hey
Basileus444
(Snipped for length)
Makes sense and thank you for the info. Nothing's set in stone yet but it looks like it'd have to be more complicated. Say Mega-Brazil could beat Mega-Peru in a 1-on-1 fight, but it would be costly and a victorious Brazil would be exhausted that it'd be really easy for those Yanquis to take advantage, so in the long-term it's too risky. (One concept that I really want to have is that concerns over overbearing and interfering TTL-Yanquis is a real concern, but South Terranova is much better placed to resist such pressures than is the case IOTL.)
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The Contexts of Roman Society, part 5-1: A Mostly Subsistence Agriculture
As the importance of the content of civic cesspits shows, the need of the farm fields loomed over Roman society in the early modern age. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was the absolutely dominant aspect of society and economy, immensely more significant than everything else combined. (In the non-agricultural sphere, most commercial activity involved moving agricultural, not manufactured, items.) Many Romans might complain that the cost and time for shipping packages at harvest times went up, but none questioned the basis for it. Those part-time carters and shippers needed to be back home bringing in the harvest. Everything was subordinated to the harvest, and that could mean everything. In years when the harvest was endangered for whatever reason and needed to be gathered in quickly, local army units could be called out to help, and woe to the commander who was found to be lax in such emergencies.
Roman agriculture in the mid-1600s is a perfect example of the immense diversity contained within Rhomania, ranging from state-of-the-art to extremely primitive.
Near cities and the larger towns, the focus was on what could be called modern market agriculture. The land was consolidated with a focus on producing a few food items in as much quantity as possible, with those items mostly to be sold as opposed to being consumed by the producers. The items would vary, with larger estates focusing on cereal cultivation while smaller plots would concentrate on vegetable, herb, and flower gardens. Given the consolidated land and the amount of cheap fertilizer available from urban cesspits, these areas were the most productive agricultural lands in the Imperial heartland. Another factor that helped in this regard is that these were areas, such as the plains of Thrace, Bithynia, and Lower Macedonia, that had the best soil for farming already.
But while this market agriculture gets most of the attention of historians, it was the exception, not the rule. Twenty percent of Romans lived in cities and towns, which means that a substantially larger eighty percent did not. And even then, the smaller towns usually had a ‘big village’ air about them as well, with large proportions of their inhabitants being farmers who lived in the town but then farmed their outlying fields, and not necessarily on a market basis. The bulk of Roman agriculture was of the subsistence, not market, type.
Agricultural yields could vary widely throughout the heartland, influenced by a number of factors. A field that produced 6 grains reaped for every one sowed (6:1 ratio) was considered first-rate arable land for tax purposes. The market agriculture fields near cities and household gardens could get higher yields, but they benefited from much higher manuring than was typical for most arable farming.
There was substantial regional variation. The fertile Anatolian river valleys could regularly get a 6:1 yield in average years, but most of Anatolia was in the 3-4:1 range. Hellas was somewhat better, with the better areas of the Morea at a 4-5:1 yield. [1] This was a production little changed from the high and late Middle Ages, where a 4-5:1 yield seems a reasonable estimate of the productivity of Roman agriculture. [2] In short, subsistence cereal agriculture, the bulk of cereal agriculture, produced a yield of 3-6:1, which illustrates both the wide variability and the limited productivity.
Most Roman agriculturists were performing subsistence, not market, agriculture, and thus their operating model was substantially different from what a modern would expect. The typical Roman farmer produced many different food items, spreading their efforts throughout many different endeavors. Furthermore their landholdings would not be consolidated but spread out in various packets throughout the village lands, plus their access to the common pastures and woods available to all the villagers.
