence of large, relatively accessible seams of coal in Britainand northwestern Europe, may also have shaped the tim-ing and geography of the modern revolution.

Industrial Revolution:1750–1914These arguments suggest that the ingredients of the mod-ern revolution were present in all parts of the world, eventhough its full impact first became apparent in northwest-ern Europe and the eastern seaboard of what became theUnited States. In this region technological change accel-erated from the late eighteenth century. Familiar markersof change include the introduction and spread of moreproductive agricultural techniques, more efficient ma-chines for spinning and processing cotton, the improvedsteam engine of the Scottish inventor James Watt, and the first locomotive. By the early nineteenth century con-temporaries saw that something exceptional was happen-ing. In 1837 the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui(1805–1881) declared that an “industrial revolution”was under way in Britain and that it was as significant as



Dictionaries and Encyclopedias p. 528 (v2)

Energy p. 646 (v2)

Enlightenment,The p. 660 (v2)

Industrial Technologies p. 981 (v3)

Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes ofthe past how to make new ones. • A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990)

the political revolutions that had recently taken place inEurope and the Americas. By this time European levels ofproductivity had already overtaken those of the ancientsuperpowers of India and China.

Three Waves of the

Industrial Revolution

The technological innovations of the Industrial Revo-lution spread in waves. Each wave spawned newproductivity-raising technologies and spread industrializa-tion to new regions. In the first wave, during the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries, the crucial changesoccurred in Britain, although many of the innovationsintroduced there had been pioneered elsewhere. Themost important changes were the introduction of efficientcotton-spinning machines and the Watt steam engine.

The steam engine provided for the first time an effi-

cient way of exploiting theenergy locked up in fossil fuels;it made available a seeminglyendless supply of cheap energy,particularly in regions withready access to coal. Immedi-ately it lowered the cost ofextracting coal by easing thetask of pumping water frommine shafts; in combinationwith new spinning and weav-ing machines invented duringthe late eighteenth century, italso revolutionized the textileindustry, the second-most-important sector (after agricul-ture) in most agrarian societies.To exploit these new technolo-gies more efficiently, entrepre-

neurs began to bring workers together in the large,closely supervised productive enterprises we know asfactories.

In a second wave of innovations that occurred duringthe early and middle decades of the nineteenth century,steam engines were mounted on wheels to create the firstlocomotives. Railways slashed transportation costs overland, which is why they had a particularly revolutionaryimpact on the economies of large nations such as theUnited States and the Russian empire. In their turn,demand for coal, locomotives, rolling stock, and trackstimulated coal and metal production and engineering.During the early nineteenth century many of these tech-nologies spread to other parts of Europe and to theUnited States.

A third wave of innovations occurred during the sec-ond half of the nineteenth century. Industrial technologies


This line drawing byartist George Catlin is a depiction of himselfpainting a portraitduring his travels in the American Indiancountry in the 1830s.It gives the viewer a sense of Europeanviews of native peoples.

spread in North America, in other parts of Europe, andin Russia and Japan. Military humiliation at the hands ofWestern nations forced the governments of Russia andJapan to realize that they had to encourage industrializa-tion if they were to survive because industrial powerclearly enhanced military power. Steel, chemicals, andelectricity were the most important new technologies dur-ing this wave of the industrial revolution, and new formsof organization brought banks and factories together inlarge corporate enterprises, the largest of which were inthe United States. In Germany and the United States sys-tematic scientific research began to play an important rolein technological innovation, as did large corporations,and innovation began to be institutionalized within thestructures of modern business and government.

By the end of the nineteenth century Britain was los-ing its industrial primacy to Germany and the UnitedStates: In 1913 the United States accounted for almost19 percent of the world’s GDP, Germany for 9 percent,and the United Kingdom for just more than 8 percent.

Economic Developments

The first three waves of industrialization transformed lev-els of productivity. Between 1820 and 1913 the GDP ofthe United Kingdom increased by more than six times;that of Germany by nine times, and that of the UnitedStates by forty-one times. During the same period GDPper capita increased by 2.9 times in the United Kingdom,by 3.4 times in the lands that became Germany, and by4.2 times in the United States. No earlier era of humanhistory had witnessed such astonishing increases inproductivity.

These growth rates were not matched in the rest of theworld. On the contrary, the increasing economic and mil-itary might of the regions that industrialized first under-mined the traditional agrarian economies of India,

China, and the Ottoman empire. While the machine-produced textiles of the European and Atlantic powersundercut local products in other regions, their modern-ized armies conquered much of the world.

During the late nineteenth century interregional dis-parities in wealth and power increased sharply. Between1820 and 1913 China’s share of world GDP fell from 33percent to 9 percent and that of India from 16 percent to8 percent, while the share of the United Kingdom rosefrom 5 percent to more than 8 percent and that of theUnited States from almost 2 percent to more than 19 per-cent. By the end of the nineteenth century India was ruledby Britain; China was dominated commercially andeven, to an extent, militarily by a conglomerate of Euro-pean and Atlantic powers together with Japan; the Amer-icas and Australasia were largely populated by migrantsof European origin; much of Latin America was under thefinancial and commercial domination of Europe; andmost of Africa and southeastern Asia had been incorpo-rated within European empires. For the first time inhuman history political and economic inequalitiesbetween countries were becoming as striking as inequal-ities within countries. Global imperialism and the ThirdWorld are creations of the late nineteenth century.

