MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Sounds like even the most 'rootless' groups lived in a state of semi-interdependence with static communities and that the desire to settlle is the more natural way of life.

Well, if Ghengis Khan had to legislate against it...!

Nice one, Hatty.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (1)
Agriculture, my friends in the anthropology department of Queens College tell me, evidently arose in three different centers: wheat and barley culture in the Middle East, rice culture in eastern Asia and Indian corn culture in America (probably in Central America). The cultivated grains came from wild grasses. The invention in America is believed to have occurred latest, and that in the Middle East the earliest, although even that is not absolutely certain because so little is known about the probable date and place of the early Asian rice culture. This is really all that is known for certain about the origins of grain culture. The rest is conjecture.

The conventional assumptions about what happened are almost wholly concerned with Middle Eastern development of grain culture, but in principle they are supposed to apply to the other two centers also. The idea is that in the Middle East little groups of hunters and wild-food gatherers, roaming about in a constant search for food, began at length to sow and to harvest patches of wild grass visited during the appropriate seasons. In time, it is supposed, this proto-agriculture produced true grains and a consequently efficient way of producing foods, and this permitted former hunters and gatherers to become peasants. After many, many thousands of years of agricultural village life, the first cities are supposed to have arisen about 3,500 B.C. in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia. But all this is conjecture.

How does such a theory account for the development of crossed, hybrid and mutant wheats and barleys? To be sure, it used to be supposed that purposeful plant selection would be practiced, as a matter of course, by hunting and gathering peoples, once they had reached a stage of expertise at gathering and sowing wild seeds. But that supposition was plausible only before the botanical problems had been appreciated. Moreover, the supposition begs the question why grain culture, then, originated in so few centers instead of in hundreds of centers, or perhaps in thousands.

Some prehistorians, to get around the botanical difficulties, have suggested that crosses arose owing to abrupt changes in river levels, temporarily bringing together plants that did not normally grow together. It has also been proposed that fortuitous showers of cosmic rays created an unusual incidence of mutations among grains and thus greatly reduced the element of chance for those who might come upon them. But the trouble with relying on natural marvels is of course the question: Why did these marvels selectively transform wild grasses? Why not everything that grew?
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (2)

The old idea that permanent settlements were impossible until after agriculture was invented is contradicted by so much hard evidence that many archeologists no longer subscribe to this idea, although few scholars in other fields seem, as yet, to be aware of this reassessment. The world is dotted with various kinds of Paleolithic leavings which indicate that hunters had permanent settlements. There are caves that seem to have been continuously occupied during very long periods. There are flint workings -- piles of chips and discards -- that mutely announce long and continuous settlement and long and continuous industry too. There are shell middens that were accrued long and continuously. There is evidence of trade goods far from their sources, hinting at home bases of some kind for the trade in amber, shells, obsidian. Moreover, unmistakably permanent pre-agricultural settlements have been located in South America, in Europe and in Asia. At least two of these, in what are now Hungary and France, go back far beyond Homo sapiens, to a time some 250,000 years ago or more, when men first began to use fire. Undoubtedly, pre-agricultural men migrated but, as we know from migrations in historical times, migrating people customarily leave permanent settlements and, even when the wandering covers a period of several generations, reestablish themselves in permanent settlements. A migrant need not imply a nomad.

I would suggest that permanent settlements within hunting territories were ordinary features of pre-agricultural life. They would have been as natural for men as burrows are for foxes or nests are for eagles. Almost all activities would have been carried on in the settlement and it would also have served as the base for work carried out in the field -- hunting, foraging, defending the territory, and raiding adjoining territories.


[ Footnote ] This implies that permanent settlements which grew as cities were, from the first, city-states. There would have been no such thing as a pre-agricultural city without a surrounding territory belonging to the city.

Nor is there reason to suppose that the permanent settlements of pre-agricultural people were necessarily populated only by a few families: a tiny band of hunters and their dependents. Indeed, one settlement, in what is now Syria, dating from about the same time as Çatalhöyük but containing remains only of wild foods, contained hundreds of closely congested clay dwellings. It was continuously occupied for some five centuries and must have had a population, at any one time, of at least a thousand persons, more likely two to three thousand.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (3)

Conventionally it is assumed that pre-agricultural food was too scarce to trade because hunting populations grew to the limit of their natural food supplies and then existed on the perilous edge of starvation. Yet food-remains in some settlements indicate that hunting people did not necessarily exploit their food resources to the hilt. For instance, at some sites mammal bones are plentiful but there are no remains of the fish that must have teemed in nearby streams nor of shellfish that must have abounded at adjacent seashores. And in any case, formation and growth of cities does not depend on "surplus" food because, as we know, cities have often grown in societies where severe hunger was endemic and terrible famines were periodic.

