Uruk and other city-states with defensive walls, tax collection and an internal hierarchy emerged in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates in about 3000 bce . Similar states appeared on the Nile, then on the Indus and in the Andes. The anthropologist Roberto Carneiro points out that these were all fertile but naturally isolated territories where, as chance would have it, farming was more productive than elsewhere. 5 People fought over such favoured places, and they changed hands. Geographical variation defined the formation of states and their survival.
In Mesopotamia the preferred grain was wheat. Centuries of irrigation made the soil increasingly saline, and the heirs of Gilgamesh switched to millet. Ancient Athens depended on grain, supplied by sea from Egypt and Sicily. Chinese cities needed rice. In the sixth century they were already supplied by canals, which transported rice over distances of up to 2,000 kilometres. Wheat bread was always prized in Europe, but rye predominated in its northern regions. The Baltic trade in rye kept Holland and England supplied for hundreds of years. Canals, ports and granaries were built to accommodate this trade. Rivalling churches and palaces, these structures were the most complex that man could build at the time. The state collected taxes and guaranteed the storage of grain, taking on the responsibility of providing for its population in times of war or crop failure. Many revolutions, including the French and the Russian, began in response to the fact that the state granaries were empty.
Even today, four sorts of grain – wheat, rice, barley and maize – provide more than half the calories consumed by humankind. They are all crops that ripen simultaneously and they all have a long shelf life, making them suitable for trading and taxation purposes. But they are all very different. Unlike wheat or rye, rice grains are easily cooked, but rice flour doesn’t keep well. In China and other rice-dependent countries, hand mills were mostly sufficient for preparing the occasional meal that needed rice flour. 6 For Europeans, wind- and watermills for grinding grain embodied technical proficiency and historical change.
Crop rotation
Continuing the migration of the naked ape from the African savannah to the forests and wetlands of Eurasia, civilisation moved northwards. For millennia, the Mediterranean was the centre of trade. In the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, the North Sea assumed this role. Luxuries from the East – silk, sugar, cotton – continued to exert their charms. But northern products, such as tar, hemp and saltpetre, shaped the world to come. The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War were pan-European conflicts between the North and the South; from this time on, the North was usually the victor. Vienna repelled the Turks, but Prague was seized by the Swedes. The first oceanic empires, Portugal and Spain, looked for colonies in the southern seas. Holland and England focused on trade with the great expanses of the North – from Arkhangelsk to Newfoundland, from Danzig to Bergen. Hanseatic and then Dutch and English trade in raw materials from the North – grain, timber, fur, linen, hemp, iron – was in greater volumes than the colonial trade in sugar, tea, cotton and other southern products. 7
Burning a forest and clearing the land gave immediate results. Land would never again be as fertile as it was after the ashes were first ploughed in. In the eighteenth century, agronomists called this the law of declining fertility, while economists called it the law of diminishing returns. If the fertility of your land is declining, you need more land. The deforestation of Europe was the direct result of the expansion of grain cultivation. But, between the forest and the field, there always existed a third space – pasture, meadow, wetland. In the estates of ancient Rome, a third of the land lay fallow – i.e., uncultivated. For centuries the peasants to the north of the Alps had practised the fire-fallow system of agriculture, sowing and harvesting crops, then putting cattle onto the land, and then, after several years, abandoning that field and advancing deeper into the forest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a quarter of German lands lay fallow. The history of agriculture was the process of the peasants learning what to do with fallow land, how to use it productively.
In the system that was typical for Northern Europe, land was divided into three parts. In autumn, a field was sown with wheat or rye. In spring the crop was harvested and the field was sown with barley, oats or beans, which were used as cattle fodder. Then the field lay fallow for a year. In this way, a third of the land was non-productive, while the cultivated fields produced at a ratio of 4:1 – i.e., from every grain sown, four new grains grew. This was the average productivity of arable farming throughout Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia. Bumper harvests could be achieved only with the addition of fertilisers – animal manure or night soil from the towns. Intensive agriculture developed only on the outskirts of towns, close to the markets.
Crop rotation was the main reason for an increase in productivity. It also supported the reorientation of farming from grain to fibre – wool, linen, hemp. From each harvest the peasant had to feed his family and also pay his master and the state for the land and for protection. This obliged him to earn cash by reducing the share of raw, perishable products he grew for survival and increasing the share of dry, cash crops he grew for trade. This was the road to riches. Cottage industry left the peasant families with a part of the profit which in other circumstances would have gone to the merchants and landowners (see chapters 5 and 7 ). But this new economy continued to depend on the massive supply of grain from Prussia, Poland and the Baltic lands. 8
The landowners in Eastern Europe battled with the same problems of the grain economy that the Mesopotamian authorities had encountered thousands of years earlier: low productivity, extended transport routes, and a ‘lazy’ population with little motivation to work and still less desire to save. But grain didn’t require much labour. Unlike the slave-owner who met all his slaves’ needs as he understood them – provisions, clothes and tools – the landowner let the peasants survive on subsistence farming. Thanks to their simultaneous ripening, cereal crops could be harvested and processed in one fell swoop. During the rest of the year the peasants didn’t work in the landowner’s fields. They had vegetable plots, pastures and crafts. The landowner didn’t interfere in these activities, which meant that peasants were able to develop them better and faster. Nor was the landowner interested in the complex crop rotation systems needed to increase productivity. They only made the process of collecting rent more complicated, especially if the noble owner ruled in absentia. His opportunities for trading depended on the proximity of his farm to the riverine system. If a farm was 10 or 20 miles from the river, trade was unprofitable. The income of the landowner depended not on the productivity of his land but on its proximity to a river and the sea. Foreign shipowners reaped the lion’s share of the profit, and they invested it back in their countries. For the village, these earnings were lost. 9
Agriculture provided general employment, but it was not full-time or year round. The landowner had to have physical mastery over the peasants to force them to work, just as the peasants forced their horses to work. But the work was seasonal. People worked in accordance with the annual rhythms of preparing the soil, sowing, harvesting and processing the crop. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, men in Russian villages spent no more than half their time working, and women and adolescents no more than a third. But at harvest time, when the crop had to be brought in all at one go, everyone joined in the toil, men, women and children. Technological innovations very slowly changed the key moments in this cycle. The gradual replacement of oxen with horses was an important step. In England this happened as early as the sixteenth century, in Europe much later. The change travelled, like many similar ‘improvements’, from west to east. Peasants opposed this replacement, because they knew that, if war broke out, horses would be requisitioned. Although ploughing with oxen was slower, it was the more reliable option. Stunted horses, shod with wooden shoes, couldn’t pull a plough. Over the centuries the weight and strength of horses increased, but this was the result of selective breeding that happened in cavalry stables, not in peasant farmyards. Iron replaced wood, helping to save effort, increase productivity, and bring peasants to compliance. Iron horseshoes, iron ploughshares, iron hoes allowed farmers to turn over deep furrows and drain fields with ditches. The conversion of military technology for civilian use was a reward for the incessant taxes, requisitioning and billeting which victorious states imposed on their civilian populations.