REVIEW: Patricia Crone: Pre-Industrial Societies

Why I am still using a quarter century-old book to orient my students as to what pre-industrial agrarian-age societies were like...

Why I am still using a quarter century-old book to orient my students as to what pre-industrial agrarian-age societies were like...

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Mark Koyama says, of Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World:

Mark Koyama: ‘Pre-Industrial Societies is a brief, readable portrait of how preindustrial societies functioned…. Crone isn't afraid to generalize and to draw on the ideas of social scientists. She packs in an amazing amount of analyze into a very short book and roams across entirety of world history. If I could only recommend one book to students interested in how societies functioned in the past, it might be this book!…

I agree. My only worry is that the book was published back in 1989, which is now 25 years ago. Surely someone must have written a better synthesis in the generation since then?

What does the zeitgeist say? Let’s ask ChatGPT4. We do so: What books do intelligence and thoughtful historians think provide better and more recent short syntheses of what we know about pre-industrial societies than Patricia Crone's 1989 book "Pre-Industrial Societies"? It offers up:

1. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum" by Robert L. Kelly (1995)….

2. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin (2007)….

3. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000)….

4. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (2005)….

5. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred W. Crosby (1986)….

6. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange by Kojin Karatani (2014)….

7. Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris (2010)….

8. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony (2007)…

It doesn’t seem to have “understood” the question properly. So sharpen the prompt: Those books are all much smaller in scope and sweep than Crone. Is there a well-recommended book that covers all pre-industrial societies since the invention of writing? And it offers up:

1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997)….

2. The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill (2003)….

3. A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (2010)….

4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)….

5. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (2012)….

6. Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson (2011)…

I don’t know Kelly or Karatani. Kelly covers too early a period. The others are all well worth reading, but none of them are what I am looking for—except perhaps McNeill and McNeill. What about Karatani?

Karatani, it turns out, wants to structure human history around four modes of exchange—gift-exchange, protection-racket, arms-length market exchange, and then “Mode D”, transcendent associationism. His book’s chapters are: On Modes of Exchange, The Sedentary Revolution, The Gift and Magic, The State, World Money, World Empires, Universal Religions, The Modern State, Industrial Capital, Nation, Associationism, The Stages of Global Capitalism and Repetition, and Toward a World Republic. I cannot judge the book, but when I start reading it I find its neo-Kantian Marxese is far too dense for my undergraduates, and perhaps for me.

So how about McNeill & McNeill? It has 150 pages on the world from the development of agriculture through to 1500. The central focus of the book is on how webs of interactions—involving the exchange of ideas, goods, technologies, and diseases—played a pivotal role. Agriculture is seen as enabling the growth of truly complex societal webs that produced the High Antiquity civilizations of the Middle East, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, and then the Mediterranean. Lots of things that they say are things that are true, and lots are also things that were said by Patricia Crone. But Crone has the edge in being much more systematic on how Agrarian-Age societies worked. McNeill and McNeill spend, to my mind, too much of their space on second-order phenomena that were the changing lifestyles and increased connections of elites.

So Crone it remains.

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What can I tell you about it?

Patricia Crone's expertise in early Islamic history shines through throughout. It makes the book a very refreshing one in that western European examples and cases do not, as so often is the case, take up much more mindshare than they deserve in any picture of the pre-modern world.

But it is her ability to generalize and draw on social science ideas that makes this a very special and valuable read. The book's brilliance lies in its ability to condense complex concepts into a narrative that is both educational and engaging. Crone's skillful handling of a vast array of historical contexts, from the Mongol Empire to seventeenth-century France, is a testament to her expertise as a historian. And Crone’s writing is clear and jargon-free

The book’s objective is clear from the beginning: to understand the constraints under which pre-industrial societies and élites labored, and thus to draw out what such societies had in common—and to do all this without projecting anything about the structure of our modern societies back onto the past.

One of the most striking aspects of pre-industrial societies is the reliance on force, usually military force, for maintaining internal order via forms of collective punishment imposed on whole groups—inhabitants of a village, a district, or a city. Bureaucracy was inadequate. Hence governments could not do a good job of distinguishing individuals and alloting whatever it thought they deserved to each.

