Pre Industrial Society Puns

(Sorry if this seems condescending I just come off that way sometimes and I'm very sorry.)

I've been around the general far left community for quite a while now But as soon as history I've always thought very confusing why so many anarchists both present and past admire pre-industrial society so much when it was so much more oppressive then our current society.

Peasant societies were on the local level xenophobic, anti intellectual, racist, sexist, homophobic, patriarchal, fanatically religious, and generally superstitious with a dislike of anything new and a general distrust thing of anybody new coming around.

I'm not saying they were stupid because that would be a lie. They were as intelligent as any human. But like any human who is never exposed to new things The echo chamber in which they lived made them very set their ways and dislike change which is part of the reason the horrifying oppression by the state destroyed them because they refused to move along with society.

I don't condone because it was horrifying (but really all of human history is horrifying) but without the destruction of the peasant class we would still be living in that ignorant society and would not have the vast technological and societal advancement that came with it.

So why do anarchists always seem to admire peasant societies and generally pre-industrial societies over modern capitalist society which has granted us such massive gains in standards of living and has granted us a chance at true equality?

I was recently reading up on a lot of articles and papers of the estimates of the historical demography of pre-modern China, and at first glance, some of the estimates seem higher to me.

I have seen Song Dynasty's estimated population go up as high as 90 million.

Though most western academics appear to accept that the historical census undertaken by imperial officers in the various Chinese dynasties may have undercount the actual population level (for purpose of tax evasion), however, Kent G. Deng, an academic at LSE, wriote a paper titled: Fact or Fiction? Re-examination of Chinese Premodern Population Statistics , which suggested that the population statistics collected by the imperial census takers may have been a lot more accurate than expected.

I thought an interesting way be to find out whether the there is actually a hard limit to the maximum carrying capacity that a pre-industrial civilization could sustain, regardless of how productive the harvests or crops could be.

Using the same set of techniques Lyman Stone explained on his blog: https://medium.com/migration-issues/notes-on-medieval-population-geography-fd062449364f , I did some very rough back-of-the-envelop calculation, on the numbers of person per square mile.

To clarify, i also excluded the areas outside of the modern dynasty's control, instead of total land area. This meant I excluded nearly half of China, particularly the western half, a good portion of northern China and some part of southern China. Which means I focused mostly on China-Proper.

y own rough estimates show a population density fluctuating, on the average of a number of persons per square mile, mostly, between 39 to 68 persons per square mile, from the Han to Song Dynasty, though it occasionally exceeded 70.

Comparing it to medieval Europe from 1000 CE to 1650 CE, most of Europe, with the exception of Italy, never exceeded 30 persons per square mile.

I was wondering if there ever has been more serious scholarly work done on this than my own amateurish approach.

When I go to the store and get a bag of fresh tomatoes, they're usually spoiled in a week or so. If I don't have preservatives, canning, or refrigeration technologies, and I live somewhere warm enough that burying it in snow wasn't feasible, how did I keep enough food for winter without constant foraging?

If this question is too broad, I'm happy to specify the Byzantine Empire to get us somewhere with a warmer climate that I imagine is relatively well documented.

Please, do not get me wrong, the society pre industrial was very bad in many aspects. However i don't think that what we have is really a "improvement". Today, the people suffer with diseases that didn't exist in the past. People are more lonely and slaves of many addictions( pornography, sex, drugs, etc). The technologies that in theory would be our servants became our masters, as if the human was made for the technologies, and not the opposite. In the past, people we're more near their communities, had a more higher sense in life than the mere pursuit of pleasure of the modern societ. Modern society is a zumbi.

I remember reading this book series around 2012 though the series may have been published earlier than that. A guy (space traveler?) lands or crashlands on a foreign planet and encounters a pre-industrial society which he for some reason ends up helping progress into a more modern civilization.

On the planet I believe science was forbidden by a religion that the majority of the population practiced which kept society artificially held back until his arrival, this is revealed in a later book to be intentional by a previous civilization that wanted to prevent the planet's destruction from something like a nuclear war in the future.

Things that stand out is I believe 1 book focused primarily on a large naval battle going into a lot of detail about ship construction, rail/road infrastructure, and irrigation.

