An additional benefit is that by reading multiple books on multiple topics at the same time, it helps me engage with the ideas and materials more constructively and therefore it also helps me remember materials better.
At the moment, I am doing some genealogical research while reading War! What is it Good For? by Ian Morris as well as New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England's Merchant Adventurers by John Butman and Simon Targett among other books.
Morris discusses the concept of demographic caging.
“Domestication was a long, drawn-out process, and with every passing year a little bit more of the wild was planted and a few more fields were weeded, hoed, plowed, watered, and fertilized. Farming had its costs—farmers typically worked more than foragers and ate more monotonous, less healthy diets—but it had one huge attraction: it produced much more food from an acre of land. As the food supply grew, humans in the lucky latitudes did what every animal does in such circumstances, turning the extra calories into more of themselves, and the lucky latitudes began looking more and more peculiar. In the rest of the world, wandering hunter-gatherers were spread thinly across the land, typically at densities of less than one person per square mile. By the first millennium B.C., however, some parts of the lucky latitudes had hundreds of farmers packed into every square mile.All very interesting and ties together several issues of interest.
The population explosion set off cascades of unintended consequences. One was that farming spread: as the best land in the original agricultural cores filled up, farmers boldly went where no peasant had gone before, seeking out fertile fields beyond the horizon. Within four thousand years prehistoric frontiersmen had vaulted from the westernmost core of domestication in the Hilly Flanks as far as the Atlantic coast of France, and from the easternmost core between the Yellow and Yangzi River valleys as far as Borneo.
Another unintended consequence was that as agriculture pushed up population densities, people found more reasons to fight. This was not, however, because farming itself directly caused more war; from Helen of Troy to the War of Jenkins’s Ear, men have contrived to kill each other over almost anything that can be imagined, with property, prestige, and women taking the top places on the list. But cramming more bodies into the same landscapes (rather like cramming more lab rats into the same cage) simply meant there were more people to fall out with and more to fall out over.
The consequence of crowding that matters most for the story in this book, though, was what defeat began to mean for fighting farmers. Gradually, over the course of millennia, it became clear that losing a conflict in a settled, crowded agricultural landscape was a very different proposition from losing one in a fluid, fairly empty landscape of foragers.
Take, for instance, the story of ≠Gau, a San hunter in the Kalahari Desert. Sometime in the 1920s or ’30s, ≠Gau fell out with another hunter, Debe, over bush food. ≠Gau, a hothead, speared Debe, killing him. Debe’s “angry family then attacked ≠Gau, but in the struggle that followed, ≠Gau killed again, shooting a man in the back with a poisoned arrow. Realizing he had gone too far, “≠Gau grabbed his people and left the area” (the words of another San, telling the story in the 1950s). A posse pursued ≠Gau, but after a skirmish that cost three more lives, the San storyteller said, ≠Gau and his group ran away.” Among hunters and gatherers, when the going got tough, the tough simply got going. So long as there was room to keep moving, no one could make ≠Gau pay for his crimes. (≠Gau ultimately came to a fittingly violent end, speared through the heart by a young man from his own group.)
How different the fate of farmers who lose fights. In 58 B.C., Julius Caesar tells us, a farming tribe called the Helvetii abandoned their home in what is now Switzerland and migrated into Gaul to find better land. Gaul, as they knew, was full; all the good farmland had been settled long ago. But the Helvetii did not care. They would simply take what they wanted, beginning with the lands of the Aedui tribe.
What were the Aedui to do? One option was to sit out the storm and hope for the best, but the best was not looking good. As soon as the Helvetii arrived, Caesar says, the Aedui found “their earth scorched, their children enslaved, and their towns stormed.” The fruits of doing nothing promised to be death, ruin, and bondage.
A second option was to fight back, but given that “the Helvetii exceed the other Gauls in ferocity, because they are embroiled in almost daily battles with the Germans” (Caesar’s words again), many Aedui found that an alarming prospect. The necessary experience and organization, they felt, could not simply be plucked out of thin air. Others among the Aedui, though, were very keen on fighting. A certain Dumnorix (“highly audacious, extremely influential … and ambitious for revolution,” says Caesar; he sounds like a Gallic version of ≠Gau) had raised a private force of horsemen. He planned to use the crisis to overthrow the ineffective Aeduan aristocracy and make himself king, turning the Aedui into a regional power.