Democratic Revolution

Economic changes were accompanied by profoundsocial, political, and cultural changes. The peasant pop-ulations of agrarian societies were largely self-sufficient,but the urbanized wage-earning populations of industri-alized societies, like the entrepreneurial classes thatemployed them, depended much more on structures oflaw and order and economic regulation that only statescould provide. Governments, in turn, depended more onthe cooperation of large sections of society as their tasksbecame more varied and complex.These changes explainthe often violent renegotiation of relations between gov-ernments and subjects. The first modern democraticpolitical systems emerged in the United States and west-ern Europe during the turbulent second half of the eigh-teenth century, which the historian Robert Palmer calledthe “age of the democratic revolution.” More democratic




Economic Growth, Extensive and Intensive p. 610 (v2)

Imperialism p. 952 (v3)

Liberalism p. 1133 (v3)

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and theonly history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. • HENRY FORD (1863–1947)

methods of rule granted political influence to wider sec-tions of the population in exchange for increasing regu-lation as governments began to recruit into mass armies,to take detailed censuses, and to regulate life in factories,offices, and even households.

Cultural Changes

Cultural life was also transformed. Mass educationspread literacy to a majority of the population in muchof North America and Europe during the nineteenth cen-tury, while the emerging mass media gave citizens plentyto read and informed them of events in their own nationand the world at large. Mass education, combined withnew forms of mass entertainment, also began to give cit-izens a more modern sense of a shared “national” iden-tity. All religious traditions had to face the challengeposed by modern science, and most did so by incorpo-rating some aspects of a new scientific view of realitywhile rejecting others. The spectacular successes ofnineteenth-century science raised the prestige of scienceand challenged traditional worldviews.

Particularly challenging was the theory of evolutionput forward by the English naturalist Charles Darwin(1809–1882), which seemed to imply that life itselfmight be the product of blind forces. Yet, preciselybecause it relied so much on rational explanations, thescientific worldview could not offer the spiritual consola-tion of traditional religions, which is why the challenge ofscience, far from destroying traditional religions, seems tohave stimulated new forms of religious activity, such asevangelical forms of Christianity.

Outside the Atlantic core region the indirect effects ofthe Industrial Revolution were largely destructive as thegrowing political, commercial, and military power ofEurope and North America threatened traditional politi-cal and economic structures and eroded faith in ancientways of thinking. Rapid population growth, land short-

age, increased taxation, and new opportunities in thetowns undermined village life in most of the world.However, as socialists pointed out, conditions in earlyindustrial towns were often worse than those in the vil-lages.Together, the slow erosion of peasant lifeways andthe appalling conditions in early industrial towns createdexplosive social tensions in all industrializing societies.

Governments outside the core region of the earlyIndustrial Revolution had to face the impossible chal-lenge of trying to match European economic and militaryperformance without undermining the traditional socialand cultural structures on which their own power wasbased. The transition was bound to be painful becausethe dominant polities of the agrarian era had been basedprimarily on traditional forms of landlordship ratherthan on commerce; yet, people increasingly realized thatindustrialization was linked closely with commercialactivity. Not surprisingly, the creation of modern forms ofgovernment frequently led to the violent breakdown oftraditional social structures and systems of rule. Japan


Although the modern era is often thoughtof as more secular and rational than

earlier eras, religion and faith continue tobe important for many people. This photo

shows a procession of pilgrims walkingdown the High Street of Little Walsingham,

Norfolk, United Kingdom, carrying astatue of the Virgin and Child in 1997.

was one of the few traditional societies that managed tomake a transition to a modern industrial economy with-out destroying the fabric of its society.

By 1900 many features of the modern revolution wereapparent throughout the North Atlantic core region,and, for better or worse, many other parts of the worldwere also beginning to feel its impact on lifeways,economies, governments, and ways of thinking.

Twentieth-Century Crisis: 1914–1945Between 1913 and 1950 the engine of growth that hadtransformed so much of the world seemed to breakdown. Global rates of growth of GDP slowed from 1.30percent per annum between 1870 and 1913 to 0.91 per-cent between 1913 and 1950.The slowdown affected allthe core regions of the Industrial Revolution but waseven more pronounced in the former agrarian colossi,China and India.The apparent exception to the rule wasRussia, whose annual growth rate rose from 1.06 percentduring the late czarist period to 1.76 percent between1913 and 1950.

The slowdown was caused in part by a breakdown inthe international banking and trading systems that hadhelped spread the Industrial Revolution. Between 1870and 1950 the proportion of world production that wastraded internationally actually fell. Part of the problemwas that the governments of industrializing countrieswere still learning how best to manage rapid economicgrowth, and all too often, like the great agrarian empiresof the past, they treated growth as a zero-sum game (a sit-uation in which a gain for one side entails a loss for theother side) that could be won only by excluding rivals

from protected markets.The burst of imperialism duringthe late nineteenth century was the most obvious expres-sion of this rivalry; another was the spread of protection-ism (protection of domestic producers through restrictionson foreign competitors), and a third was the emergence ofa system of defensive alliances in Europe, which helpedturn a crisis in the Balkans into a global war. Distrust andrivalry among the major industrial powers clogged thearteries of international exchange that were so crucial asa source of economic growth and political stability.

