All True Wealth Is Biological

History 101: Everything Is Caused By... Agricultural Productivity

Hello, and welcome to the History 101 For Fiction Writers series, running at Inkhaven!

Are you a fiction writer? Are you a GM, which is basically the same as being a fiction writer? Do you play in a role-playing game, which is basically the same as being a GM? Do you want to know the Secrets Of Writing?

First secret of writing: By studying the history of the real world, you can understand the patterns societies follow and learn more about how to construct plausible fictional worlds. Bujold does it, Tolkien did it, Martin does it. You can do it too.

So let’s start learning history! Starting off with “All True Wealth Is Biological,” which has been split into two posts to let me exploit my Inkhaven requirements better.

Part One: Feeding The Hungry Masses

Events stem from underlying causes. The first and most important underlying cause for the ways societies are the way they are: Since people need to eat, the most important part of any economy is that it gets people Food.

Pictured: The source of humanity’s wealth.

That is: In order to have an economy, you need People and you need Stuff. But if you have lots of Stuff that but no People to get it, the Stuff might as well not be there and you don’t have an economy (see: Mars, the inside of volcanoes, the bottom of the ocean), while People are pretty imaginative when it comes to having an economy even with very little Stuff. You can stick People in a desert or on an island or a frozen wasteland, and as long as they have access to something to eat they’ll find a way to survive in almost any world imaginable.¹ People can make shelter, clothes, spears, boats and bows out of practically any materials if they have determination and ideas², but they need to live to do that and the chief thing stopping them from living in a place³ is Not Enough Food. Absent calories it doesn’t matter how much gold there might be, people mostly can’t get to it.

This is something that has a lot of interesting implications, and yet following these implications is something that fiction is often bad at. Even where it’s good at it, it often underestimates the scale - a friend of mine was telling me about a Zelda game which (a) had rich farmlands, and (b) had a major urban center, but they were a considerable distance away from each other with no easy way to get from one to the other. This is not normally how the world works, and it is even less the way the world worked before the development of the railroad⁴. Video games and badly-designed role-playing game settings delight in putting huge cities in mountain passes, on top of towering spires and anywhere else that is incredibly cool, regardless of how much sense it makes.

So let’s talk about agricultural wealth and where cities come from!

One Part Part Two: Flesh-Colored Peasant Need Food Badly

In order to live, people need to eat. (If you are writing about nonhumans who do not need to eat, this changes Everything in extremely complex ways.) They have other required inputs - they need air, they need water, they need protection from the elements - but for purposes of this article these can mostly be simplified away: Everywhere on the surface has air, and the food they eat also needs water⁵, so if there’s food there’s probably water, too, and most sources of food can double as sources of building materials and of clothing.⁶ In practice, Not Enough Food is the limit to how large your population can get and this is especially true in the pre-railroad world, where the vast majority of the population consisted of farmers barely enough to support themselves after taxes.

Transport costs in the Default Society - the society most people with writing but without railroads had lived in - are very high, in terms of how many loaves of bread you have to sacrifice to get more loaves of bread moved elsewhere. Therefore people normally⁷ hang out near sources of food and water, instead of living in Las Vegas or Dubai and getting it shipped in the way the way people there do today.

This is particularly bad by land. Without railroads you need muscle to haul anything, and this muscle comes attached a stomach which needs to eat to do that work. This makes you subject to the tyranny of the Wagon Equation. You can have things shipped up the coast, but storms mean that the sea is risky⁸, so your best bet is rivers. Rivers get you drinkable⁹ water and are safer from storms than the sea is. Further, the river will haul the grain-barges downstream on its own with no particular help, letting you get cheap food from everywhere upstream of you and only mildly expensive food from everywhere downstream of you.

Therefore, if you have a big city, it is probably on a big river. Probably it is most or all of the way down it. Cairo is most of the way down the longest river in Egypt, and Paris is most of the way down the second longest river in France¹⁰ and Rome is most of the way down the third biggest river in Italy.¹¹¹²¹³ This big city imports food and raw materials and second sons¹⁴ and exports manufactured goods, serving as a hub for everyone with trained skills that can be practiced anywhere, tanners and tailors and tinkers and potters and smiths and every other trade in a premodern city. With them gather their support staffs, notaries and housecleaners and lawyers and launderers and prostitutes, and the people collecting the profits from all of this, kings and soldiers and tax collectors. As Pratchett puts it in Night Watch:

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed…

…and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

(This essay will be continued in a second post. Subscribe to read it when it comes!)

1. It might admittedly take them a few tries. Exploration: not safe for children, adults or small armies.

2. My hat is off to whoever invented the igloo. “We need to not die of cold! How do we prevent this using only snow and ice?”

3. On the Earth’s surface.

4. Which changed absolutely everything.

5. Fish need water to breathe, plants need water to grow, and animals need water to drink.

6. This deserves a very long article in its own right to defend! Textiles are probably the most important thing for a society after food! But that new article would take up enough space to eat this one, so I’m going to have to write it later. The very short version: Wool comes from animals, silk comes from bugs, linen comes from plants, most other textiles are similar.

7. As a pilgrimage site, Mecca is the rare exception, though it even it has more food and water than a typical location in the Arabian Desert.

8. Because the storm might sink your ship or dash it against coastal rocks. The later in this period you are, the better your society gets at building ships and the safer sea travel is.

9. If not necessarily by modern standards.

10. Orleans and La Rochelle are on the longest. I’m not sure why Paris is the capital and Orleans isn’t; probably better trade routes?

11. The de facto capital of the later Western Roman Empire was usually either Milan, partway down the longest river, or Ravenna, not quite on but very near its mouth.

12. I’m not sure why all these capitals are only most of the way to the end of the river - Cairo’s been the capital of Egypt since the Muslim conquest* and it’s most of the way down the river, but Alexandria, old capital of Egypt from 331 BC to 641 AD, is all the way down to the end of the river. Rome (most of the way down the Tiber) was the biggest city in Roman times, but Venice (all the way down the Po and actually just off the coast) was the biggest city in early modern Italy. This is an interesting and complex mystery that deserves much more investigation, followed by a blog post!

*: Technically this is only true if you’re a lumper not a splitter with regards to Cairo. For a couple hundred years the capital was Fustat, today part of the Cairo metropolitan sprawl, but the Fatimid dynasty moved the capital a short distance in 969 and ever since then the government of Egypt has stuck with their pick.

13. There are exceptions to the Biggest River Rule, the most famous of which is probably Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul. Byzantium was founded for its chokehold on one of the best-trafficked waterways of the world instead of for its agricultural potential. But even it’s on a river! It’s just not a very big river!

14. Here used as metymony for people who can’t earn a living in their home communities and so go to the big city to seek their fortunes.