- It has been suggested that agriculture has been one of mankind’s most important inventions, second only to our learning to use fire. Do you agree or disagree? What other human inventions are of this magnitude? What would have happened to our species if we had not invented agriculture? Was the invention of agriculture inevitable?
The agricultural revolution in the Neolithic Period was one of the most important changes in human history, except perhaps for the Industrial Revolution that began in the 18th Century. In the present-day world, the computer, information, genetic and cybernetic revolutions should also be ranked as being of equal importance, and perhaps will turn out to be the most significant of all in the long run. If agriculture had not been invented, urban life of any kind would probably been impossible, although until industrialization, about 90% of the human population remained rural and agrarian. Agriculture made it possible for 10-20% of the population to live in cities and to pursue more specialized occupations than farming. Cities became centers of trade, commerce and government, and the agricultural surplus also made it possible to create large standing armies and more stratified, hierarchical societies than existed in among the nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies (Adler and Pouwels, 2008, p. 3).
- Hammurabi’s Code is one of the very first written law codes. Why is it so important to have law in written form? What difference, if any, would it have made to the average Babylonian to have written law?
Written law codes were more formalized expressions of social control than those passed down orally, although all of them were based on much older traditions that have been lost. They reflected the rise of a professional caste of scribes, lawyers, judges and lawgivers in early urban civilizations that had not existed in the past but had become necessary due to the increasing population and the greater complexity of society. Merchants and traders, as well as all of those in involved in transactions of money, goods and lands required written records, just as courts and judges used them to establish legal precedents and traditions to which they could refer in future cases. In a hierarchical state like Hammurabi’s Babylon, there was certainly no equal justice under the law or equal citizenship, although even women, peaants and slaves were accorded some rights and protections. Even if they were illiterate (as were most people before modern times) scribes and layers could refer them to written codes that specifically delineated their rights, duties and obligations according to the written code. It made a difference for people of all castes to understand that “punishment depended on the social rank of the violator, and offenders were subject to the same damages or injuries they caused others” (Alder and Pouwels, p. 25).
- Egypt and Mesopotamia both developed along major river systems, yet a comparable civilization did not apparently develop in North America along the Mississippi River Valley. Why do you think this did not occur? What necessary factors for the rise of civilization were missing? Or was it simply a matter of accident?
Much less is known about these ancient North American civilizations than those in Egypt and Mesopotamia, or even those in Mexico, Central America and Peru. All of them, including the Mound Builders and the Mississippian civilization, knew about agriculture and the cultivation of maize, beans, squash and potatoes, and this type of farming was also common in the eastern woodlands and Caribbean islands when Europeans first arrived. These societies evidently developed on their own, independently of external influences, and they “created their own world through their own unaided intellectual and cultural resources” (Adler and Pouwels, p. 198). In Mexico and Peru, there were also urban centers as large as any found in the Middle East, although apart from Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, few of these were ever discovered in North America. They were highly stratified and hierarchical societies like the Incas and Aztecs, and perhaps heavily influenced by Mexican practices of sun worship and human sacrifice. Traces of this Mississippian civilization survived into the post-contact period, such as the Natchez culture, but most of it had disappeared by the time of European settlement. There were certainly no climatic or environmental factors that prevented the development of these kinds of civilizations in North America, and no historians would asset that everything knowable is known today about the history of settlements and contacts in the Americas.
- Emperor Augustus tried to solve social and moral problems by instituting his own reforms. Consider how he handled the problem of the homeless? How did his solution differ from modern attempts to resolve this problem? Are there any similarities? What about his concern about the love of luxury and the modern paradigm of consumerism and materialism? What similarities do you see between then and now? What differences?
