by Bruce Wilder
(Ian–this is an elevated comment from my post on Breakout Societal Power. It fills in much of the gap elided to in this phrase “Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen…” but does so better than I would have. It’s not just about why some societies in sharp competition don’t make it, however.)
There is an underlying dynamic of solidarity and surplus that seldom gets the attention it deserves.
Ancient Greece at the end of the of the Bronze Age participated in the famous but mysterious collapse and entered a Dark Age of significantly diminished population, political organization and culture. They emerged beginning around 800 BCE, apparently with a new set of technologies, politics and agriculture and trade that generated surplus. People were healthy and well-fed (comparatively). Greece experienced a population boom, increasing in numbers roughly ten times over 400 years and a critical part of the competition among city-states was to found colonies. It wasn’t just Greece, Phoenicia and the Etruscans and others were involved.
Technological innovation is not a merely moral phenomenon; it is a matters of surplus and numbers. There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.
The surplus that fed the urban civilization that Rome engineered diminished with soil erosion. The extraction of the tradeable surplus from a slave class on the great latifundia was inefficient and self-defeating on many levels, undermining the economic foundation of an urban civilization. People at the bottom of the system were unhealthy. Famines and plagues ensued. Trade declined with falling division of labor in a dimishing artisanal class, compounding the effects of declining agricultural surplus.
The rise of China followed on the creation of enormous agricultural surplus to feed vast armies and an urban civilization with a huge artisanal population, with trade driving deep division of labor and technological inventiveness. The surplus originated in vast hydraulic projects and the elaboration three-crop rice production.
There would be no social barrier in China to ever more labor intensive agriculture: more and more hands in the fields until the extraction of surplus was choked off by congestion losses. By 1500, Chinese peasants could barely feed themselves. Ordinary people were physically weak. The cities were huge, but represented only single-digit percentages of total population.
Europe recovering from the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Rome saw a revival of surplus, especially after iron plows turned the heavy but fertile soils of Northern Europe and dug deeper in the south. But, the congestion losses of too many hands in the fields showed quickly too and the flowering of the High Middle Ages ended in overpopulation and the Black Death, which was driven as much by imminent famine as rats and fleas.
The contrasting aftermaths of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — two, long series of bubonic plagues sweeping thru Europe is worth contemplating. One destroyed a civilization and the other seemed to spark a new civilization.
Agricultural surplus feeding a growth of artisanal production and merchant trade, but being choked off by congestion and extractive oppression is a recurrent dynamic. It underlies the peculiar history of rivalry between England and France. France, with the greatest agricultural potential in western Europe, occupying an extensive well-watered plain, had a vastly greater population than England thruout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. But, France became overpopulated. Famine and hunger drove the French Revolution when bad weather triggered bad harvests that threatened the surplus that fed Paris.
England’s ability to feed its industrializing cities was a near-run thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The additional surplus generated by the British Agricultural Revolution was a paltry thing and Ireland was kept on the edge of famine by overpopulation until pushed over the edge.
The productive often desperate competition that Ian draws attention to has a multi-path causal relation to the generation and/or extraction of surplus. That surplus may originate in accidents, be managed or neglected by elites and be extinguished without intention.