In sum, the assumptions behind the dogma of agricultural primacy are at odds with much direct and indirect evidence. The dogma relies on props of a different kind. I have asked anthropologists how they know agriculture came before cities. After recovering from surprise that this verity should be questioned, they tell me the economists have settled it. I have asked economists the same thing. They tell me archeologists and anthropologists have settled it. It seems that everyone has been relying on somebody else's say-so. At bottom, I think, they are all relying on a pre-Darwinian source, Adam Smith.

Smith, whose great work, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1775, saw the same relationships between cities and agriculture that we can observe today. He reported that the most highly developed agricultural nations of his time were precisely the nations in which industry and commerce were most highly developed. He saw and reported that the most thoroughly agricultural countries had the poorest agriculture. To illustrate this point, he contrasted the backward agriculture of agricultural Poland with the more advanced agriculture of commercial and industrial England.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (4)

Smith observed and reported something still more interesting: that it is not agriculture that leads the way for the development of industry and commerce. He noticed that in England the development of agriculture lagged behind commerce and industry. The way he made this point was to note that the superiority of English industry and commerce over that of other nations was more marked than the superiority of English agriculture. In short, he reported that the really big difference in the superior English economic development was the greater development of industry and commerce, not the greater development of its rural agriculture. Getting down to details, he made the important observation that the most productive, prosperous and up-to-date agriculture was to be found near cities, and the poorest agriculture was distant from them. Why, then, did Smith not make the logical inference that city industry and commerce preceeded agriculture?

To understand why, we must put ourselves in his place. His intellectual world was very different from ours, and in no way more than in its beliefs about the creation of the earth and of the life upon it. Lyell's Principles of Geology, which was to demonstrate that the earth is eons old, was more than fifty years in the future. At the time Smith was writing, educated men in Europe still believed that both the world and men had been created almost simultaneously, about 5,000 B.C., and that man was born into a garden. So Smith never asked how agriculture arose. Agriculture and animal husbandry were givens; they were the original ways in which men earned their bread by the sweat of their brows.

For Smith, in the 1770s, the question had to be, How did commerce and industry arise upon agriculture? -- no matter what the evidence might suggest to the contrary. And so Smith had to propose a very special chain of economic causes and effects unlike any observable since, but presumably in operation at the beginning of the world. In short, he was not able to indulge his imagination while sticking to known processes; he had to invent chains of imaginary causes and effects.


[ Footnote ] He proposed that all clothing and housing were at first free and plentiful, but as population grew they became scarce. Why should this be, if there were more hands to make clothing and build shelter? He did not pose that question; instead he rushed on to propose that, having become scarce, they became valuable, requiring agriculturalists to become more productive so they could afford clothing and shelter. This productivity created a surplus of workers and that made commerce possible. But then why, in historical times, have there been economies with surpluses of workers who remained with nothing much to do? That was another question he did not pose. Instead he assumed that these first surplus workers would have found commerce and industry to keep themselves busy and would have built cities. Having done so, they would have needed food and would have increased their industrial production so that they might buy it. But why are the problems of idle and hungry city people not so simply solved as this in historical times? That was another question he did not pose.

Smith still needed to account for the fact that cities are economically more advanced than rural areas even though, as he supposed, they trail after economic advances in rural areas. He rationalized this anomaly by suggesting that industry must inherently be more capable of organization into divisions of labor than agriculture, hence capable of advancing more swiftly. But in real life, agriculture is equally available to division of labor, as it was in Smith's time when there were milkmaids and ploughboys. Indeed, when Smith, the superb economic reporter, was not troubled by being Smith, interpreter of the Book of Genesis, he used rural industry, not agriculture, as his chief illustration of how unproductive people are when they do not adhere to the principle of division of labor.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (5)

Adam Smith thus converted biblical history into economic doctrine. This seems to have been accepted as satisfactory by his contemporaries. Two generations later, it was also accepted by Karl Marx. At any rate, although Marx questioned much, and admired Darwin's work with its implications of man's long prehistory, he did not question the idea that industry and commerce had arisen upon agriculture. In this, he was quite as conservative as Adam Smith.

But now we come to a strange twist in the history of the dogma of agricultural primacy. It has continued to be accepted, though so much else in Adam Smith's, and Marx's, world has changed. What is accepted, actually, is not Smith's farrago about the beginning of economic life, but that the rise of industry, commerce and cities upon agriculture is explicable and unquestionable. A sentence from a history of the Rockefeller Foundation philanthropies, published in 1964, is illustrative: "When man learned to cultivate plants and to domesticate animals," it says, "society for the first time was able to plan ahead and organize itself through the division of labor." The thought is pure Adam Smith prehistory, adapted ever so slightly to acknowledge that mankind was not born with knowledge of farming.