After the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand,the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on28 June 1914,Austria invaded Serbia, Russia intervenedto defend Serbia, and Germany declared war on Russia,which dragged Russia’s allies, Britain and France, into thewar.The global reach of European colonial and commer-cial networks dragged other regions into the war. Ger-man colonies in Africa, the Pacific, and China wereseized by French, British, and Japanese armies; troopsand supplies came to Europe from present and formercolonies in India, southeastern Asia, Africa, Australasia,and North America as well as from semicolonies such asArgentina. In 1917 the United States entered the waragainst Germany.

Nineteenth-century military innovations ensured thatWorld War I would be particularly bloody. New weaponsincluded machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and chemicalweapons such as mustard gas, which could burn out theinternal organs of its victims. Ironically, medical improve-ments kept more troops at the front, only to be slaugh-tered in the thousands by machine guns or artillery inoften futile raids on enemy positions. Modern industrialstates mobilized for “total war” effectively as they tookcontrol of national economies to supply their armies.Thehome fronts—where women replaced men on the farms,in munitions factories, or on the railways—were as vitalto success as the armies. Indeed, the role of women dur-ing World War I was a major factor in the rapid spreadof women’s suffrage during the postwar years.World WarI was not the first total war of the industrial era—the U.S.Civil War deserves that title more—but it demonstrated




Communism and Socialism p. 401 (v2)

Fascism p. 733 (v2)

Genocide p. 815 (v2)

World War I p. 2079 (v5)

World War II p. 2085 (v5)

I am inclined to think that history pays its way largely in the personalsatisfaction of sitting on the fence and enjoying vicariously the trials and

tribulations of men and times now ended. • AVERY O. CRAVEN (1885–1980)

even more powerfully the appalling scale and destructive-ness of industrialized warfare, and it was the first trulyglobal war of the modern era.

Global Upheaval

A punitive peace treaty negotiated in Versailles, France,and the failure of the newly created League of Nationsensured that the rivalries that had caused World War Idid not go away. In 1929 the international trading andbanking system finally collapsed, leading to a depressionthat affected all the major capitalist powers, as well asthe Asian, Latin American, and African countries thatsupplied them with raw materials.The Great Depressionseemed to confirm the socialist prediction that the cap-italist system would eventually break down. Many gov-ernments retreated even further into autarchy (nationaleconomic self-sufficiency and independence) as they sawthemselves competing for a dwindling share of world re-sources and markets.

In 1933 in Germany a fascist government emerged ledby Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Hitler was determined toreverse the losses of World War I, if necessary through

conquest. Fascism also took hold in Italy, the birthplaceof fascism’s founder, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), aswell as in Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere. Fascism andsocialism both reflected a deep disillusionment with theliberal capitalist ideologies of the late nineteenth century,but whereas fascists anticipated an era of national andracial conflict, in which the fittest and most powerfulwould triumph, revolutionary socialists framed the con-flict in terms of class war that would pit capitalismagainst socialism.

The appearance in Russia of a Marxist-inspired statedetermined to overthrow capitalism was another appar-ent sign of the breakdown of nineteenth-century capital-ism. Russia’s czarist government had encouraged indus-trial growth but had failed (unlike the Meiji governmentin Japan) to incorporate within its ruling structures theentrepreneurs who would be needed to make a success ofindustrialization. Eventually the rapid growth of an urbanproletariat (working class) and the impoverishment ofincreasing numbers of peasants generated a social crisisthat, when combined with military defeat during theRusso-Japanese War and the huge costs of participationin World War I, led to the collapse of the Russian impe-rial state.Traditional elites reacted too passively to the cri-sis, which allowed the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin(1870–1924), to seize power and hold on to it during abrutal civil war (1918–1920).

The Bolsheviks were radical Marxists, committed tothe overthrow of world capitalism and its replacement bya society in which productive resources such as the land,banks, and all large enterprises would be owned collec-tively. Under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the Soviet government took decisive and brutalsteps to build up a noncapitalist industrial society capa-ble of challenging the might of its capitalist rivals. Em-ploying methods of state management pioneered duringWorld War I, the Soviet government began to manageand coordinate the entire Soviet economy, leaving no sig-nificant role to market forces. To manage rapid industri-alization and rearmament, the Soviet government createda huge, powerful, and coercive state apparatus, willingand capable of acting with extreme brutality where nec-


Extract from All Quiet onthe Western FrontSince its publication in 1929, All Quiet on theWestern Front has remained a classic novel aboutthe personal anguish of soldiers in war. Germanwriter Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970)based the novel on his own experiences as a sol-dier during World War I. Below is one of the mostprofound quotes from the book.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a manlike me. I thought of your hand-grenades, ofyour bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wifeand your face and our fellowship. Forgive me,comrade.We always see it too late.Why do theynever tell us that you are poor devils like us, thatyour mothers are just as anxious as ours, and thatwe have the same fear of death, and the samedying and the same agony—Forgive me, com-rade; how could you be my enemy?

