Nature's Evil

1   Scott, Against the Grain . 2   Kant, ‘Conjectures on the beginning of human history’; Olson, The Logic of Collective Action . 3   Olson, ‘Space, agriculture, and organization’. 4   Al-Rawi and George, ‘Back to the cedar forest’, p. 83. 5   Carneiro, ‘A theory of the origin of the state’. 6   Pomeranz, The Great Divergence . 7   De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis . 8   De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age . 9   Von Thünen, The Isolated State ; Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and Western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’; Moon, The Russian Peasantry . 10  Zheleznov, Ekonomicheskie vozzreniia pervykh russkikh agronomov , pp. 153, 201. 11  Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate . 12  Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 19. 13 Chayanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziajstvo . 14  Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV ; Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question . 15  Jones, Bread upon the Waters . 16 Ibid. 17  McNeill, ‘Frederick the Great and the propagation of potatoes’. 18  De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age ; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy . 19  Von Thünen, The Isolated State . Chayanov saw von Thünen’s scholarship as exemplary, and Braudel compared him to Marx. See also Parr, ‘Overlooked aspects of the von Thünen system’. 20  Allen, Farm to Factory .

THREE

The Remains of Foreign Bodies

Anthropologists can’t agree about whether our ancient ancestors were omnivores or corpse eaters, or whether they preferred shellfish. It was later that people developed a taste for meat and for milk. Feeding an animal takes a lot of land, more than it takes to support a human being. But stock-rearing is less labour-intensive than arable farming. On the Mongolian steppe, two shepherds on horseback could look after a flock of 2,000 sheep. A Turkmen herdsman with an assistant could graze a herd of 800 bulls and cows. Hunting requires even less labour and, correspondingly, more land. In Europe, hunting remained a privilege of the aristocracy. The Austrian Hapsburgs were deeply attached to this strange pastime right up to the end; even during the First World War they numbered their hunting trophies in the thousands. If it is true that political power is defined by excess, a surfeit of the necessary, then collections of hunting trophies illustrate this thesis just as well as the harems of oriental sultans.

Meat

Animals are at the top of the food chain, and a calorie of meat was always more expensive than a calorie of plant food. In many cultures, the consumption of meat was a privilege of the elite. Meat was available for mass consumption only on rare occasions – that was the gift economy in action. Alcohol was consumed with the meat and the whole event was a feast – a communal release of physical and sexual energy.

All world religions, except for Zoroastrianism, surrounded meat eating with various prohibitions. In India, eating cows is forbidden; in the Middle East, pigs are banned; in the British Isles, dogs and horses are off the menu. Anthropologists theorise that these taboos follow the rule ‘edibility is inversely related to humanity’. 1 Some cultures consider horses to be close to humans and they aren’t eaten, while in other cultures cows have this status. Prolonged fasting – regular abstinence from meat and dairy products – was embraced by Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. Over a couple of thousand years, this practice has demonstrated that the plant-based diet is good for physical health.