From the standpoint of efficiency, this was an extremely poor design. Peasant efforts were dispersed throughout many different endeavors rather than concentrating on one or two items, while much time was used up simply by travel between the various strips that a particular farmer would hold. The more productive market agriculture did not have these issues, and that combined with the higher manure, explains said higher production. But such criticisms completely miss the point. The goal of market agriculture is efficiency, to produce as big a surplus as possible to be sold on the market. Any needs of the producers are expected to be filled by the market, assuming the producers can make enough of their target crops. However subsistence agriculture’s goal is not efficiency, but food security. Subsistence agriculture is based on the assumption that the market is not a reliable means to fill one’s needs, which means one must look to one’s fields to fill those needs instead.
That is the reason for diversification. No man can live on bread alone, so the subsistence agriculturists need to produce more than just grain. Also producing multiple items is a way of spreading out the risk. If one crop fails, another might pull through just fine. That is also the reason for the dispersal of landholdings. These take advantage of local microclimates that will favor one crop over another, while again minimizing the risk of a local disaster wiping out all of a peasant’s efforts. It is farming operating under the ‘put your eggs in as many baskets as possible’ principle.
As is typical for a Mediterranean society, the main items were the Mediterranean triad, wheat, olive oil, and wine. These made up the bulk of items produced and consumed in both market and subsistence agriculture. The typical farmer practicing polyculture would not just restrict themselves to those three though. Barley was a backup cereal to wheat, while fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, beekeeping (for both honey and wax), and small-scale animal husbandry were common alternative products. The growth of flax and cotton was, in certain areas such as Cilicia, also a frequent strategy.
While typically grown for subsistence, there was a cash crop aspect to the production of non-cereals. Wine and olive oil were both useful as cash crops and often functioned in that way in addition to subsistence use. Flax and cotton more often functioned as cash rather than subsistence crops, as were the products of apiculture. In this regard, vegetable gardens varied, with those close to active markets often acting as cash crops while those farther away used primarily for subsistence use.
No peasant was completely cut off from the market. They needed coinage to pay their taxes and to get products that couldn’t be sourced locally, such as salt. The peddlers plying the roads and sea routes helped to fill this need, especially in more isolated areas, as did regional and seasonal trade fairs. But due to the limitations of transportation, once one moved away from the cities and towns, the market declined drastically in importance in economic activity.
Thus the goal of subsistence farmers wasn’t to produce as much as possible, because it was pointless to labor hard to produce a surplus that would just rot away in the fields. If there was no market that could usefully absorb such a surplus in a way that would profit the peasant, as opposed to a middleman merchant, there was no incentive. In that case, the farmer would just produce enough for his needs, plus a little extra if possible.
The extra was as a security measure. Some surplus could be stored as a reserve for inevitable hard times, and when available said surpluses were used that way. However given the limited food preservation means of the time, only so much surplus could be effectively used in this manner. If there was a surfeit after this, then it was time to feast instead, and this was the foundation for countryside harvest feasts.
This was also a security measure, since if one was having a feast, one invited one’s neighbors. This was a way to maintain communal ties, an essential insurance policy. If a farmer was having a bad year, his neighbors would help him through it if they could, in the expectation that when things were the other way, the farmer would then help them. The support of the village was a critical support for common peasants, and these feasts were a way of sustaining the ties that guaranteed that support.
Outsiders often considered this an example of peasant sloth and stupidity, devouring their surplus rather than banking it. But that was to completely misunderstand the situation. The peasants out in their rural villages did not have access to banking services as city-dwellers would understand them. Marketing their goods could be extremely laborious and time-consuming and not warrant the effort. Selling some extra wine and eggs to a peddler passing through was a good way to get a new knife or mirror or salt, but was not a model that could sustain life. Their banking was in the goodwill and support of their village, not in a pile of coins or bank certificates deposited in a building. For most of the 80% of the Roman population that was not urban, the market was a part of their economic life, but decidedly secondary and much less important than their subsistence agriculture.
[1] Based on OTL Ottoman agricultural yields from the same period. Sam White,
The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 66.
[2] Jacques Lefort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries”, in
The Economic History of Byzantium, pgs. 259-60.