Source: Remarque, E. M. (1929). All Quiet on the Western Front (A. W. Wheen,Trans., p. 223). New York. Fawcett Crest.

essary. For a time people thought the new system mightmatch the economic and military power of the major cap-italist states. During the 1930s and again during the1950s rates of economic growth were more rapid in theSoviet Union than elsewhere (although the lack of mar-ket prices in the Soviet command economy makes mon-etary comparisons difficult).

Rearmament

During the 1930s, in an international climate of increas-ing tension, all the major powers began to rearm.WorldWar II began with attempts by Japan and Germany tocreate their own land empires. Japan invaded Manchuriain 1931 and China proper in 1937; Germany’s expan-sionist drive led to war in Europe in 1939 after Germanyinvaded Poland. In 1941 the United States, now thelargest economic power in the world, entered the warafter Japan’s preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor, and theSoviet Union entered the war after being invaded by Ger-many.WorldWar II was fought in the Pacific and in east-ern and southeastern Asia as much as in Europe, buteventually the economic and military power of the UnitedStates and the colossal mobilizational efforts of the SovietUnion helped turn the tide against the Axis powers (Ger-many, Japan, and Italy). World War II was even cruelerthan World War I. Sixty million people may have died—about 3 percent of the world’s population at the time.

The war ended with the use of the most terribleweapon yet invented—the atomic bomb.The first atomicbombs were dropped by the United States on the Japan-ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.Most of the casualties of World War II were civilians asthe aerial bombing of cities became, for the first time, arecognized weapon of modern warfare.The extreme bru-tality of the war found its most potent symbol in the sys-tematic murder by Hitler’s Nazi Party of almost 6 millionJews in what has come to be known as the “Holocaust.”

By the end of the war Europe no longer dominated theglobal economic system.The new superpowers were theUnited States and the Soviet Union. Each had its ownallies and clients, and each represented a different path tomodernity. The size and power of the Communist bloc

were enhanced by the incorporation of much of easternEurope and by the emergence in 1949 of a Communist-dominated China led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976). By1950 almost one-third of the world’s population livedunder Communist governments.Throughout this periodeconomic growth was more rapid outside of Europe, par-ticularly in the United States, the Soviet Union, andJapan, but also in regions such as Latin America.

The emergence of powerful anticolonial movements insoutheastern Asia, India, Africa, and elsewhere markedthe beginning of the end of European imperialism. InIndia the Indian National Congress, established in 1885,became a powerful supporter of independence, and inMohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) it found an inspira-tional and creative leader whose nonviolent protestsforced Britain to grant independence to the newly createdstates of India and Pakistan in 1947.

Despite the crises of the early twentieth century, social-ist predictions of the death of capitalism were premature.Technological innovation was rapid throughout theperiod; the internal combustion engine entered mass pro-duction, aviation emerged (first as a weapon of war andthen as a new form of commercial and personal trans-portation), and chemical substitutes for textiles and rub-ber were first produced.This was also the era of sonar, ofnuclear power, and of oil. It also was an era of fundamen-tal scientific breakthroughs, particularly in physics.

Other developments helped ensure that the capitalistengine of growth would revive and that the frenetic paceof economic growth of the nineteenth century would even-tually be resumed.The managerial principles that wouldhelp revive growth first became apparent in the UnitedStates. Two developments were particularly important:mass production on assembly lines, pioneered by HenryFord (1863–1947) in 1913, and mass consumerism, aphenomenon whose importance first became apparentduring the 1920s as ordinary people began to gain accessto modern goods such as cars, telephones, and radios.

Buying into Consumerism

Mass consumerism eventually provided a solution to thefundamental problem of underconsumption, which had


Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in worldhistory reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the firsttime as tragedy, the second as farce. • KARL MARX (1818–1883)

haunted producers during the nineteenth century when,as productivity rose, they had greater difficulty marketingwhat they produced. From at least the 1870s people hadrealized that capitalist economies are prone to periods ofboom and bust as productivity outstrips market demand.The business cycles of capitalist economies were the mod-ern equivalents of the agrarian era’s Malthusian cycles ofgrowth and decline, but, in a striking contrast, the busi-ness cycle was driven by overproduction,whereas Malthu-sian cycles had been driven largely by underproduction.During the early twentieth century people realized thatraising demand might be a more promising way of ensur-ing long-term growth than seeking protected markets.

However, for demand to rise, governments and em-ployers had to ensure that consumers had sufficient cashin their pockets to purchase goods and services. Duringthe depression of the 1930s economists such as JohnMaynard Keynes (1883–1946) argued that governmentscould help revive capitalist economies not by cuttingwages further, but rather by boosting consumptionthrough devices such as the provision of unemploymentpayments. However, governments were already experi-menting with such devices. In the United States the “NewDeal” of the 1930s pumped large amounts of money intothe economy through government programs mostlydesigned to boost spending by creating employmentthrough the building of new infrastructure such as roadsand dams.