A third possibility, the one the Aedui actually chose, was to put themselves under the protection of powerful friends. This, however, was anything but straightforward. To most Aeduans, the obvious friend was Caesar, the newly appointed governor of the neighboring Roman province. Dumnorix, however, was playing a double game; far from reorganizing Aeduan society to fight off the Helvetii, he actually planned to put the Aedui under Helvetian protection. The Helvetii would then help him become king, and together the two tribes would dominate Gaul and keep Rome out.
The one option the Aedui did not have was to run away and start over, like ≠Gau and his people in the Kalahari Desert. ≠Gau’s band had relatively little to lose by decamping, but the Aedui would lose everything. Farmhouses, fields, and stored food would be forfeited; generations’ worth of ditch-digging, well-sinking, terrace-building, and brush-clearing would be wiped away. And where, in any case, would they go? They were surrounded by other farming groups—Boii, Arverni, Allobroges—and if the Aedui moved, they would find themselves in just the same position as the Helvetii, attacking another tribe to steal its land.
The crowding that farming created in the lucky latitudes was one of the most important things that has ever happened to humans—so important, in fact, that not one but two enterprising social scientists have tried to claim ownership of the idea by thinking up a clever name for it. Back in 1970, the anthropologist Robert Carneiro wrote a paper about it in the journal Science, calling it “circumscription,” and in 1986 the sociologist Michael Mann rebranded it as “caging.”
“The important thing about circumscription/caging, Carneiro and Mann argued, is that the people it traps find themselves forced—regardless of what they may think about the matter—to build larger and more organized societies. Unable to run away from enemies, they either create a more effective organization so they can fight back or are absorbed into the enemy’s more effective organization.
In New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England's Merchant Adventurers , Butman and Targett argue that
Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive.Also very interesting. I think they are forcing the entrepreneurship and innovation aspect of their argument a bit too hard but it is interesting history, they are right about the early commercial contacts before the Pilgrims and this is a useful balance to the Plymouth/Jamestown narrative.
Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves.
At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World.
The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.
And connecting it all together, on the genealogy side, I come across Thomas Gardner who seems an exemplar of both arguments. From Wikipedia:
Thomas Gardner[a] (c. 1592 – 1674) was an Overseer of the "old planters" party of the Dorchester Company who landed in 1624 at Cape Ann to form a colony at what is now known as Gloucester. Gardner is considered by some to have been the first Governor of Massachusetts, due to his being in authority in the first settlement that became the Massachusetts Bay Colony (into which was later subsumed the Plymouth Colony).Putting it in more contemporary terms, Thomas Gardner was sent by the Dorchester Company to establish a new commercial settlement (New World, Inc.) in 1624 in an area adjacent to the Plymouth Colony which had been financed by the Merchant Adventurers company.
The area known as Cape Ann had been visited by the Plymouth group, who had obtained a Patent and had fished in the area known as Gloucester. These visitors from the south had built structures for salting and temporary housing. The Gardner-led group, who settled the area via another Patent, maintained themselves after their landing. Disagreements occurred between the Plymouth colonists and the "West Country" colonists over Patent conflicts. Roger Conant, a Plymouth colonist, was instrumental in working out a compromise between the parties, part of which was moving the Dorchester group away. The colony that had been planned for Cape Ann was doing well, having brought over adequate provisions and having had the proper skills, yet it was commercially unsuccessful because of the rocky, infertile soil and poor fishing in the area. In 1626, the Dorchester Company granted permission for Conant, who had arrived in 1625 from Plymouth via Nantasket, to assess the situation, to become the new Overseer, and to move the colony.
The Cape Ann settlement was well supported and had good supplies and competent settlers with useful skills but the ground was infertile and the fishing insufficient for commercial purposes.
The Plymouth Colony evinced concerned about the activities of such a nearby group (caging). Between poor commercial prospects and bad neighborly relations, the Dorchester Company relocated its operations under a new project leader to the area which would eventually become Salem, Massachusetts (expansion as a response to caging). In just a few years, the various investing companies merged their different activities (commerce as a driver of history) which in turn created a much more complex form of governance (caging as a driver of development).
So between the two books and the genealogy, I have an integrated case study of demographic caging in combination with commercial competition driving increasing levels of economic, societal, and governmental complexity.
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