Page 173 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

58 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated
plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding
of ourselves. • Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975)

a succession of progressively larger and more militaris- but were also subject to demands to perform work for the
tic states: the Chavin, the contemporaneous Moche and larger unit.
Nazca, the Chimu, and finally the Inca, based in Cuzco, Old World agricultural ecologies are now clearly dom-
who established their dominance in the 1470s.The Inca inant in the New World as well as the Old. Yet New
demanded two-thirds of all production and large corvees World technology persists in a wide range of environ-
of labor to build huge road systems, storage facilities, mental niches that Old World agriculture has not been
and extraordinary mountain cities with terraced fields adapted to: the Hopi mesas with eight inches of annual
that could not possibly have paid for themselves in eco- rainfall, Mexican milpas whose owners rely on traditional
nomic terms. Manufacture of cloth goods and utilitarian maize as a low-cost subsistence base, the high Andes, and
and craft objects was organized and standardized on a the Amazon rain forest.
large scale. When groups under pressure from the Inca
fled to avoid conquest, the Inca sent colonists to replace Industrial Agriculture
them. When Pizarro arrived in 1532 and captured the Industrial agriculture responds to the higher levels of per-
ruler, the system collapsed. capita output permitted by the industrial revolution. Eco-
The Mayan civilization of the Yucatán peninsula was logically, it breaks up the animal–plant interdependence
different only in that the Mayan elite seem to have been at the farm level by separating animal production facili-
indigenous, and they actually did perform functions cru- ties from crop production, providing manures from
cial to productivity. Mayan civilization appeared essen- industrial sources, and requiring farmers to produce to
tially complete in the archaeological record about 2000 industrial specifications rather than consumer prefer-
BCE and persisted continuously until the middle of the ences. Organizationally, it makes farm management part
fourteenth century, when it collapsed in a series of civil of the system of factory production, replacing inter- and
wars and the areas were depopulated. The population intra-household relationships and elite prerogatives with
centers were temple and palace complexes surrounded by relations based on commercial contracts between farmers
many small hamlets and large areas of a type of chi- and industrial organizations. At the extreme, in areas
nampa technology. such as California’s Imperial Valley, farmers are not
When Europeans arrived Old World agriculture ar- landowners of any kind. Corporations own much of the
rived with them, but the pattern differed in English- land, and farmers are contractors who agree to produce
speaking and Spanish-speaking areas. In the former most the desired crop for delivery at a specific time.The farmer
of the management was peasant/household, and because may own a core of farm machines, will hire whatever
Old World peasant agriculture supported far higher pop- additional inputs are needed to produce the crop, and
ulation densities than New World peasant agriculture, it then move on to the next contract.
completely displaced the latter wherever the two systems Industrial agriculture is highly specialized.The on-farm
competed for land. population of the United States is now 2.5 percent of the
In the Spanish-speaking areas, by contrast, the main total population, but it is supported by people in rural
Old World management pattern was elite and the man- and urban areas engaged in agricultural finance, storage,
agement system displaced was therefore its New World primary processing, government, trade, transport,
counterpart, leaving the peasant systems more or less as research, and education who make up not less than 20
they were.The most extensive result was the “latifundia/ percent of the total.When this entire group is taken as the
minifundia” situation of large European-owned hacien- unit for comparison from one society to another, it is eas-
das, mission estates, and other elite enterprises being laid ier to see how industrial agriculture arises and to avoid
over indigenous villages in which the villagers retained overstating the contrast between agrarian and industrial
rights to carry on with their own subsistence agriculture society.