The cartoon stereotype of the half-naked cave man, brandishing a club while he drags his woman off by the hair, is a reminder of what even the most learned people preferred to accept after they had painfully assimilated the idea that men were hunters long, long before they were farmers. It required less of a mental adjustment, evidently, to assume that the hunters must have been very primitive, and that they had no economic life more complex than that of animals. But during the past half century, archeologists have been piecing together the evidence that has made the cartoon stereotype untenable. It is clear that pre-agricultural men were much besides hunters: they were manufacturers, builders, traders and artists. They made large quantities and many varieties of weapons, clothing, bowls, buildings, necklaces, murals and sculptures. They used stone, bone, wood, leather, fur, rushes, clay, timber, adobe, obsidian, copper, mineral pigments, teeth, shells, amber and horn as industrial materials. They backed up their major crafts and arts with subsidiary goods: "producers' goods," or "input items," as economists now say -- ladders, lamps and pigments, for instance, to achieve the Paleolithic cave paintings; burins to gouge out furrows in other tools; scrapers to dress hides.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Dogma of Agricultural Primacy (6)

At some point the question might have been asked, How did agriculture arise upon all this industry? Instead, the long economic history of man before agriculture has continued to be regarded as only a sort of prologue played out in the wilds, to be followed by the drama as already recounted by Adam Smith. A persuasive but simple fallacy continues to buttress the dogma and perhaps accounts, at least in part, for why the question has gone unasked. It was this fallacy that made me reluctant to consider that cities had come before agriculture, even after logic had forced me to face the thought. An analogy between agriculture and electricity may help explain and exorcise it. Cities today are so dependent upon electricity that their economies would collapse without it. Moreover, if modern cities had no electricity most of their people -- if they could not quickly get away -- would die of thirst or disease. And the most impressive and massive installations for generating electricity are in rural areas. The power they generate is sent into both cities and countryside.

If the memory of man did not run back to a time when the world had cities but no electricity, it would seem, from the facts I have just mentioned, that use of electric power must have originated in the countryside and must have been a prerequisite to city life. Here is how the sequence would be reconstructed theoretically: First, there were rural people who had no electricity, but in time developed it and eventually produced a surplus; then cities were possible.

The fallacy is to mistake the results of city economic development for preconditions to city economic development. It is so simple a fallacy and yet -- like the belief in spontaneous generation -- it blocks off as already answered some most interesting questions that have not been answered at all. How do cities really grow? If they create and re-create rural development, then the question to ask is, What can it be that creates and re-creates city economies?


< End of Chapter 1. >
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

So... what's the verdict?

Is Jacobs crackers?

But for a few comments, I didn't think any kind of running commentary or [ emphasis added ] was warranted: I'd have ended up doing virtually all of it in bold. The material is tight and there's no point trying to educe the argument in another way. And the pure Applied Epistemological passages at the start and the end ring out loud and clear.

{The only thing I would add now is that Jacobs uses 'rural' to mean simply 'not urban', but I would further distinguish rural districts from wilderness.}

Has everybody been following along? Are you convinced?

Silence I will take as a 'yes': we can take it as axiomatic that agricultural primacy is completely backwards: it's Cities First -- Rural Development Later.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ahhh...
She died in April this year, a few days shy of her 90th birthday.

[ genuflect ]
NB. The Economy of Cities is one of only two books that I have bothered to purchase though a book-finding service. And worth it, I reckon.
[ /genuflect ]
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Has anyone noticed that if it is wrong that all humans were hunter-gatherers at one time, then the psychology/sociology based on that assumption is wrong, too?

e.g. thrill-seeking and brawling as alternative outlets for masculinity now that the hunt is not part of the fabric of life.

We can still say "I'm not surprised" at people's behaviour because we must assume people have always been people: and that means there were no more hunters then than there are "hunters" now. Most people don't have to be daring and adrenalin-flushed, but there have always been some that do and there always will.
Send private message
Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Jacobs is not Crackers.

Cities must have come first. Agriculture grew out of need. As all cities grew from an original settlement that by and large had a static population. Life spans were incredibly short throughout history up until the 20th Century. So the only way cities grew was because of trade.

My posit is that pretty much every major city we know of was created by mariners and/or traders. The easiest way to show this is how cities grew in the NEW World and apply the 'what is what was' principle.

Virtually every major city in the USA was established as a trading outpost by mariners/traders. The first settlers brought some supplies with them then traded goods and service with the locals as well as hunting and gathering to supply the small settlement. As the settlement grew larger more permanent food supplies were needed to feed the growing population as trades and services were established to cater for the growing economy.

