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.

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Our reading — they may agree, disagree or merely touch the same thing. Closest first: a shared subject counts for most, then how near the wording is.

• 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 2020similar wording
• 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 2022similar wording
• 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 2022similar wording
• Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land. GMGeorge Monbiot4 Oct 2023similar wording
• Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood. BDBret Devereaux24 Jul 2020similar wording

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