For capitalist governments mass consumption offeredanother advantage that undercut some of the anticapital-ist arguments of Marxism and its offshoots. During thetwentieth century people realized that populations withaccess to increasing material wealth were unlikely toturn into the sort of revolutionary proletariat that the Ger-man political philosopher Karl Marx had envisaged asthe gravediggers of capitalism. Mass consumption wasthe capitalist antidote to revolution.

Crisis and Innovation

In many fields the crisis period of 1914–1945 was alsoa period of cultural revolution. The theory of relativityadvanced by the U.S. physicist Albert Einstein (1879–

1955) and quantum mechanics, developed by such scien-tists as Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Erwin Schrodinger(1887–1961), Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), andMax Born (1882–1970), challenged earlier mechanisticmodels of the universe, while the Austrian neurologistSigmund Freud (1856–1939), by showing the impor-tance of unconscious psychological drives, challenged


This line drawing by the poet ee cummingsshows the austerity typical of so-calledmodern art.

History gets thicker as it approaches recenttimes. • A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990)

faith in the role of reason in human affairs. New artforms, such as cinema, brought artistic realism into massculture and challenged artists and writers to experimentwith new, less realistic forms of expressionism, from thecubism of painters such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)to the dream narrative of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce(1882–1941).

The new technologies of mass culture, including radio,newspapers, and particularly the cinema, offered newways of influencing the ideas, attitudes, and fantasies ofpeople throughout the world, and governments as well asadvertisers came to appreciate their power.The Soviet gov-ernment was particularly creative in using the mass mediato spread its ideas.The new mass media also helped cre-ate a mass culture that could challenge the hegemony oftraditional high culture. Outside of the industrial heart-land, the revival of traditional religious and artistic tradi-tions, such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism, beganto play an important role in creating new national culturesthat could challenge the cultural hegemony of the NorthAtlantic region.

Contemporary Period:1945–PresentAfter World War II the capitalist engine of growth roaredto life again to generate the most rapid economic growthin world history. From 0.91 percent per annum between1913 and 1950, global rates of growth of GDP rose to2.93 percent between 1950 and 1973 before falling tothe more modest but still impressive rate of 1.33 percentbetween 1973 and 1998.

The international economic order was revived andrestabilized by expanding markets, by massive reconstruc-tion aid from the United States, and by the creation ofglobal regulatory institutions such as the United Nations(in 1945) and the International Monetary Fund (in1947).After falling between 1913 and 1950, the propor-tion of goods produced for international markets tripledbetween 1950 and 1995.A revival in international tradeand the spread of mass consumerism, first in the UnitedStates and then in Europe and Japan, stimulated eco-nomic growth in all the leading capitalist countries. For

the first time significant numbers of consumers in Europeand Japan began to buy private cars, televisions, andradios and even exotic foreign holidays, made possible bythe reduced cost of air transportation. A new wave ofinnovations in electronics, many stimulated by wartimeresearch programs, ushered in the electronic revolution ofthe 1980s and 1990s, and innovations in biology, includ-ing the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid(DNA, the carrier of genetic information), spawned newtechniques of genetic engineering whose implications arestill unclear.

Capitalist governments became increasingly adept atsustaining growth by stimulating consumption and byseeking the right balance between intervention andlaissez-faire (a doctrine opposing governmental interfer-ence in economic affairs). Slumps during the early 1970sand the late 1990s demonstrated that the business cyclehas never been completely tamed. Nevertheless, many ofthe protectionist illusions of the late nineteenth centurywere shed as governments realized that in a world ofrapid global growth, the wealth of individual nations(even the most powerful) usually depends more onglobal economic growth than on the possession of pro-tected markets. A clearer understanding of the economicand political realities of modern capitalism explains the



American Empire p. 82 (v1)

Climate Change p. 363 (v1)

Cold War p. 376 (v2)

Consumerism p. 435 (v2)

Globalization p. 849 (v3)

Green Revolution p. 870 (v3)

Human Rights p. 939 (v3)

Mass Media p. 1203 (v3)

Postcolonial Analysis p. 1502 (v4)

Progress p. 1514 (v4)

Religious Freedom p. 1574 (v4)

Russian–Soviet Empire p. 1638 (v4)

Social Welfare p. 1737 (v4)

United Nations p. 1916 (v5)

Urbanization p. 1925 (v5)

Examine the history of all nations and all centuries and you will always find men subject to three codes: the code of nature, the code of society, and the code of

religion . . . [T]hese codes were never in harmony. • DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784)

decision of U.S. governments to finance postwar recon-struction in Europe (through the Marshall Plan) and inJapan, even if that meant turning former enemies intocommercial rivals. Partly in this spirit, and partly underpressure from indigenous anticolonial movements, Euro-pean governments surrendered the empires they hadconquered during the late nineteenth century.

During the forty years after 1945 roughly a hundrednations achieved independence from their Europeanoverlords, and another batch of new nations emergedafter the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. By 2004the United Nations had 191 members.

Industrialization spread beyond the core regions of thelate nineteenth century, partly with the active support ofthe major capitalist powers. Economic growth was par-ticularly rapid until the late 1990s in eastern and south-eastern Asia, in particular in South Korea, Taiwan, Ma-laysia,Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all of whichwere influenced by the Japanese model of growth.

