Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Photographic Print
Panoramic Images
24 in. x 8 in.
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The Development of western history occurred within a context shared by many other cultures: an economy and society based on agricultural production. Within this broad framework of agricultural society a host of differences might develop. In political organization, for example, it has been argued that where agriculture depends on irrigation, which in turn involves close coordination of human effort, authoritarian political systems are particularly likely--e.g., ancient Egypt or China.
Religions could vary widely. But there are certain broad similarities within all societies dependent on agriculture, and before turning to the western variants it is well to outline the basic context. Furthermore, since the first breakthrough in agricultural society occurred in the West with industrialization, an understanding of some of the normal limitations of agriculture gives us a realistic goal in an overview of the later evolution of western civilization. What particular set of quirks and values, for example, led the West into replacing agriculture and the countryside with industry and the city as the normal environment for human life?
The basic points about agricultural society may seem obvious, but we rarely examine their complex impact in forming an idea of what that society actually was. First, most people worked the land and did not live in cities. Civilizations around the Mediterranean, including ancient Greek and Roman but also recent Italian cultures, were more highly urbanized than most, for many farmers lived in towns and traveled out to their fields. They might thus maintain urban values. But as a general rule no more than twenty percent of a population in an agricultural society lived in cities, and the percentage was usually less than this.
Civilization, however, has an urban bias; the word derives from the ancient designation for the city. But here we face a dichotomy, which is our second main point about agricultural societies. The cities lived off the countryside economically, but the farmers were often remote from urban culture and might be regarded as positively uncivilized. This is not a fair judgment, though it is true that many key ideas began in cities and spread only slowly to the rural majority. A totally rural society had neither leisure nor enough diversity to produce the high culture we most readily identify with civilization--polished music, formal drama, and so on. So what we regard most readily as "civilized" typifies the minority. It may be more interesting and important to determine what the values of the rural majority were. Urban concepts rarely were adapted without some distinctively rural twists.