(Or “industry” for that matter. Is it just basically a specialized craftsman, or a team working in a cottage industry with maybe a water wheel or bellows?)

So in the American school system the idea of Mercantilism as a cause for the Revolution is drilled into you. Although Mercantilism has a couple features, one is that the “colonies supply raw resources for manufactured goods.”

But Britain circa 1700 is pre-Industrial Revolution. What constitutes “manufactured goods” that is produced on a non-artisanal scale? And what would the production of something like clothing or metal tools look like?

What do you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs ? And what about it in pre-industrial societies ?

Hi,

I was thinking about sex ed and was pondering if it was a purely industrial invention, due to a divide between "natural observation" of sex in the wild such as between animals and human life which can exist without seeing the natural world such as in a city. So, it seemed to me that sexual education had to arise by necessity of removing man from nature, but this also seemed overly simplistic. So I wanted to know if "sexual education" really did exist for pre-modern societies and how it existed as a role.

One of the best things about money is that it allows an individual to set aside capital, the product of his labor, in a form that retains value. A farmer, for instance, can’t save fruit from year to year, nor can a baker save bread. Sound money is critical for lasting gains in wealth and economic progress. Sound money is why wealthy societies become dominant, and a reason other societies are poor and ripe for conquest and domination.

Rome provides a meaningful long-term template. The Roman government, in search of revenue, started debasing the denarius under Nero in the 1st century, taking it from 90% silver to 75%. As late as the reign of Marcus Aurelius, which ended in 180, the denarius was still about 75% silver. By the end of the 3rd century, it was pot metal that was simply plated with silver. The 3rd century was notable for numerous coups, civil wars, assassinations, and secessions. There are plenty of reasons political chaos goes hand in hand with economic chaos; they reinforce each other.

Roman coins weren’t worth saving by the middle of the 3rd century, and the collapse of the currency was a major cause of the collapse of the empire. In some ways, sound money was even more important in ancient times than it is today because they didn’t have sophisticated banking, financial markets, credit, accounting, or ways of measuring the rate of currency depreciation. Physical cash was king.

Currency inflation creates chaos, whether in a relatively primitive economy like that of the Romans—where there was still a lot of barter. Once the rulers found they couldn’t depreciate the currency anymore, direct taxes went up substantially, but it became hard to collect them simply because the currency had no value. The soldiers didn’t like being paid with worthless tokens. This is why after the reign of Aurelius, the next century was a time of civil wars and general chaos. There was no new construction of roads or public buildings. Those who were able holed up at their country estates, which were internally self-sustaining. It was the beginning of feudalism, a foreshadowing of the coming Dark Ages. By the accession of Diocletian in 295, Rome had lost all touch with its republican roots and had become an oriental-style despotism.

Is Rome a distant mirror to today’s West? It’s entirely possible, even likely.

https://preview.redd.it/4qpfu950wnf71.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ef7c4cc3ad26a4a32adf2c056666db54a2b9327

Hi reddit, I’m looking over inventions that could change a pre-industrial society in a significant manner, similar the wheel, the stirrup, the printing press, and gunpowder did in our timeline. However naturally I do have some constrictions, it must be simple enough so a society technologically in the iron age up until about an equivalent of classical antiquity could construct it, but otherwise it could be rather anachronistic. Further this setting also lacks most forms of fossil fuels, so no vast coal and oil fields exist on the planet. I will end with describing one invention I have decided to add myself.

Invention – Archaic printing press.

Required technologies – a writing system, an inexpensive writing medium, level planks of wood, and a form of ink. (bronze metallurgy)

Method – a scribe starts with copying a given text onto a plank of wood; however this is written in mirror writing. The inscribed piece of wood is then given to a woodworker that start to carve out the spaces between the letters, the negative can then be either directly used to print texts, but could also be used to create a mould, and a negative can be casted in bronze or copper for a more durable negative. The negative is coated with ink and pressed against a piece of paper or other inexpensive writing medium.

Origin of the technology – this technology was originally created as a way to more easily apply pigments in complex shapes onto fabric, but these wooden stamps soon came to instead be used as a way to mass producing texts in a given society.

Note - This is purely about history and understanding history better, do not attribute political motives to this post.