Patronage was always crucial, emphasizing the importance of personal connections over skill sets​​. This reflects a stark difference from the modern emphasis on professional expertise. It hinges on personal trust as pretty much the only social glue back then: you could (probably) trust your nephew to do the job. You really could not trust anywhere else. Governance was thus mistrustful and predatory. In some sense, it was a miracle that there was as much innovation​ and investment as there was.

Poverty was rife. Producing a lot of surplus was next to impossible. The challenges posed by the lack of efficient transportation and communication systems were enormous. These limitations significantly restricted the development of markets and of a sophisticated division of labor, although they did not eliminate such development. Still, advances in technology were slow—and, while they benefited the lifestyles of the rich and famous, their effect on the population at large was only, as John Stuart Mill said, to enable a larger population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment.

What surplus from agriculture there was was consumed by the élite​​. Why? Because otherwise the need to have more children to try to provide some insurance for the family would push up the population until there was (next to) no surplus. Malthus ruled, with production above subsistence only to the extent that the élite were able to run a successful force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation machine. Social stratification is thus of the essence in understanding pre-industrial societies: how social hierarchies were constructed and maintained.

And, of course, the most important piece of social stratification is the gender-based one.

What glued society together. For one thing, religion: Crone’s discussion of the role of religion in pre-industrial societies is particularly enlightening. Religious beliefs and practices were interwoven with every aspect of life, from governance to economics, forming the worldview that shaped the functioning of these societies.

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What do I hope you will take away from the book? Here are eight possibilities:

1. The Great Transformation to Modern Industrial Society: There is a truly vast gulf between pre-industrial societies and the modern world.

2. Role of Force in Pre-Industrial Societies: In pre-industrial societies, maintaining internal order often required force—military or military-like force—due to the absence of strong economic and cultural ties and factors that could make interactions win-win as a rule.

3. Economic and Social Structures: Agrarian dire poverty was the rule, and whatever prosperity and high culture was built on top of that existed only to the extent that the élite could run their force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation machine.

4. Labor and Patronage: Only rarely could you hire a stranger, or be hired by a stranger, do do a job or get paid and have the job actually get done and the pay transferred. Hence the importance of kinship and patronage in pre-industrial societies: connections over skills.

5. Taxation & Violence: The much higher tolerance for violence in pre-industrial societies, especially in contexts like tax collection, due to the different economic conditions and societal norms.

6. Religion & Culture: The significant role of religion and culture in shaping the life and governance of pre-industrial societies. You could not choose you religion; you could not choose your culture—the very idea that in some sense you might as close to nonsense.

7. Technological Development: Extremely slow technological advance in pre-industrial times, with Malthusian pressure guaranteeing that the overwhelming bulk of any dividend from technological advance would go to supporting a larger population rather than making the population richer.

8. Social Stratification: Overwhelmingly, people were slotted into social roles embedded in hierarchies from which they could escape only with great difficulty, if at all. And this slotting overwhelmingly took place at birth. And, of course, gender roles were constructed and maintained as the most important single aspect of social stratification.

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Discussion Questions:

1. How does Crone define a 'civilized' society in the context of pre-industrial times, and what factors contribute to the transition from a primitive to a civilized society?

2. How did the central role of and reliance on agriculture shape social, economic, and political structures?

3. What were the prospects for development in the context of agrarian-age limitations on market economies in pre-industrial societies? How did the nature of agricultural production and land ownership affect market activities?

4. What influenced urban development in pre-industrial societies? What roles did cities play, and how were they different from modern urban centers?

5. How were pre-industrial societies stratified? What roles did peasants, the ruling elite, and the bourgeoisie play within this social structure?

6. What was the impact of limited transportation and communication methods on the economic and social development of pre-industrial societies.

7. How did the division of labor and specialization evolve in pre-industrial societies? What were the implications for social organization and economic activity?

8. How did the emergence of state structures affect power dynamics and social organization?

9. How did the level of material culture and the nature of intellectual pursuits reflect the broader societal structure?

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References;

• Crone, Patricia: 1989. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Oxford: Blackwell. <https://archive.org/details/isbn_2901851683115>.

• Karatani, Kojin: 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs. Durham: Duke University Press. <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376682​​>.

• Koyama, Mark: n.d. “Best Books on Politics & Economics in Preindustrial Societies”. Shepherd: Explore, Discover, Read. <https://shepherd.com/best-books/politics-and-economics-in-preindustrial-societies>.