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The most recent Byzantium and Friends was a discussion of "peasants" - rural non-elites - and how to make them historically visible, and what we learn about them and their lives when we can start to see them in the record. The particular test case was about late Byzantine Aegean islands.
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Mar 11, 2023 05:33
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Koramei posted:This is a super fascinating chart, but I'm actually surprised at how low the even late Medieval share was. I'd always assumed it was more like... 90% or even more. Less than 60% in England and the Low Countries even in 1400 -- so 4 in 10 weren't farmers (and it's even including fishermen and such) -- is pretty striking. All the pre-1800 numbers are estimates, based on the interpretation of data for the purposes of economics studies. One of the quirks of this is the definition of employment, one of the papers cited makes clear that it doesn't count 70% of women's labour because it wasn't paid. This is well and good for economists, I guess, but it does mean that you have to consider a women who is married to a farmer, raises farm children (known as unpaid labour), and does the household duties in the farm etc. may not be an agricultural worker. The chart makers have done something very annoying, which is mixing up data for different countries from different studies with different methodologies. Specifically, the data for England is from a study where the woman described above is only 30% an agricultural worker. The data for other countries is from a paper that included with a broader population study where a ratio of 0.8 is applied to the documented rural population of various countries. Some assumptions were made about both populations to streamline the process, such ignoring the complicated calculation of farmers on the edge of urban areas or discounting any dual-occupation workers (farmer/smith, farmer/carpenter etc.) from being agricultural workers (This was also an economics paper). In this paper, England actually is 75% agricultural worker in the late middle ages. The Low Countries and Italy were known for being unusually urbanized place in the Middle Ages, so them having a lower ratio ratio isn't that surprising. More surprising maybe is Spain, whose population was estimated to be 65% agricultural in 1500 in the paper, just a bit higher than Italy. Overall I'd say that the numbers used here skew low for the purposes of understanding, from a historical perspective, how many people worked in agriculture. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 07:17
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CrypticFox posted:I'm not really sure, I don't know enough about Early Modern Europe to answer that. The two numbers I've seen cited for the percentage of the Roman Empire that worked in agriculture are 80% and 90%, (although those are pretty rough guesses based on archaeological field surveys, Grand Fromage might be able to better speak to that question). Yeah around 70% to 80% is what I've read. Ancient demography is all insane guesswork though so I wouldn't take any of it as gospel. Somewhere between 20% and 30% of the Roman population was urban and the vast majority of the rural population would've been doing agriculture.
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Mar 11, 2023 07:58
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Is there somewhere good to read up on this kind of stuff about the Vikings?
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Mar 11, 2023 09:03
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I've been doing some reading on this and part of the answer is food imports. The Dutch Republic and Northern italy in the 16th/17th are big net grain importers - From the Baltic, England, Southern France, etc. You can sustain a more urbanised population if you essentially outsource your grain farming to elsewhere and pay for it with traded and finished goods. A interesting exception is England, which over the 1550-1700 period urbanises while remaining a net grain exporter. London triples in population and becomes one of the great cities of Europe while England as a whole continues to export more grain than it imports. How? Historians still aren't sure. But it's one of the first signs something odd is happening in the English economy.
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Mar 11, 2023 11:14
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I've been doing some reading on this and part of the answer is food imports. The Dutch Republic and Northern italy in the 16th/17th are big net grain importers - From the Baltic, England, Southern France, etc. You can sustain a more urbanised population if you essentially outsource your grain farming to elsewhere and pay for it with traded and finished goods.
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Mar 11, 2023 11:24
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Wait England exported grain? I thought during that period England was importing tons of grain from America.
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Mar 11, 2023 11:32
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Elden Lord Godfrey posted:Wait England exported grain? I thought during that period England was importing tons of grain from America. From its barely just established colonies? Not that I've ever heard...