Augustus and his empire were products of a long period of civil war and social conflict that destroyed the Late Roman Republic and his main task was to restore order after decades of chaos. He kept the form of many of the old Roman institutions but in reality the emperors were dictators for life rather than consuls and first citizens. For Augustus, the old Republic was decadent, not least because slavery had caused corruption and love of luxury among the aristocracy while also displacing the peasant farmers in Italy and turning them into landless laborers and urban paupers and proletarians (Adler and Pouwels, p. 126). Unlike the modern world, this was not a mass consumer society based on industry, and the vast majority of people lived at or below the subsistence level. Julius and Augustus Caesar settled homeless peasants on public lands, either in Italy or colonies overseas. Veterans of the Roman legions also received land grants, which was a common practice throughout the later history of the Roman Empire, but not one practiced today given the demise of old-style imperialism and colonialism. In the present-day world, most of the population no longer has the agricultural skills that would make such policies meaningful, nor is there a great deal of ‘free land’ available, given the much larger global population. Augustus also attempted to limit the importation of slaves into Italy and encouraged manumission and the creation of a larger class of freedmen. This no longer applies in the modern world, either, given that slavery has been abolished almost everywhere, at least in the formal-legal sense. Some aspects of Roman social policy were very similar to those in the modern welfare state, though, such as the distribution of food and money to the poor and massive public works projects to create employment at government expense, and even the use of the military as a job-creator and welfare provider to the lower classes, at least to those men who survived their term of service.
- When the Spanish met the great Amerindian cultures of Latin America, they considered them to be barbaric people. What aspects of their own culture might have convinced the Spaniards of the accuracy of their attitude? What aspects of the Native American cultures might qualify as "civilized"?
In the early days on conquest and exploration, perhaps the most important factor in declaring the natives of Africa, Asia and the Americas to be ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilized’ was the fact that they were not Christians. By law and custom, the Christian monarchs could therefore conquer and enslave them, and also subject them to conversion at the hands of missionaries, which was not unusual at all in this era of religious wars and persecution, when freedom of conscience was unknown. In the early years, the Catholic powers of Spain and France were more zealous in these missionary activities among the natives than the Protestant countries. Other aspects of ‘barbarism’ included the practice of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, which Christian missionaries duly stamped out in all its forms, given their belief that Christ’s sacrifice had been sufficient for all times. In Mexico and Peru, the Spanish encountered sophisticated urban civilizations with strong central governments, systems of public works and standing armies that seemed quite ‘civilized’ in the European sense, and indeed they took over the machinery of the Aztec and Inca empires for their own purposes. This was not the case with other regions in the Americas, though, which lacked large cities and seemed to be closer to a ‘state of nature’. Most of these cultures did not have written law codes, for example, or clear hierarchies of kings and priests, nor did they seem to have any concept of private property. Of course, none of them had firearms or horses until the Europeans introduced these, all of which caused the Europeans to regard them as ‘barbaric’, despite their obviously sophisticated techniques of fishing, forestry and agriculture.
- During the Age of Exploration, Spain and Portugal, and to a lesser extent, England and the Netherlands, laid claim to the entire world. On what basis do you think they could make such an audacious claim? Why do you think the rush to discover and claim the rest of the world did not result in warfare between the Spanish and Portuguese?
Spain and Portugal reached an early understanding about the division of the new world in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, in which Pope Alexander VI used his good offices to referee between the two empires. This agreement left most of the Americas apart from Brazil in Spanish hands, including Florida and most of the territory west of the Mississippi River, and so it remained until the 19th Century. Until the 17th Century, Spain did not have to be particularly concerned about the Protestant interlopers like Britain and Holland encroaching on its North American claims, nor did it ever make any serious attempt to control and colonize these areas. Portugal had few major colonial settlements at all outside of Brazil, and most of its trading and commercial posts were located in Africa and Asia, while Spain had virtually no interest in these areas. In addition, the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were actually unified in 1580-1640, although after Portugal revolted it ended up forming a closer alliance with Britain. For most of the early period of expansion and colonization, though, these two Catholic powers each had their own distinctive spheres of influence overseas that had been recognized by the Catholic Church and the authority of the pope, and did not really conflict with or encroach upon each other in any case. Britain, France and Holland were relative latecomers to overseas trade and colonization, however, which led to wars with powers that had already established their own empires and trading systems. Of course, as the Great Powers conducted these high foreign policies they paid little attention to the rights of the native peoples, who were non-Christian peoples and therefore subject to enslavement and conquest—and even to having their lands declared ‘vacant’ by various explorers who claimed them on behalf of their European sovereigns.
REFERENCES
Adler, P.J. and R.L. Pouwels (2008).World Civilizations, 6th Edition.Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