Rockets and Rubles

Global economic growth occurred despite the partition-ing of the world into two major power blocs.The capital-ist and Communist powers challenged each other militar-ily, economically, and politically. For several decadesthese rivalries threatened to ignite a third world war,fought this time with nuclear weapons. However, theCold War was also a contest for economic and politicalhegemony. The two blocs offered rival paths to eco-nomic growth, and for perhaps three decades people didnot know whether the command economies of the Com-munist world or the capitalist economies of the Westwould generate the most rapid growth, although bothsides agreed that during the modern era economicgrowth is the key to political and military success.

After Stalin’s death in 1956 Soviet living standardsbegan to rise as his successors steered investment towardconsumer goods and housing. During the 1950s theSoviet Union enjoyed a string of successes that seemed todemonstrate the technological dynamism of its com-mand economy.These successes included the creation ofSoviet nuclear weapons and missiles, the launching of the

first space satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, and thelaunching of the first human,Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968),into orbit in 1961.

Then, during the 1970s, Soviet growth rates began toslow, and disillusionment set in as Soviet citizens realizedthat their living standards were well behind those of themajor capitalist countries. Although the command econ-omy could indeed innovate when massive resources weredevoted to large prestige projects, without the constantpressure of competitive markets it could not generate thetrickle of petty innovations that drove productivitygrowth in the capitalist world. By the 1980s it was clearthat the Soviet economy was failing to incorporate thenew electronic technologies that were revolutionizingcapitalist economies and societies. Soviet generals under-stood that this fact was a military as well as a technolog-ical disaster for the Soviet Union.

The failures of the Soviet economy tell us much aboutthe driving mechanisms of the modern revolution. Sovietplanners understood from as early as the 1950s that theweaknesses of the command economy derived from thelack of domestic competition and the absence of anyeffective equivalent of the profit motive. Even during the1930s high rates of growth derived more from a massive,and highly coercive, mobilization of labor and resourcesthan from real gains in efficiency. During the mid-1980sa new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), admittedthat the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt becauseit could no longer keep mobilizing new resources, as ithad during the 1930s and 1940s.The Soviet system col-lapsed because its mobilizational strategy of growth, likethat of traditional agrarian empires, although effective inmilitary crises, stifled innovation.The failure of the Sovietcommand economy provides ironic support for KarlMarx’s claim that capitalism is the motor of modernity.

China Adapts

Communist China offers an apparent exception thatproves the rule. During the 1950s the government ofMao Zedong tried to industrialize using the methods ofStalin. However, the economic and social disasters of theGreat Leap Forward (1958–1961, a period in which the


But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States,and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle,

to what final aim, these enormous sacrifices have been offered. • G. W. F. HEGEL (1770–1831)

Chinese government tried to force the pace of industrial-ization by abolishing all private property) and the chaosof the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976, a period ofinternal chaos during which millions were accused ofanticommunist activities and subjected to exile, banish-ment, or death), combined with the growing rift betweenChina and the Soviet Union, encouraged the Chinesegovernment to retreat from the Soviet ideal of total statecontrol of the economy. After Mao’s death in 1976 his

successors cautiously reintroduced elements of a marketeconomy, and as entrepreneurial activity spread in China,economic growth accelerated. Capitalism was neverentirely destroyed in China (as it had been in the SovietUnion), which is why, despite the survival of its Commu-nist government, its economy has shifted with some suc-cess toward a competitive market economy.

Throughout the world economic growth and the manychanges that have come with growth transformed lifeways


The Marshall PlanIn a speech delivered on 5 June 1947 by U.S. Secretaryof State George C. Marshall at Harvard University,Marshall laid out what would become known as theMarshall Plan.The United States was willing to offer upto $20 billion in relief to a war-torn Europe strugglingto survive after a brutal winter if theWestern Europeannations would cooperate as a single economic unit.(Marshall also offered aid to the Soviet Union and itsallies, which was rejected by the Soviet leader JosephStalin.) As evidenced by Marshall’s words in theextracts that follow from his speech, the plan was cru-cial to the survival and growth of post–World War IIEurope.

I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situationis very serious.That must be apparent to all intelligentpeople. I think one difficulty is that the problem isone of such enormous complexity that the very massof facts presented to the public by press and radiomake it exceedingly difficult for the man in the streetto reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Further-more, the people of this country are distant from thetroubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them tocomprehend the plight and consequent reaction ofthe long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reac-tions on their governments in connection with ourefforts to promote peace in the world.

[ . . . ]The truth of the matter is that Europe’s require-

ments for the next 3 or 4 years of foreign food andother essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to paythat she must have substantial additional help, or face

economic, social, and political deterioration of a verygrave character.

The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle andrestoring the confidence of the European people inthe economic future of their own countries and ofEurope as a whole.The manufacturer and the farmerthroughout wide areas must be able and willing toexchange their products for currencies the continuingvalue of which is not open to question.

Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world atlarge and the possibilities of disturbances arising as aresult of the desperation of the people concerned, theconsequences to the economy of the United Statesshould be apparent to all. It is logical that the UnitedStates should do whatever it is able to do to assist inthe return of normal economic health in the world,without which there can be no political stability andno assured peace. Our policy is directed not againstany country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty,desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be therevival of working economy in the world so as to per-mit the emergence of political and social conditionsin which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, Iam convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis asvarious crises develop. Any assistance that this Gov-ernment may render in the future should provide acure rather than a mere palliative. Any governmentthat is willing to assist in the task of recovery will findfull cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the UnitedStates Government.

[ . . . ]

Source: Congressional Record (June 30, 1947). Retrieved September 8, 2004, from http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/57.htm

during this period. Mass education was introduced inmost of the world; thus, a majority of people in mostcountries were introduced to the basics of literacy. Moreand more people lived in huge cities as improved medical,sanitary, and educational services and increasing oppor-tunities for wage work lured people from the villages. Forthe first time in human history cities became healthierplaces than villages, at least where they were suppliedwith the basic amenities of clean water, sanitation, med-ical services, transportation, and electricity. Improvedmedical care explains the astonishing fact that in justthirty-five years (1955–1990), the average life span ofhuman beings increased from about thirty-five years tofifty-five years.

Urbanization transformed gender relations as familiesadapted to an urban world in which women’s salarieswere as vital as those of men. Women have become in-creasingly visible in government, in education, in medi-cine, and in science. Yet, true gender equality, like eco-nomic equality, still seems a remote goal. Worldwide in1990 about eighty women were in secondary educationand sixty-five in tertiary education for every hundredmen, and only about sixty women were in paid employ-ment for every hundred men.

During the 1980s and 1990s new forms of electroniccommunications and transportation and the reintegrationof the Soviet Union (and its successor states) and Chinainto the capitalist world economy bound the worldtogether more tightly than ever before.This new pulse ofglobal integration has come to be known as “globaliza-tion.” Globalization stimulated economic growth in mostof the core industrial economies and many newly indus-trialized countries, although many of the world’s poorercountries found the costs of competition too high and fellfurther behind, particularly in parts of Africa and LatinAmerica. For better or worse, globalization also broughtthe world’s many cultures into closer contact. As televi-sion and radio became more common even in ThirdWorld countries, the cultural norms and consumerist val-ues of the most industrialized countries became common-place throughout the world.

Coca-Cola Culture

and the Backlash

The influence of the United States was particularly perva-sive as consumer goods such as Coca-Cola and U.S.styles in clothing, music, sports, and entertainmentbecame familiar throughout the world.Yet,Western influ-ences have also generated a powerful backlash as govern-ments and citizens in other parts of the world have tried,with varying degrees of success, to defend traditional cul-tural and religious values. The emergence of new formsof radical anti-Westernism is merely one reflection ofgrowing resistance to Western values.

Resistance to Western values has been fueled byincreasing global inequality. In 1960 the wealthiest 20percent of the world’s population earned about thirtytimes as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 thewealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much.The successes of the most highly industrialized countriesthrew a harsh spotlight on the poverty of less industrial-ized regions, highlighting inequalities in income and inaccess to medical and educational resources and to neces-sities such as clean water and air. Although industrializa-tion spread to more and more countries during thetwentieth century, in too many cases it was incomplete ornarrowly based on the trade in specialist commoditiessuch as coffee or oil or managed by corrupt militaristicgovernments that skimmed off profits or spent them onarmaments rather than reinvesting them in growth.

Although the wealth and the technologies exist to pro-vide all humanity with basic medical care, clean water,and adequate food, millions still die from famine orwater-borne diseases in the least industrialized regions ofthe world, and lack of appropriate education and serviceshas contributed to the rapid spread of AIDS, particularlyin southern Africa, where in some countries almost one-quarter of the adult population had AIDS during the mid-1990s. Peasants have become increasingly marginalizedas traditional rural lifeways have been undermined byoverpopulation, the fragmentation of landholdings, andcompetition from cheap overseas imports.

In much of the world the modern era has included the


Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.

death of the peasantry, the class to which most humanshad belonged throughout the agrarian era.The collapseof Communism has created Third World conditions inmuch of the former Communist world as well. For manypeople, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century,the modern revolution must still seem like a distantdream. Directly or indirectly, the deep economic, politi-cal, and cultural inequalities of the modern world likelywill continue to fuel bloody guerrilla conflicts in whichsmall groups with modern weapons attempt to resist thecultural, economic, and military power of the wealthiestcapitalist states.

Burning the Candle

Whereas many people have seen the dire conditions inthe world’s poorest countries as a sign of those countries’backwardness, others have seen such conditions as awarning of future dangers. During the second half of thetwentieth century people were increasingly aware that therapid population growth and increasing consumption ofthe modern era had put new pressures on the whole bio-sphere (the part of the earth’s surface, seas and atmos-phere inhabited by living things). Indeed, in SomethingNew Under the Sun, John McNeill argued that, in thelong perspective, the changing human relationship withthe environment may turn out to be the most importantof all the changes that occurred during the twentiethcentury.

