Page 210 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

production and reproduction 1511

ter and summer pastures and harsh climatic conditions reside in villages having little contact with urban centers.
took their toll on the young, old, or infirm. Population With the advent of iron metallurgy after about 1000 BCE
pressures frequently built as numbers increased or as cli- peasantry acquired improved tools—axes, plow parts,
mate changes reduced grazing. On such occasions long shovels, hoes, and so forth—that increased production
migrations into grasslands of rival communities, or even substantially.
invasions of the civilized societies nearby, would occur. Second, civilizations created large interactive popula-
Some examples are the Turkic and Mongol peoples of tions that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Crowd
inner Eurasia in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE, diseases became permanent features of the human bio-
Semitic peoples of Arabia in the seventh and eighth cen- logical condition.
turies CE, and the proto-Egyptians of the Sahara Desert Two consequences occurred. First, cities had demo-
who migrated into the Nile River valley after 4000 BCE. graphic deficits; that is, their death rates normally ex-
As agricultural and pastoral populations spread across ceeded their birth rates. Cities survived only because of
the world, some found their way into the fertile valleys of regular rural emigration from the surrounding villages or
the Nile,Tigris and Euphrates, Indus, and Huang Rivers, emigration from long distances. Second, civilized peoples
where they developed dense concentrations of large vil- developed at least partial immunities to the diseases they
lages and highly productive agriculture, which gave rise carried. Simple agriculturists, pastoralists, and hunter-
to urban cores, that is, cities and civilization. Early civi- gatherers had little or no immunity to urban diseases and
lizations were urban-based political and economic sys- suffered vast die-offs when they came in contact with civ-
tems. Each city controlled a few thousand villages, whose ilized groups. Civilized societies expanded because of the
structures and systems of production and reproduction continued strong reproductive habits of villagers.As their
were largely unchanged, except in two important ways. populations expanded into peripheral areas for agricul-
First, civilizations were more socially stratified and tural land or for natural resources such as timber, metal
developed classes of specialists: crafts people, bureau- ores, or fresh water sources, primitive peoples shrank
crats, a priesthood, and a landed aristocracy often iden- back or perished from disease, in effect a kind of bacte-
tical to a military elite. About 90 percent of the popula- riological warfare no less potent because urban societies
tion remained agricultural peasantry, who continued to did not know that disease was why they prevailed.

Industrialization
By these processes agrarian civilizations expanded from
about 3500 BCE to 1750 CE, when the Industrial Revo-
lution brought the next great shift in production and
reproduction. It launched the modern population explo-
sion; increasing output of food and manufactured prod-
ucts at rates greater than population growth resulted in
a dramatic rise in standards of living. Beginning in north-
western Europe during the mid-eighteenth century, indus-
trialization passed through successive stages during the
next two centuries, meanwhile diffusing its productive
forces or their influence across most of the world.
The yak, the beast of burden in Tibet as well Industrialization arose out of the intersection of two
as a source of food and hair. factors. The first factor was the rise of a global network