Settlements CAN'T grow into cities without trade. Trade creates growth. Growth creates demand. Demand creates need for a stable food supply. The stable food supply can be grown within the settlement initially but eventually it has to be moved increasingly further away. Rural America was created only after the Cities were established.

This is exactly how most historical cities were created.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I don't think it affects the argument much but the statement

Life spans were incredibly short throughout history up until the 20th Century.

is surely untrue. Life spans have always been of the 'three-score-and-ten' variety. It was the very high infant mortality that took the overall life expectancy down.

However Komorikid's broad argument about city populations appears to be correct. I'm currently reading about the first great urban increase of modern times -- the Dutch cities in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries -- and the evidence is clear enough that strictly urban populations were fairly static (a combination of low birth rate among the relatively sophisticated and recurring swingeing plagues) but the rural population was growing apace and, as it were, feeding into the towns.

The sequence then seems to be
1. A city appears (for whatever reason)
2. That city needs feeding
3. This promotes greater efficiency in food growing in the countryside (of which of course 'agriculture' is itself the first great example)
4. This leads to an increase in the rural population
5. But the greater efficiency means less demand for labour
6. The excess moves into the city.

Though whether this is a self-fuelling loop and whether or not it is benign, I'm not sure.
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Life spans were incredibly short throughout history up until the 20th Century.

Life expectancy seems to have gone down with the advent of agriculture.

I hear they're now saying "'til death us do part" used to be a much shorter sentence, so typical marriage contracts should be reviewed. But how long has there been a diamond anniversary?

Settlements CAN'T grow into Cities without trade. Trade creates growth.

Careful. A small settlement is already a city if it is the organ of economic growth. (Cities are defined by their behaviour, not their size.) And don't forget innovation: creation of (new) goods, services and resources to be traded.

Rural America was created only after the Cities were established. This is exactly how most historical cities were created.

Hear hear.

(As I understand it, pockets of Beaker remains across Europe correlate pretty well with the major cities. Most of them are probably outposts and show the cities have been there pretty much forever.)
Send private message
DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

However Komorikid's broad argument about city populations appears to be correct.

>Ahem<

...the first great urban increase of modern times...
...urban populations were fairly static... the rural population was growing apace
...

I don't follow.

The sequence then seems to be

Your squidgy bits seem to depend on whether you're talking about new-cities-after-agriculture or the beginnings-of-cities-and-agriculture. Jacobs' model, however, is seamless: she operates the principle what is is what was.

1. A city appears (for whatever reason)
2. That city needs feeding

The city quite possibly appears because people need feeding.

3. This promotes greater efficiency in food growing in the countryside (of which of course 'agriculture' is itself the first great example)

No, you've missed a bit. The point is that food growing had to be invented in cities and later transplanted into the wide open spaces. (Much later if Venus figurines really are carb-i.e.-grain-fuelled "corpulants" {Is OED listening?})

And you may have missed the next bit: greater efficiencies are not developed in the countryside: they are developed in cities and implemented in the countryside.

But maybe I've missed a bit: why should people in need of food lead to more food rather than fewer people? (We have already noted that the more we can afford to feed, the fewer children we tend to have.) There is a principle lurking here that needs to be brought out.

Maybe it's simply this: agricultural techniques are among the myriad avenues of commerce and research, all with their own vicissitudes. As it goes, wealth and efficiency have increased overall, with people responding to circumstances and circumstances responding to people.

4. This leads to an increase in the rural population
5. But the greater efficiency means less demand for labour
6. The excess moves into the city
.

This is simplistic. People only move to the city because of some (often unfulfilled) promise. Efficiency doesn't increase so quickly that the younger sons find themselves unexpectedly at a loose end. What's to stop them finding something else to do to serve/tap this growing local market? Where do towns come from? New developments can increase the demand for labour...

Cities bolster the countryside, not the other way around: think of villages as producing turnips and humans for the cities.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I am reporting on the hyper-modern experience. I do not know how well it accords with early cities. I will try to flesh out my original position by random observations.
1. New cities did not appear; old small ones simply became new large ones.
2. Cities do not appear to have any natural increase because city-dwellers have fewer children and plagues have greater effect in cities. (I should have mentioned that the growth in the Dutch cities was fuelled by immigration from outside Holland as well as the countryside -- perhaps cities always offer higher wages and therefore are always prone to this effect.)
3. Developments in agriculture are not specifically city-created. In Holland it was the huge demand of the various armies in the Thirty Years War that led to the Golden Age of Dutch Agriculture.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7  Next

Jump to:  
Page 5 of 7

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group