CityReads | Agriculture & Cities inevitably Lead to Inequality?

楼市 2024-10-04 21:19 上海

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Agriculture and Cities inevitably Lead to Inequality?

Highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

大卫·格雷伯, 大卫·温格罗.人类新史：一次改写人类命运的尝试. 张帆, 张雨欣译. 九州出版社.2024.

Sources: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything

https://book.douban.com/subject/36839137/

Regarding human history and the origins of cities, the mainstream view holds that Homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of history until over 10,000 years ago when agriculture was invented. Archaeologist Gordon Childe called this the Agricultural Revolution, a period when humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to settling in villages, planting the seeds of inequality. As agricultural production accumulated surplus food, it became possible to sustain a portion of the population that no longer needed to be directly involved in farming. This surplus allowed for the emergence of full-time, specialized artisans, transport workers, merchants, soldiers, and priests, as well as officials and kings who managed and controlled these surplus resources. Thus, a ruling class and states were formed, marking a fundamental shift in social organization—a leap from rural life to urban civilization, a transformation Childe called the Urban Revolution. With the rise of cities came the birth of dynasties and empires. In short, the Agricultural and Urban Revolutions were two of the most profound changes in prehistory: humans learned to cultivate crops and domesticate animals, and states began to emerge.

This mainstream view contains an underlying assumption: as human societies grow larger, more complex, wealthier, and more "civilized," they inevitably become more unequal. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the authors critically examine this assumption behind the dominant narrative of human history by revisiting the dawn of everything. They synthesize and reinterpret archaeological discoveries from various sites around the world in an attempt to rewrite human history, particularly regarding the origins of agriculture, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization. The book questions whether 95% of human evolution was truly spent in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, and whether the invention of agriculture and cities necessarily led to hierarchy and domination. The Dawn of Everything challenges many mainstream narratives about human history and attempts to construct alternative ones. Since its publication, the book has been met with both praise and sharp criticism.

I am particularly interested in the discussion on the origins of agriculture and cities, so here’s an introduction to two points from Chapters Seven and Eight of The Dawn of Everything, which diverge from mainstream views.

First, the relationship between the origin of cities and the development of agriculture is unclear. Cities are not necessarily dependent on rural hinterlands, and the food sources for urban dwellers do not inevitably rely on grains laboriously cultivated by farmers. After the invention of agriculture, the so-called Neolithic Faustian bargain—where humanity sacrifices equality in exchange for wealth, status, and hierarchical systems—did not necessarily occur. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was slow and fragmented; much of what is considered agriculture was, in fact, small-scale horticulture. Farming emerged from an economy of scarcity, and the invention of agriculture always took place in areas where wild resources were most scarce.

The food sources of early city dwellers were diverse, including small-scale horticulture and animal husbandry, river and marine resources, and the hunting and gathering of wild plants and animals from forests and marshlands. The specific proportions of these food sources depended on the geographical location of the city.

The authors pose an interesting question: Why did agriculture emerge so late, even though Homo sapiens had existed for 200,000 years? Since the emergence of the human species, there have only been two warm periods long enough to support the development of agriculture and leave traces in the archaeological record. The first was the Eemian interglacial period, 130,000 years ago, when global temperatures stabilized at slightly higher than today’s levels, but with a limited geographical range of human habitation, it had little impact on humans. The second warm period, which we are currently in, began around 12,000 years ago and is known as the Holocene. It created an environment favorable to agriculture as humans spread across the globe.

In the early Holocene, the world’s major rivers were largely unpredictable, wild, and difficult to tame. It wasn’t until around 7,000 years ago that floodplains began to stabilize, allowing rivers like the Yellow River, the Indus, and the Tigris to form fertile floodplains and wetlands along their banks. These deltaic environments attracted both wildlife and humans, fostering agricultural development and offering abundant water resources to mitigate the risk of crop failure. They also provided materials like reeds, fibers, and silt for construction and handicrafts, giving rise to early urban civilizations. Therefore, the authors suggest that extensive agriculture may have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.

To some extent, this view echoes Jane Jacobs' 1969 "City First" hypothesis, which she introduced at the beginning of The Economy of Cities. Jacobs argued that our understanding of cities and economic development has been largely distorted by an agriculture-dominated dogma. This dogma holds that humans had been domesticating animals and cultivating crops for a long time before the first cities developed. Jacobs cited numerous examples of agricultural innovations that originated in cities, both in modern and medieval times. She reasoned that, from a logical standpoint, crop cultivation and animal husbandry in prehistoric times actually took place in cities, making the emergence of cities necessarily precede agriculture. Drawing from archaeological discoveries at Çatalhöyük, Jacobs created a fictional "New Obsidian" primitive city, where she extensively argued for a "city-before-agriculture" model. In "New Obsidian," hunters gathered to exchange handmade goods, and under the influence of the economic processes of export multipliers and import substitution, cities developed before agriculture.

Archaeologist Michael E. Smith and others, summarizing archaeological findings from the Near East, China, and Mesoamerica, listed evidence on the timeline of the origins of agriculture. They concluded that Jacobs’ hypothesis, which posits that agriculture first occurred in cities, is inconsistent with archaeological evidence, both past and present. These findings are enough to overturn Jacobs’ "city-first" model (for details, see CityReads | Agriculture and city, which comes first? Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality). Geographer Peter Taylor responded to Smith's critique, suggesting that Jacobs' theory has not been entirely disproven and remains an important topic for urban studies in archaeology and the social sciences (see CityReads | Are the Debates on ‘Agriculture and City, Which Comes First?’Concluded?).

