A pre-modern countryside produces an enormous amount of food and almost no extractable surplus, which is the hard limit on everything the state above it can do.

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• Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land. GMGeorge Monbiot4 Oct 2023
• Farmers were the overwhelming majority of every pre-modern agrarian society — 80 to 90 per cent of it — and that single fact shapes everything else about how those societies worked. BDBret Devereaux24 Jul 2020
• Being a rich or efficient agrarian economy is not what produces an industrial revolution, or one would have happened much earlier and somewhere other than Europe. BDBret Devereaux26 Aug 2022
• It is false that the world needs no more food and only better distribution of the food it has. MGMichael Grunwald13 Jul 2025
• An economy running on muscle power has a hard and low ceiling on total production, because its only real input is land and the returns to more of it fall away fast. BDBret Devereaux26 Aug 2022

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