This Fleeting World

Acceleration:
The Agrarian
Era
The agrarian era began ten thousand to eleven thousand years ago
with the appearance of the first agricultural communities. We can
define the agrarian era as “the era of human history when agriculture
was the most important of all productive technologies and the foundation
for most human societies.” It ended during the last 250 years as
modern industrial technologies overtook agriculture in productivity and
began to transform human lifeways.
Although the agrarian era lasted a mere ten thousand years, in contrast
to the 250,000 years of the era of foragers, 70 percent of all humanity may
have lived during the agrarian era, because the technologies of this era
were so much more productive than those of the era of foragers.
The agrarian era was characterized by greater diversity than either
the era of foragers or the modern era. Paradoxically, diversity was a product
both of technological innovations and of technological sluggishness
because, although new technologies such as agriculture and pastoralism
(livestock raising) created new ways of living, the limits of communications
technologies ensured that different parts of the world remained separate
enough to evolve along independent trajectories. We can identify several
distinct “world zones.” These were large regions that had no significant
contact with each other before about 1500 ce. The four most important
world zones were the Afro-Eurasian landmass (which stretched from the
far south of Africa to the far northeast of Siberia), the Americas, Australia,
and the islands of the Pacific.
Within each world zone long and sometimes tenuous webs of cultural
and material exchanges linked local communities into larger networks
of exchanges. In some of the world zones the dense networks of political,
cultural, and economic exchanges known as “agrarian civilizations”
emerged, and through time these civilizations linked with other agrarian
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