Agrarianization: the formation and expansion of agrarian regimes

Fire in the agrarian regime: continuities

Human history over the past ten thousand years may be read as a series of events and trends accompanying agrarianization - a dominant socio- ecological process in the course of which humans extended the domain of agriculture and animal husbandry all over the inhabited world, and in so doing made themselves increasingly dependent upon their cultivated plants and domesticated animals as continuously available living energy sources.

Just as we can use the term ‘fire regime' in both the singular and the plural forms, we can also refer to ‘the agrarian regime' in the singular as well as to ‘agrarian regimes' in the plural to indicate the particular forms this regime took in different parts of the world at different times. No two agrarian regimes were identical, and they were all subject to change; and yet they shared some typical features that justify also using ‘agrarian regime' in the singular form as a generic concept encompassing them all.

The core of every agrarian regime was raising food; fire was an important means for this end, a link in the complex chain of activities that led to food production. It was widely used for ‘clearing' pieces of land and turning them into fields where crops could grow or cattle graze. The existing vegetation, be it grass or bush or forest, would be burned down, and the ground, fertilized by the ashes, could then be used for growing selected species that would - as we now know - turn solar light into edible plant material.

Especially when the clearing job was done in a pristine forest, the removal of full-grown trees must have been a very laborious task that could only be carried out by first slashing off the branches with stone axes in order to kill the tree, and then, when it was dead and dry, burning the remaining trunk.

The technique of ‘slash and burn', also known by other names such as ‘shifting cultivation', was taken over from practices developed by foragers in order to make land more transparent and accessible to hunters.

Agrarian regimes absorbed and elaborated several basic habits and skills that were engrained in human societies through their investments in learning to live with fire. It is hard to imagine how people could have begun cultivating plants and taming animals had the control over fire not already prepared them for a life in which conscious care for something non-human was taken for granted. The first crops grown on any large scale were cereals and tubers which, because of their nutritional value and their capacity to withstand storage for long periods, provided appropriate staple food for a human community; but to serve this purpose, they needed to be cooked. This in itself made fire and fuel indispensable for agrarian communities.

The same can be said about the human predominance over all other land mammals, initially secured with the aid of fire. By the time agrarianization began, the human monopoly over fire was so firmly established (and at present it is so easily taken for granted), that it is seldom given separate attention in this context. Yet it certainly was a necessary condition. Their hegemonic position in the animal kingdom enabled people not only to bring certain species, such as goats and sheep, under direct control, but also to keep most of the remaining ‘wild' animals away from their crops and herds.

But no doubt the most spectacular use of fire in the agrarian economy was the practice of ‘slash and burn', in which patches of abandoned cropland would be prepared for renewed cultivation by burning down the saplings and grasses that had meanwhile sprung up. The land was then sown with new crop seeds for one or more seasons, to be left fallow again when the harvest was no longer rewarding and the farmers turned to an adjacent lot. Eventually they would return to the first lot that by then was overgrown by bushes and trees, and start the entire cycle anew.

In modern times, the practice of ‘slash and burn' was still common in large parts of the non-industrialized world. Urban visitors often frowned upon it as ‘primitive', without realizing that in its initial stage ‘slash and burn' repre­sented an important step in the collective learning of land management - a major breakthrough in which the destructive effects of fire were put to use in a longer-term ecological strategy. But it cannot be denied that this strategy sometimes caused serious air pollution and was always wasteful of fuel.

Beyond slash and burn

Agrarianization proceeded differently in different parts of the world. Yet, if we look at the world in its entirety, from a very long-term historical perspective, we can observe a clear dominant trend. In the preceding phase, human groups with fire had survived, whereas groups without fire had not. Now, for a period of at least the past 10,000 years, there was a similarly dominant tendency, not only for groups with agriculture to supersede groups without it, but later on also for groups with more intensive agriculture to supersede groups that stuck to more extensive agriculture.

This overall trend implied further differentiation. Just as the previous era had been marked by the increasing differentiation in behaviour and power between human groups and other animals, the agrarian era was marked likewise by increasing differentiation, again in both behaviour and power, not just vis-a-vis other animals, but also, and especially, among and within human societies.

In several parts of the world, where conditions turned out to be favourable for agrarian production, people began to cultivate the land more intensively, with newly invented methods such as irrigation and ploughing, so that, in a positive loop of economic and demographic changes, harvests became more plentiful and the population grew in numbers. This unleashed several other social processes. More and more people gave up their (semi-)nomadic existence and settled down in villages and towns.

Fire was so much a part of agrarian society that each of these trends also affected the ways it was used and appreciated. Being no longer the only non­human source of energy that had been brought under human control, fire also ceased to be the focus of group life it had been for thousands of generations; instead, it became increasingly dispersed over all sorts of separ­ate hearths, braziers, ovens, and lamps, each with their own instrumental functions. Whereas, during the earlier phase, people were primarily con­cerned to keep the communal fire burning, now the very opposite issue became most pressing: how to prevent the many fires burning for various purposes from running out of control and causing a blaze.

