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.

Added to korrents 7 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• 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. BDBret Devereaux24 Jul 2020
• However normal the rest of Sparta is argued to have been, its enslaved majority is not: no reconstruction of the population makes Sparta anything but extraordinarily enslaved. BDBret Devereaux19 Aug 2022
• There was a long, unexplained gap between the first domestication of crops and the emergence of the first agrarian states. SJSteven Johnson13 Jan 2026
• 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
• Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land. GMGeorge Monbiot4 Oct 2023

See this claim on the map