Second,cities themselves do not necessarily lead to the emergence of a specific form of political organization, such as hierarchy and the state.

The mainstream view holds that the earliest cities, where large populations first gathered and settled permanently, correspond with the emergence of the first states. It suggests that a bureaucratic system based on writing and the state is fundamental to the formation of cities. Here, it is necessary to introduce the ten characteristics of the earliest cities proposed by Gordon Childe in 1950 (for details, see CityReads | Who first coined the term “Urban Revolution” ?):

1) In terms of size, the earliest cities were larger and more densely populated than any prior settlement.
2) In terms of population composition and function, cities were different from rural areas: while most people were farmers, cities saw the rise of full-time, specialized artisans, transport workers, merchants, officials, and priests who were not directly engaged in food production but were supported by the surplus food produced by farmers.
3) Every farmer had to contribute a small surplus from their labor on the land as a tax, usually paid to a symbolic local guardian or a sacred king.
4) Every city had its own distinct monumental public buildings.
5) Priests, officials, and soldiers consumed a large portion of the social surplus, forming what is known as the "ruling class." Compared to the shamans of the Paleolithic era or the chiefs of the Neolithic period, the ruling class was entirely exempt from physical labor.
6) Managing vast income required the invention of a system of writing and numbers.
7) The invention of writing further facilitated the development of sciences such as algebra, geometry, and astronomy. Astronomical calendars and mathematics were common features of early civilizations.
8) Some specialists, supported by the social surplus, developed abstract and complex styles of art.
9) Long-distance trade with foreign lands became routine in early civilizations. Although early international trade often involved luxury goods, it also included raw industrial materials.
10) Specialized artisans in the city not only used the materials provided to them, but they also gained security from state organizations, which were based on residence rather than kinship.

The Dawn of Everything disagrees with many of the aforementioned characteristics of the earliest cities. The authors argue that monumental architecture is not necessarily a unique creation of cities. Structures like the Göbekli Tepe or Lake Shigirskoe were built by hunter-gatherers. The rise of cities does not require states, priests, or bureaucrats, and cities do not inevitably lead to hierarchies and domination. The authors cite examples from Ukraine’s mega-sites, the Uruk period in Mesopotamia, and the early cities of the Indus Valley to discuss organized large-scale human settlements that did not result in the concentration of wealth and power among ruling elites, questioning whether there is a causal relationship between the origins of cities and hierarchical states.

Early cities were diverse. Some early cities operated on egalitarian principles for centuries before the emergence of temples or palaces, such as the early cities of Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-Daro in India; others never featured temples or palaces, like the mega-sites in Ukraine; still others showed no evidence of a managing or ruling class, such as the Maya lowlands, where impressive ceremonial centers have been discovered, yet no evidence of monarchs or social stratification has been found; and in some early cities, centralized authority appeared and then disappeared, as seen in the Taosi site in Shanxi, China.

Between 4100 BCE and 3300 BCE, large settlements in Ukraine and its neighboring regions were continuously inhabited for approximately 800 years, with Taljanky being the largest site, covering 300 hectares. There is no evidence of central management or public storage facilities, nor any government buildings, defensive structures, or monumental architecture. There were no citadels or municipal centers, only over 1,000 houses. These mega-sites illustrate that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.

Between 2300 BCE and 1800 BCE, the Taosi site underwent three phases of expansion, first establishing a defensive settlement of about 60 hectares on the ruins of a village, which later expanded into a city covering 300 hectares, exhibiting significant social stratification with distinct civilian and elite zones. The elite zone contained workshops and palace-like structures. However, around 200 BCE, Taosi seems to have experienced a violent revolution, leading to the destruction of the elite zone, which the excavators described as follows:

“The city wall was razed flat, and … the original functional divisions destroyed, resulting in a lack of spatial regulation. Commoners’ residential areas now covered almost the entire site, even reaching beyond the boundaries of the middle-period large city wall. The size of the city became even larger, reaching a total area of 300 hectares. In addition, the ritual area in the south was abandoned. The former palace area now included a poor-quality rammed-earth foundation of about 2,000 square metres, surrounded by trash pits used by relatively low-status people. Stone tool workshops occupied what had been the lower-level elite residential area. The city clearly had lost its status as a capital, and was in a state of anarchy.”

CityQuotes

1.“The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate dispositions to full and free expression. It is, I suspect, motives of this kind which have their basis, not in interest nor even in sentiment, but in something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not most, of the young men and young women from the security of their homes in the country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city life.”- Robert E. Park, The City, 1925

2.“Most city dwellers lead sensible, circumscribed lives, rarely go downtown, hardly know areas of the city they neither live nor work in, and see (in any sociologically meaningful way) only a tiny fraction of the city’s population. Certainly, they may on occasion – during rush hours, football games, etc. – be in the presence of thousands of strangers, but that does not necessarily have any direct effect on their personal lives … urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.”- Claude Fisher, Comment on Mayhew and Levinger's "Size and the Density of Interaction in Human Aggregates" , 1977

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