The great majority of people in advanced agrarian societies continued to be peasants. They fulfilled a clear function: they grew the food. Almost paradoxically, this same self-evident function also kept most of them and their families in poverty, often not far above the level of starvation. They were tied to the land they had to till, and when the produce of land and labour had been harvested, they were tied to their harvests.

This state of dependency made them permanently vulnerable, to crop failure and to theft and robbery, and even to sheer destruction by fire. Their vulnerability to acts of human violence became increasingly troubling, when groups of bandits acquired weapons made of bronze and, later, iron, and learned to raise and command bands of men specializing in raiding. For a long time the only way peasants could protect themselves against irregular invasions by bands of warriors appeared to be by submitting themselves to a more regular relationship of authority and serfdom to other warriors.

This kind of arrangement was the crux of the military-agrarian societies that, at different moments in time, emerged on every continent. The central parts were always played by the peasants, the ‘agrarians' who formed the vast majority, and by minorities of warriors, the ‘military'. There were others partaking in this social configuration as well; a central function was per­formed by smiths - specialists in working with fire.

In agrarian societies ruled by warrior elites, the majority of peasants and the far fewer smiths found themselves in the same plight. In order to pursue the productive activities on which their social existence hinged both groups needed warriors - to protect them from other warriors. Just as the peasants supplied the rulers with food, the smiths, in addition to forging ploughs and other implements facilitating food production, supplied them with weapons. This simple statement brings out the importance of the social function of smiths as well as the structural weakness of their position. Their mastery over fire and metal was acknowledged and much needed; but they lacked mastery over people. They had to submit to the very social hierarchy that they sustained with their work.

Fire in cities

As cities in the agrarian world increased in number and size, more, and more diverse fires were kept burning within their walls, generating increasingly complex problems having to do with air pollution, the prevention and suppression of blazes, and fuel supply.

Air pollution was a regular source of complaints, expressed most vocifer­ously by those who had the best chances of escaping from it, the privileged rich. As early as 1257 the foul-smelling smoke of coal fire, penetrating every­where and spreading thick layers of soot, was said to have driven Eleanor, the Queen consort of England, out of London.

Prevention of conflagrations has been a concern of city dwellers, and city governments in particular, ever since towns or cities first emerged.

Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages big cities such as Rome and Constantinople were notorious for the blazes that every so often ravaged whole districts. Once a fire broke out, there was little the inhabitants could do to suppress it; water, sand, and prayer were said to be equally (in)effective. Usually water and sand were available only in very small quantities, which were carried to the blaze in buckets and then thrown onto it. The only way to protect neighbouring houses was by covering the roofs with wet cloth. If the conflagration was too great, the last remaining measure was to create a ‘firebreak’ by tearing down buildings that were standing in the fire’s way.

Every city, large or small, was a concentration of people, combustible property, and fires. Since the means of fighting a fire once it was raging were so limited, strong emphasis was put on prevention. Town governments in medieval Europe regularly issued measures directed at all citizens but especially at craftsmen working with fire (as many of them did). The regulations about using fire in an urban setting were always local; but since the citizens in different towns learned from each other, the actual rules were remarkably similar. The general purport was to turn cities into ‘fire-pro­tected zones’, where the use of fire was permitted only within specifically designated confines, and great restrictions were put on using fire after sunset, when ‘curfew’ time began. In all medieval cities, the gates were then closed, and night watches guarded against accidental fires and arson. From the sixteenth century onward, one city government after another prohibited using wood and thatch as construction material for exterior walls and roofs.

The plethora of preventive measures, especially those prescribing brick and stone as construction material, probably gave town dwellers better protection than country folk against blazes. In some rural regions, there were spells when threats of fire setting were uttered as a ‘weapon of the weak’, and were actually carried out against the houses of rich estate owners as well as in internecine feuds among peasants.^[276]

The worst fate that could befall a city was when, during a war, the city had been under siege and had offered resistance. If it then had to capitulate, it ran the risk of being ‘sacked and burned': all houses would be looted, and as a final act of triumph the conquerors would set the whole city on fire.

The many precautions normally surrounding the use of fire in cities inevit­ably reminded people that fire kept burning for domestic or commercial purposes was an ‘expensive institution', risky and costly. The most immedi­ately felt costs were those involving the purchase of fuel. Cities could not possibly be self-supporting in this respect; they needed a continuous import of wood, for both timber and fuel. This was an important reason for building urban settlements on the banks of a river, where wood could be brought in from upstream. As cities became larger, the demand for wood often led to deforestation in the surroundings. Complaints about depletion of woods were already recorded in ancient Greece and Rome, and even earlier in China. After the demise of the Western Roman empire, the trend in that part of the world was temporarily reversed: human numbers shrank and forests regained ground; but soon after the beginning of the second millennium, people began making inroads again in the rejuvenated forests. By the middle of the seven­teenth century, in some of the most densely populated parts of Western Europe, especially Britain and Holland, hardly any forests survived, and most of the wood had to be imported from Scandinavia and the Baltics.