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Mar 11, 2023 11:57
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In the 18th century British America was definitely exporting grain, because when the revolution hit, trade got upended and a bunch of slaves in the Caribbean starved since most of the arable land there was just sugar plantation and actual stuff of life was supplied by import. After the period cited though
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Mar 11, 2023 12:18
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One of the key bits about England and the British Isles in particular is that the majority of its farmland has relatively easy access to the sea, either directly or through rivers running nearby, in contrast to countries like France or Spain. It's a lot easier to move bulk goods like grain around by sea than by land, which means that for a lot of English farmers the market for their produce isn't "The local town I can huck things to via oxcart" but rather "As far as a boat can reach," which is pretty drat far. This means that English farmers (near water access anyways) have more incentive to produce surplus grain than the average inland French farmer - there's no point busting your back to create a massive surplus when the local town can only buy so much grain before it's not willing to buy more and you can't realistically shift your grain anywhere else, but if you can dispose of your surplus grain in London or some hungry Dutch city across the way even when your local township has said "No thanks, we're full," you can sell as much as you can make as long as there are big coastal urban centers somewhere nearby consuming more than their locality can feed. It also means that the average English farmer is considerably savvier about international trade and sophisticated financial markets and instruments than the average French farmer which has some interesting implications as the Industrial Revolution starts rolling around and there's a lot of projects offering big returns on investment if only they could get some capital to get off the ground... That being said I've mostly seen the dynamic I described there in the 18th century, maaaybe the 17th. I'm not sure how far it applies before then - you'd need certain preconditions to get things going, like enough large coastal cities to provide a market, sufficiently developed coastal trade and trade infrastructure to be able to transport the surpluses, etc. etc.
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Mar 11, 2023 12:39
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Here's the blog post which first inspired this question. I'd underestimated London's growth during this time - over 150 years it goes from 50,000 people to 500,000. 50,000 to 200,000 happens in the first 50 years, 1550-1600. The size alone isn't exceptional - Paris and Constaniople are as big already in Europe. But the growth is, especially given England is not yet a imperial power in line with the french and ottomans.
Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 12:58
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skasion posted:In the 18th century British America was definitely exporting grain, because when the revolution hit, trade got upended and a bunch of slaves in the Caribbean starved since most of the arable land there was just sugar plantation and actual stuff of life was supplied by import. After the period cited though Also presumably that's exporting grain direct to the Caribbean which makes a lot more sense logistically than shipping it back to Britain.
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Mar 11, 2023 16:51
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feedmegin posted:Also presumably that's exporting grain direct to the Caribbean which makes a lot more sense logistically than shipping it back to Britain. Yeah probably. they must have been more or less capable of sending large amounts of food across the Atlantic though. Since after all, they were feeding all* the people making the voyages across, one way or another. More probably as flour or hard tack than raw cereal I would think, and with a relatively high tolerance of spoilage
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Mar 11, 2023 17:08
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skasion posted:Yeah probably. they must have been more or less capable of sending large amounts of food across the Atlantic though. Since after all, they were feeding all* the people making the voyages across, one way or another. More probably as flour or hard tack than raw cereal I would think, and with a relatively high tolerance of spoilage https://www.ouramericanrevolution.org/index.cfm/page/view/m0091 quote:Colonial American Exports
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Mar 11, 2023 17:12
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That doesn't disagree with the suggestion that those wheat exports were mostly feeding Caribbean islands that weren't growing their own, though. (Also, again this is later than the period we were talking about)
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Mar 11, 2023 18:13
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I've been doing some reading on this and part of the answer is food imports. The Dutch Republic and Northern italy in the 16th/17th are big net grain importers - From the Baltic, England, Southern France, etc. You can sustain a more urbanised population if you essentially outsource your grain farming to elsewhere and pay for it with traded and finished goods. A thing I found interesting in The Great Divergence is that England during that period is relying on its colonies very heavily for clothing production - basically the land that owuld normally be used very very heavily for flax and sheep is outside of England during that period.
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Mar 11, 2023 22:54
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Alhazred posted:Kim Hjardar's books Vikings and Vikings at War is considered to be pretty good.
