The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser.
Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.
The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser.
Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.
The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.
They were still doing subsistence agriculture to supplement their own income well into the 21th century. Of course they didn't grow enough calorie heavy crops like corn, potatoes or wheat to live entirely off the land, but they had enough food that a bi-monthly shopping trip with their children was enough to get by.
In general the transition from feudalism to capitalism, including the formation of the legal systems that supported the latter, happened gradually for maybe up to four or five centuries before the steam engine had been invented.
Sure, the Industrial Revolution further accelerated the development of property rights, mercantile, and civil laws, but all in all I don’t think there’s much truth that machines were the primary cause of such developments.
Useful land was a scarce resource in more civilized regions, while labor was cheap. Given enough land, subsistence farmers could easily feed themselves outside particularly bad years. But much of the land belonged to local elites, and commoners had to work that land to fund the pursuits of the elites.