ABSTRACT
The world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this manifold into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality [Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982), Introduction, p. 3]. All animals depend on other living things for their food, and human beings are no exception. Problems of finding food and the changing ways human communities have done so are familiar enough in economic histories. The problems of avoiding becoming food for other organisms are less familiar, largely because from very early times human beings ceased to have much to fear from large-bodied animal predators like lions or wolves. Nevertheless, one can properly think of most human lives as caught between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings [William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976), pp. 5–6].
