ABSTRACT
The previous article showed that as societies grow in population size and density and as they advance technologically, there is a steady growth of social stratification. Agrarian societies are the most intensively stratified of all preindustrial societies. In fact, according to Gerhard Lenski, they are the most intensively stratified of all societies, inasmuch as the degree of stratification seems to have declined with the advent of industrial societies in the past century. In this excerpt from their textbook on stratification, William and Arline McCord give us a glimpse of the major forms of stratified life in agrarian societies. Three major types of stratification have been most prevalent. In the ancient world, especially in Greece and Rome, the economy was strongly rooted in slavery. There were many free peasants in the ancient world—indeed, they often outnumbered slaves—but slavery contributed more to the production of economic wealth. In India, a unique stratification system based on castes arose. Castes are hierarchically arranged groups that are, at least ideally, hermetically sealed. Marriage is restricted to members of one’s own caste, and upward or downward mobility is technically forbidden. In the European Middle Ages and in many other agrarian societies, the stratification system was rooted in serfdom. Serfdom produced a type of stratification system known as an estate system. Estates are stratified groupings that differ not only by wealth and power, but that also have a legal status. The primary source of wealth in estate systems is the extraction of economic surplus from the peasantry, a group generally tied to the land but that has greater freedom than is granted to slaves.
