ABSTRACT
This book is part of a series of concise topical studies of “Themes in World History,” meant primarily, though certainly not exclusively, for use in undergraduate world history survey courses, taught in colleges and universities in the U.S. and other countries. While the topics of all of the studies in this growing series are important and revealing aspects of world history, the topic of agriculture has a unique value and relevance. While all of the other topics were either core components of civilization or
important products of civilization, agriculture was the component that made civilization possible. A society of hunters and foragers could not construct large permanent settlements or spare a significant part of its able-bodied members to specialize in activities not related to food. While early societies must have had systems of authority and social hierarchies, they were not in a position to form governments, class systems, strong armies, large-scale trade and markets, sophisticated writing and education systems, and other elements of a full-scale civilization. A civilization with those elements required the production of a reliable and substantial surplus of food before anything else. That surplus would free a significant group of people from food production, allowing them to develop the specializations necessary for a civilization. The anthropologist Robert Redfield in the 1950s contrasted civilization’s advanced culture, what he called the “great tradition,” with the peasants’ folkways or “little tradition.” Yet that great tradition utterly depended on that little tradition for its survival. Agriculture was thus prior to and a prerequisite for civilization. Farmers
supported civilization by producing crops and livestock, work which placed farmers in continual interaction with the natural environment. Farmers thus served as the interface between civilization and the environment. The problem that is the main focus of this book, however, is that civilizations did not simply rely on farmers, but most of the time dominated and exploited them. The relationships between farmers and urban civilization, and between farmers and their environment, were highly complex, but in general, in both relationships, the farmers were subordinate: a pattern I call the dual subordination.