I have oft seen observations (both on Reddit and on other forms of social media) that the Industrial revolution flowed thusly,

• There was this sudden period of enlightenment and scientific progress
• The above resulted in spectacular advances in automation and mechanisation
• This then enabled the colonial powers to produce products of outstanding quality, and most importantly volumes and thus overwhelmed the colonies in manufacturing.

This theory, while logical, is simplistic in the extreme and precludes a lot of factors, some of which I will touch upon in brief.

• Technological Advancements - Despite what the narrative states, for nearly 2,000 years, the cotton producing countries, chief amongst these being India, were at the cutting edge of innovating and refining cotton growing, refining and production techniques. This tech from India flowed both East & West (China and the Islamic countries) from whence on it flowed to Europe by the 16th century. Venice took a lot of the techniques from the Islamic Empires, and set up the first Cotton manufacturing units sometime in the 16th century. Yet, the demand for European cottons paled in front of the vastly more refined, superior quality Indian cottons and this was to be the case till the early 1800's. Quite a few key innovations, right from domesticating wild cotton to the Cotton Gin (discovered as early as 500 AD), though we attribute this almost entirely to Eli Whitney (he did mechanise the Gin) to horizontal looms which vastly increased the output of the loom all were invented in India and over time diffused around the world. It is important to note that you had centres of production in South America, West Africa and India running parallely (but isolated from one another), but the quality and quantity of Indian cotton exports was far ahead of the smaller production outputs of South American and African cotton.
• What this meant was, for 2,000 years, Indian cotton exports dominated the global cotton trade, right from the Romans to Egyptians down to the 18th century European colonial powers (nascent colonial powers), they purchased Indian cotton at a great cost to their balance of payments.

Things all started to change in the 17th century. What changed?

• The colonial powers had by now gained access to cotton growing regions in the Americas. This e

Any information would be helpful.

Societies before industrialisation were a lot less productive. The state had to appropriate a lot of surplus just to keep functioning which resulted in high taxes and prevented Smithian growth. Prosperous societies like Rome appropriated the entirety of surplus through practices like slavery (Although it can be argued that society isn't really prosperous if a large section of the population are slaves). A tax like LVT would simply not be enough and would also promote de-urbanisation (given the impracticality of taller buildings in this period). Is this the wrong line of thinking? Can this be applied to poor third world countries?

Essentially were the bureaucrats that administer the day to day running of the state, religious clerical or priestly strata, and the intelligentsia/academics/scholar classes one in the same quite often?

Hello, all! Long-time lurker, first time poster.

Any interesting research on mental health (specifically depression and anxiety) in pre-industrial societies?

Society has lumped many groups together and stigmatised them. There were a lot of things associated with ‘masculinity’ but which they virtually ‘banned’ for people who are males.

For one example to prove my point;

We have Pre-Industrial ‘masculine’ archetypes, which are from times before men were expected to wear black suits or be unemotional and ‘good at STEM’. This archetype is/was known for being highly emotionally expressive, artistic and heavily intuition based? Often motivated by ideals strongly.

They really liked to wear perfume, long hair (Having your hair cut short all the time was sometime seen as bad), makeup and jewellery whenever possible. Those probably deemed P.I archetypes are seen as often nearly always valuing emotional or ‘fancy’ things over ‘practical mathematical and mechanical’ stuff. They’ve been stigmatised for ‘causing the dark ages’ supposedly.

In a nutshell a P.I type would probably be someone better suited to tending to a horse or cow and drawing things, but is not cut out for mechanics and highly ‘logical’ stuff. Would do better in natural philosophy than STEM is one more stereotype.

Then there’s the other kinds who aren’t exactly RR as somebody else mentioned. But P.I archetype-ish ones and other types often face the same or similar stigmas to RR men.

Regardless to say ‘P.Is’ probably wouldn’t dismiss you for showing emotion and would probably have integrated it in the conversation if you did, than reciprocate with their own. It was mostly almost always only after the 1800s when they said “A man cannot cry.”

I guess another way to write this would be, was there a pre industrial society that advertised for products they produced more than the rest? I'm thinking more along the lines of ancient or classical societies

A common modern cultural trope is nostalgia for "the good ole days" and the traditions of the past, usually only 50-100 years prior. Did this exist in societies before the industrial and liberal revolutions? From a modern standpoint, it seems like pre-industrial society changed very slowly, such that someone in say 1400s Japan would see little difference between themselves and the culture of 1200s Japan. But maybe this is just a lack of understanding. Is there much cultural nostalgia in the historical record?

