This Fleeting World

46 This Fleeting World
Thought Experiment
In the twenty-first century, extravagant displays of wealth—palatial
estates, jewels, and the like—remain a means to show great affluence.
How do you think wealth will be shown a century from now? Is it
possible that extravagant displays of wealth would be frowned on? Or
maybe we’d start giving things away to show our wealth, as the Native
Americans did in their potlatch ceremonies. After all, Bill Gates
is busy giving away his billions. (Well, a lot of them!)
first millennium bce states still controlled no more than about 2 percent of
the area controlled by states today. Beyond this tiny area, which probably
included most of the world’s population, smaller communities of foragers,
independent farmers, and pastoralists existed.
Although agrarian civilizations usually regarded these outside communities
as barbarians, they could play a crucial role in providing sources
of innovation and in linking agrarian civilizations. For example, steppe
pastoralists in Eurasia transported religious ideas, metallurgical traditions,
and even goods between China, India, and the Mediterranean world, and
they may also have pioneered some of the military and transportation
technologies of agrarian civilizations, such as the wheeled chariot. The
most innovative naval technologies of this period were found in the western
Pacific, where peoples of the Lapita culture, using huge double-hulled
canoes, settled a vast area from New Guinea to Fiji and Tonga between
3000 and 1000 bce.
Long-term growth in the number, size, and power of cities and states
reflected not only innovations in statecraft and warfare, but also the sustained
demographic buoyancy of the entire agrarian era. Our figures are
too vague to allow much precision, but clearly, at least in the long trend,
populations grew faster in areas of agriculture than elsewhere. However,
they probably did not grow much faster than during the early agrarian era.
Particularly in the cities, with their appalling sanitary conditions, bad air,
and filthy water, death rates were extraordinarily high. Although cities offered
more opportunities, they also killed people far more effectively than
the villages. Population growth was also slowed by periodic demographic
collapses. The spread of diseases into regions whose populations lacked