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Mar 13, 2023 18:46
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i was always curious about how quickly new crop strains develop in pre modern societies. In my head it makes sense for medieval farms to be more productive per acre than an roman republic era one because there's a thousand years of crop selection between the two but idk if people thought of their plants like that
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Mar 13, 2023 18:59
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Tomn posted:One of the key bits about England and the British Isles in particular is that the majority of its farmland has relatively easy access to the sea, either directly or through rivers running nearby, in contrast to countries like France or Spain. It's a lot easier to move bulk goods like grain around by sea than by land, which means that for a lot of English farmers the market for their produce isn't "The local town I can huck things to via oxcart" but rather "As far as a boat can reach," which is pretty drat far. This means that English farmers (near water access anyways) have more incentive to produce surplus grain than the average inland French farmer - there's no point busting your back to create a massive surplus when the local town can only buy so much grain before it's not willing to buy more and you can't realistically shift your grain anywhere else, but if you can dispose of your surplus grain in London or some hungry Dutch city across the way even when your local township has said "No thanks, we're full," you can sell as much as you can make as long as there are big coastal urban centers somewhere nearby consuming more than their locality can feed. It also means that the average English farmer is considerably savvier about international trade and sophisticated financial markets and instruments than the average French farmer which has some interesting implications as the Industrial Revolution starts rolling around and there's a lot of projects offering big returns on investment if only they could get some capital to get off the ground... Another interesting example of this is the US right after the Revolution. Farmers along the coast could pretty much grow whatever they wanted, in whatever amounts they wanted, because it was pretty easy to move it to port. Inland farmers, though, had to contend with lovely transportation infrastructure, and once you got up into the hills/mountains where the rivers stopped being navigable it turned into a shitshow. Doubly so once you get over them - remember the Ohio/Mississippi network isn't a 100% American highway yet. As a result you see a gently caress ton of distilling, because it's a hell of a lot easier to get a few barrels of whisky to market out on the coast than a few hundred pounds of grain (roughly 25 lbs of grain to 1 gallon of liquor iirc). This rapidly lead to a rebellion out on the frontier when the new government tried to tax domestically manufactured liquor to help pay for the wartime debts, in no small part because it was seen as falling much heavier on the farmers in the hinterland that relied on distilling to earn anything off their surplus.
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Mar 13, 2023 19:03
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Agean90 posted:i was always curious about how quickly new crop strains develop in pre modern societies. In my head it makes sense for medieval farms to be more productive per acre than an roman republic era one because there's a thousand years of crop selection between the two but idk if people thought of their plants like that Crop selection was a thing, which is why we have maize. There's some other possible evidence of it going on happening in NA in the North East but that's outside my area of expertise, I just remember seeing an article or two about it. I have absolutely zero idea how/if it occurred in Europe. But conceptually it's pretty easy to work through.
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Mar 13, 2023 19:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:Another interesting example of this is the US right after the Revolution. Farmers along the coast could pretty much grow whatever they wanted, in whatever amounts they wanted, because it was pretty easy to move it to port. Inland farmers, though, had to contend with lovely transportation infrastructure, and once you got up into the hills/mountains where the rivers stopped being navigable it turned into a shitshow. Doubly so once you get over them - remember the Ohio/Mississippi network isn't a 100% American highway yet.
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Mar 13, 2023 19:28
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Agean90 posted:i was always curious about how quickly new crop strains develop in pre modern societies. In my head it makes sense for medieval farms to be more productive per acre than an roman republic era one because there's a thousand years of crop selection between the two but idk if people thought of their plants like that The how is pretty simple: farmers are not in fact total dumbasses they're as smart as anybody else, they notice that one batch of plants does better or worse in a given area, they adjust their planting patterns, and they tell the people around them about what they learned. The thing that is probably worth saying though is that "productive per acre" is not generally considered to be the first priority of subsistence farmers. At the end of the day subsistence farming is in fact fairly risky as survival strategies go, and so the priority is less "most production per acre" and more "least likely to fail." This has a bunch of interesting effects that change how they farm compared to modern farming, such as having many different micro-strains of crops to use in different microclimates (e.g. one strain of wheat for the sunny side of a hill, one for the shady side of a hill), and having non-contiguous plots (as in, in a given hamlet, each farmer would have a patchwork of plots that are separated by other farmers from the same hamlet). This also meant having a mix of crops that performed well in wet years vs dry years, and of course prioritizing things like hardiness against pests. Now, people are not monolithic and crops need to be a certain level of productive, and of course there's a security that comes from having crops be more productive, so productivity per acre is not a nonpriority, but crops are going to be selected for a lot of different virtues and the priority is generally going to be "not dying" above "maximum production." e: A cool piece of european crop selection is rye. Rye mimics wheat, and in the middle east was considered a pest: rye is compared to wheat quite bitter, and anybody who has baked with it knows that its protein content is much lower, so in the middle east people just basically threw it out. But Europeans did in fact take to it and use it when the middle eastern agricultural package was imported into Europe, implying that there was a substantial enough difference in preferences between early farmers in europe vs the eastern mediterranean to justify adopting a whole type of crop that was from the eastern med and not grown there. Tulip fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Mar 13, 2023 |
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Mar 13, 2023 20:07
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Never mind crops, try the horse collar. Efficient ploughing is important. Iirc rye is much more cold tolerant than wheat. Better bitter bread than none if there's a frost. Note where rye bread is popular today... feedmegin fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Mar 13, 2023 |
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Mar 13, 2023 22:45
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Also weeding wheat fields put a lot of selective pressure on weeds to 'look like wheat', inadvertently creating enough seletion pressure to invent new cereal crops.