27 yo Turkish woman in real estate. This makes two based women in one week, something is in the water.

Despite the west elm Caleb drama airing out on this sub, I'd like to voice my support for all the queens around the world giving Ted K a proper reading. So instead of banding together to get your hinge dates fired from their gay jobs, get on tik tok and help make anarcho-primitivism great again

My toddler is gaga for trains. He threw a tantrum the other night because I wouldn't let him get on the train while we were waiting for his mother at the station. From my discussions with other parents and from an Onion article, this is apparently a common thing for children his age. He is not limited to his "choo choo"s though; he also loves airplanes, busses, trucks, cars and bikes, pretty much anything involved with human transportation.

But all these technologies have only existed in the past couple hundred years or so, nor are they present in every contemporary society. Do toddlers in pre-industrial societies go nuts for anything? Did Roman tots point at all the carts going down the street? Did Viking tykes go nuts for longboats? Are there commonalities between or patterns across what toddlers obsess over?

I play Banished, (r/Banished) and one of the more curious features of the vanilla game is that there are no draft and pack animals, considering that the game has a Pre-industrial European setting.

Can a pre-industrial European town have survived without draft and pack animals? How dependent were their economies on draft and pack animals?

On a different note, how dependent were non-European civilizations on draft and pack animals? The Middle East was, and still is, very dependent on draft and pack animals; while in contrast, pre-contact civilizations in the Americas had no draft animals, and only the ones in South America had access to native camelids as pack animals.

I've often heard the claim that the animal most influential to human history was the Horse. Had the horse never been domesticated, could humanity still progress as much while relying on the Camel, the Ox or the Elephant instead?

This is something I've been curious about for a long time. Tenochtitlan originally sat on a lake but the Spanish drained it (which is a shame IMO). Colonists in North America also drained swampland. How did they do this? It seems like a labor intensive process and I can't imagine they just bailed all the water out with buckets.

Just, Jesus, they act like you suggested they just go out and live in the woods or something, like you asked them to kill their kids, is it just a part of our current culture of "infinite progress/infinite growth"?

Note - This is purely about history and understanding history better, do not attribute political motives to this post.

I have oft seen observations (both on Reddit and on other forms of social media) that the Industrial revolution flowed thusly,

• There was this sudden period of enlightenment and scientific progress
• The above resulted in spectacular advances in automation and mechanisation
• This then enabled the colonial powers to produce products of outstanding quality, and most importantly volumes and thus overwhelmed the colonies in manufacturing.

This theory, while logical, is simplistic in the extreme and precludes a lot of factors, some of which I will touch upon in brief.

• Technological Advancements - Despite what the narrative states, for nearly 2,000 years, the cotton producing countries, chief amongst these being India, were at the cutting edge of innovating and refining cotton growing, refining and production techniques. This tech from India flowed both East & West (China and the Islamic countries) from whence on it flowed to Europe by the 16th century. Venice took a lot of the techniques from the Islamic Empires, and set up the first Cotton manufacturing units sometime in the 16th century. Yet, the demand for European cottons paled in front of the vastly more refined, superior quality Indian cottons and this was to be the case till the early 1800's. Quite a few key innovations, right from domesticating wild cotton to the Cotton Gin (discovered as early as 500 AD), though we attribute this almost entirely to Eli Whitney (he did mechanise the Gin) to horizontal looms which vastly increased the output of the loom all were invented in India and over time diffused around the world. It is important to note that you had centres of production in South America, West Africa and India running parallely (but isolated from one another), but the quality and quantity of Indian cotton exports was far ahead of the smaller production outputs of South American and African cotton.

• What this meant was, for 2,000 years, Indian cotton exports dominated the global cotton trade, right from the Romans to Egyptians down to the 18th century European colonial powers (nascent colonial powers), they purchased Indian cotton at a great cost to their balance of payments.

Things all started to change in the 17th century. What changed?

• The colonial powers had by now gained access to cotton growing regions in the Americas. This enabled them to start procuring