Population growth accounts for much of the impact ascities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roadsand highways have paved over more land, and as ThirdWorld farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a liv-ing. However, late during the twentieth century peoplerealized that rates of population growth were slowingthroughout the world as urbanization, increasing educa-tion, and improved services simultaneously reduced thepressure to have large families and raised their cost. Atpresent, it seems likely that global populations will levelout at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-firstcentury.

On the other hand, consumption levels are rising in

much of the world.As industrialization spreads to China,India, Africa, and much of Latin America, and as moreand more consumers begin to expect the material livingstandards currently enjoyed in Europe and North Amer-ica, human pressure on the environment will increaseeven as population growth slows. Environmental strainstake many forms. Habitats invaded by humans are nolonger available to other species; thus, current rates ofextinction may be as high as during the most rapidextinction episodes of the last 600 million years.

Some resources are already being used at dangerouslyhigh levels; this is particularly true of fisheries and cleanwater. However, the most dangerous of all these threatsmay be the impact on the atmosphere of burning largequantities of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is one of severalgreenhouse gases—gases that hold in the sun’s heat andtherefore tend to raise the average temperature of theatmosphere. Deforestation may have increased globalcarbon dioxide levels during the agrarian era, but theburning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution hasgreatly increased these levels, from approximately 280parts per million in 1800 to approximately 350 in 2000,and levels could reach 550–660 parts per million by2150.The exact consequences of this human manipula-tion of the atmosphere are not yet clear, but they are likelyto cause significant and perhaps rapid changes in globalclimatic patterns—changes as great as those that occurredat the end of the last ice age.

Modern Era in World HistoryIn 1969, by landing on the moon, human beings tookthe first, hesitant steps toward leaving their home planet.These steps brought into focus some of the majorchanges of the modern revolution, reminding humansthat the increasing power and complexity of humansocieties were bought at a price and came with dangers.Humans now have the power to destroy themselves andto do much damage to the planet. Our increased powerclearly has brought responsibilities for which we are illprepared, and the great complexity of the modern global


If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.• T.S. ELLIOT (1888–1965)

community has created new forms of vulnerability andthe fearsome prospect of a major collapse, similar to thecollapses suffered in the past by many overambitiousirrigation-based societies. On the other hand, the im-mense sophistication and scale of the knowledge avail-able today hold out the promise of a managed transitionto a more sustainable relationship with the biosphere.

What remains unclear, then, is whether the modernrevolution will lead to the emergence of a new global sys-tem capable of relative ecological, economic, and politi-cal stability, or whether the accelerating change of themodern era is the prelude to a sudden, sharp collapse thatwill drive many parts of the world back to the productiv-ity levels of the early agrarian era, if not even further. Per-haps the fundamental paradox of the modern revolutionis that on the one hand human control over the biospherehas increased spectacularly; yet, on the other hand wehave not yet shown that we can use that control in waysthat are equitable and sustainable. We must wait to seewhether the astonishing collective achievements of ourspecies will prove ephemeral or enduring.

Further ReadingAnderson, B. S., & Zinsser, J. P. (2000). A history of their own:Women in

Europe from prehistory to the present (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Bairoch, P. (1988). Cities and economic development: From the dawn ofhistory to the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bayly, C. A. (2004). The birth of the modern world 1780–1914. Oxford,UK: Blackwell.


Davies, R.W., Harrison, M., & Wheatcroft, S. G. (Eds.). (1994). The eco-nomic transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press.

Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age. Berke-ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Headrick, D. R. (1990). Technological change. In B. L. Turner, W. C.Clark, R.W. Kates, J. F. Richards, J.T. Mathews, & W. B. Meyer. (Eds.),The Earth as transformed by human action: Global and regionalchanges in the biosphere over the past 300 years (pp. 55–67). Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hobsbawm, E. J. (1962). The age of revolution, 1789–1848. New York:New American Library.

Hobsbawm, E. J. (1977). The age of capital. London: Abacus.Hobsbawm, E. J. (1987). The age of empire. London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson.Hobsbawm, E. J. (1994). The age of extremes. London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson.Maddison,A. (2001). The world economy:A millennial perspective. Paris:

OECD.Marks, R. B. (2002). The origins of the modern world: A global and eco-

logical narrative. Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.McNeill, J. R. (2000). Something new under the sun:An environmental his-

tory of the twentieth-century world. New York: W.W. Norton.McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web: A bird’s-eye

view of world history. New York: W.W. Norton.Palmer, R. (1959–1964). The age of the democratic revolution: A politi-

cal history of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Vols. 1–2). Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pomeranz, K. (2000). The great divergence: China, Europe, and the mak-ing of the modern world economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Population Reference Bureau. (n.d.). Human population: Fundamentalsof growth, patterns of world urbanization. Retrieved August 27, 2004,from http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Urbanization2/Patterns_of_World_Urbanization1.htm

Wong, R. B. (1997). China transformed: Historical change and the limitsof European experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

World development indicators. (2002).Washington, DC: World Bank.


The whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Manon the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no

more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. • ARUNDHATI ROY (b. 1960)

this fleeting world - teachinginsanity.net fleeting world--an... · this fleeting world an overview...

Documents