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Mar 13, 2023 23:03
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No sense going against the grain
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Mar 13, 2023 23:40
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Brawnfire posted:No sense going against the grain Amaizeing
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Mar 14, 2023 00:44
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Rice one
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Mar 14, 2023 00:49
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Agean90 posted:i was always curious about how quickly new crop strains develop in pre modern societies. In my head it makes sense for medieval farms to be more productive per acre than an roman republic era one because there's a thousand years of crop selection between the two but idk if people thought of their plants like that There was a change in field rotation that was a big deal. Two field went to three field. But I think that was a relatively late change.
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Mar 14, 2023 00:57
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Not specifically related to any comments but the conversation reminded me that I think people tend to imagine people from the past as stupid, but they weren't. They were just as intelligent as us. They just knew less, or the knowledge they required on a daily basis was very different, and we've built up on generations of discovery and trial and error. Hundreds of years from now people will probably ask why we didn't know about flying cars when we had regular ones or whatever, and flying cars are sooooo simple.
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Mar 14, 2023 01:49
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On the other hand, they were just as stupid as us
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Mar 14, 2023 01:51
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Wasn't the development of three crop rice fields partially because of better cultivars of rice?
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Mar 14, 2023 01:53
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:On the other hand, they were just as stupid as us Also true
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Mar 14, 2023 01:54
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We do have flying cars. They're called helicopters. What we don't have is the socio-economic conditions that would make them a practical option for the kinds of activity stereotypically imagined when speaking of flying cars.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:49
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We don't have flying cars because the traffic control, airspace, and safety control management would be absolutely insane to deal with. Also flying car prototypes and working models exist.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:53
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Lawman 0 posted:Wasn't the development of three crop rice fields partially because of better cultivars of rice? Rice? No. I could be wrong but I don't know what crop rotation you even do with rice. I don't remember for dry rice but I know for wet rice you can do up to 24 harvest between fallowing of a given field. Two to three field is a kind of enormous strategic change. Two field is 1 field planted, 1 field fallow. Three field is 1 field planted with nitrogen depleters e.g. oats, wheat, 1 field planted with nitrogen fixers e.g. beans, and 1 fallow. This is an enormous change in the whole way you think about your land use.
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Mar 14, 2023 08:36
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Not specifically related to any comments but the conversation reminded me that I think people tend to imagine people from the past as stupid, but they weren't. They were just as intelligent as us. They just knew less, or the knowledge they required on a daily basis was very different, and we've built up on generations of discovery and trial and error. Hundreds of years from now people will probably ask why we didn't know about flying cars when we had regular ones or whatever, and flying cars are sooooo simple. The only other thing to consider is there is a lot more people around now, so the chances that someone thinks of a good idea are higher even if everything else is equal. I think that's part of where this modern question of "why did it take people so long to think of this?" comes from - there are more people now, and more people who research full time, or try and come up with novel applications of existing ideas/technology full time. So of course things get discovered/invented/improved faster now.
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Mar 14, 2023 12:04
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It's also easier to invent something new when there are more previous discoveries to build upon
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Mar 14, 2023 12:08
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FreudianSlippers posted:It's also easier to invent something new when there are more previous discoveries to build upon I invented this sword to kill my stupid neighbor working all year to collect a crop when I can just raid him at the right moment. I feel like we were our own worse enemies for scientific discovery.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:50
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It took ages to make one Rome and now we have like five of the things.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:57
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Crab Dad posted:I invented this sword to kill my stupid neighbor working all year to collect a crop when I can just raid him at the right moment. Eventually however I realized that starving my neighbor by raiding him all the time meant I wouldn't have anything to raid and would starve myself, so instead I learned to threaten to raid him and in exchange he'd give me part of his crop, but not enough to starve him. The great thing was that since I was only THREATENING to raid instead of ACTUALLY raiding, I had a lot more time and could threaten a lot more people and thus ensure a good income even without ever actually raiding while taking less per raid! Better yet, eventually I learned that I could claim to be working to protect him from OTHER people raiding him so he could even feel grateful! And thus taxation was invented. Progress! (just in case: this is a joke, i am aware that there is more to it than that)
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Mar 14, 2023 17:03
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