This Fleeting World

32 This Fleeting World
General Characteristics
and Long Trends
Agricultural communities share important characteristics that give the
agrarian era an underlying coherence despite its extraordinary cultural
diversity. These characteristics include societies based on villages, demographic
dynamism, accelerated technological innovation, the presence of
epidemic disease, new forms of power and hierarchy, and enduring relations
with nonagrarian peoples.
Village-Based Societies
At the base of all agrarian societies were villages, more or less stable communities
of farming households. Although the crops, the technologies, and
the rituals of villagers varied greatly from region to region, all such peasant
communities were affected by the annual rhythms of harvesting and sowing,
the demands of storage, the need for cooperation within and among
households, and the need to manage relations with outside communities.
Demographic Dynamism
The increased productivity of agriculture ensured that populations grew
much faster than they had during the era of foragers. Rapid population
growth ensured that villages and the technologies that sustained them
would eventually spread to all regions in which agriculture was viable.
Modern estimates suggest that during the agrarian era world population
rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 770 million in 1750, at the beginning
of the modern era. Although these figures hide enormous regional
and chronological differences, they are equivalent to an average growth rate
of approximately 0.05 percent per annum; on average, populations were
doubling every fourteen hundred years. This rate can be compared with
doubling times of eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of
foragers and approximately eighty-five years during the modern era.
Accelerated Technological Innovation
Local population pressure, expansion into new environments, and increasing
exchanges of ideas and goods encouraged many subtle improvements
in agricultural techniques. Most improvements arose from small changes
in the handling of particular crops, such as earlier or later planting or the
selection of better strains. However, on a broader scale, increased pro-