Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles Lecture 35
Tribute-taking states, we’ve seen, could encourage growth in several ways, but they could also discourage it. So, their overall impact on growth was rather contradictory. They stiÀed growth in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Lecture 35: Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles
T
he previous lecture described some of the ways in which Agrarian civilizations could stimulate innovation. Yet if this is true, why were rates of innovation so much slower than in the modern world? Why were there such regular famines, and why did entire civilizations seem periodically to collapse? We will see that sometimes the same features that stimulated growth and innovation could also act as checks to growth. These factors help explain why ancient society did not show the productive dynamism of the most productive of modern societies. Exploring these features will eventually help us to better appreciate some of the distinctive features of the Modern era. Because we have been focusing on long-term trends, we have focused on growth. But at smaller scales, and to thoughtful contemporaries, what stood out more sharply was a pattern of rise and fall that made history seem cyclical rather than directional. Peasants, too, were more aware of the cycles of the seasons and of years of feast and famine than of the long-term trend toward growth. Why did growth in this era always seem to be followed by collapse? Two main types of collapse stand out: political collapse (such as the decline of the Roman Empire) and demographic collapse (such as the Black Death), and often the two went hand in hand. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, written in 1817, provides a powerful symbol of political decline. As it happens, we know more or less who “Ozymandias” was. Shelley wrote his poem after hearing of the imminent arrival in the British Museum of a bust of Pharaoh Ramses II, “The Great,” who ruled Egypt for much of the 13th century B.C.E. What factors tended to undermine the power of rulers such as Ramses?
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