Land-limitation and farming

Last month Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles ("BFB") put out "The farming-inequality nexus: new insights from ancient Western Eurasia", Antiquity (2019) doi 10.15184/aqy.2019.105. Alongside this, we may refer to the latest map of the spread of farming to new places.

BFB propose that when farmers learnt to domesticate oxen, land and oxen suddenly got very valuable... and human labour, cheaper. Farmers with oxen could produce food more cheaply than the old farmers hoeing by hand; "passing the savings on to you, the customer" as the saying goes. Any farmer who couldn't afford an ox was left to tend vegetable-plots, if that. This is a recipe for inequality based upon a labour-pool; or, as Marx would call the latter, the proletariat. BFB's measure for inequality is the "Gini Coefficient".

A symptom of a "land-limited" economy is the effort to clear more land or to recycle the old land. Learning to ferment manure into fertiliser was one step. Irrigation is another. So is clearing out forest. Or terracing hills against erosion.

The real inequality, says the text, started the fourth millennium BC onwards but the chart "figure 3" points to the four thousands BC. Catalhoyuk, Civilisation Of The Goddess^TM, was already unequal in the 6000s; Eridu down Iraq, in the late 4000s. Southern Europe wouldn't get that bad until the Minoan era. But over the 4000s, European towns did raise their Gini percentiles to varying degrees. UPDATE 8/9/2020: 4400 BC, Poland.

That map of the spread of farming shows that farming had already spread before these inequalities had kicked in. Also, the move was very slow. This doesn't look like a big push of land-hungry plantation-owners. It looks more like mere overpopulation by the freeholders, pushing their way up the rivers, likely under heavy fire by the old hunter-gathering woodwoses decidedly Not Dead Yet. By 5000ish BC, the farmers had finally taken northern Continental Europe. And there they stayed, not crossing the North Sea.

At 4000 BC, though, after a whole millennium of farmers dwelling along the French and German coasts, a sudden push conquered the Danes' Mark, Kent, and Anglesey.

I think that to feed this proletariat, Europeans had to learn very quickly to improve their fishing-boats for North Sea conditions. They also needed more land - after the plantation owners had done kicking the freeholders off their own land.