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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

>By extracting rents and taxes, in return for protection and certain services, perhaps plowing fields.

Why use the term extract rather than trade? Protection was quite valuable. Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village. There was plenty of unused land.

They didn't because the peasant and their family would not last long.

This idea that civilization is somehow oppressive rather than a great achievement just doesn't make sense. Force is the natural way of things. Alone those peasants would likely have 100% of the harvest taken by force, whether it be by wild animals, roving bandits, even locusts. It's a far better deal to have some percentage of it taken in return for having it protected.

In nature, protection is the thing that matters.

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Yes, protection does matter, but it’s not a voluntary arrangement when armed men decide the terms.

> The irony of all of this extraction is that while it is often nasty and predatory, it can have some positive long-term effects, because the extra food that the farmers are being effectively forced to produce moves through either state-redistribution or market mechanisms to an increasing population of specialist non-farmers who in turn provide benefits for the broader society, sometimes including the farmers.

> Metal tools, improved plows, large mills and bakeries would all be impossible without specialist smiths, wood-workers, architects, millers and bakers, for instance. And those merchants, moving food around from where it is common to where it is scarce can – if there are enough of them and trade is sufficiently unrestricted by things like wars – serve a valuable stabilizing role on the otherwise wildly destructive volatility of prices for things like food and other essentials. Moreover, specialization and trade encouraged distance travel, which might bring foreign disease, but might also bring new agricultural technologies.

https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

I do think there are also great achievements to admire, but it’s also true that a main lesson of reading history is that most of human history was terrible for most people.

And we haven’t even talked about what happened during wars and the slavery.

> Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village.

Except not really. Peasants were considered the property of their lords. If they decided to go and “try their luck” at a neutral location and that was reported to their lord, armed men on horseback would be very likely to show up not long after, to return them back to the lord’s land, but not without a solid beating and/or maiming first.

Sometimes, certain forms of civilization just are oppressive, rather than collaborative. They tend to be out-competed by forms that are less oppressive, true, but it’s not guaranteed and not always fast and not always permanent.

Typically that was not the case as far as I'm aware. It's why the black plague gave them so much leverage. They could go to a different lord.

But often the land belonged to the lords or at least they could take it within their region at their pleasing. There were not that much "neutral locations". That wilderness was common land or hunting grounds belonging to someone.

I think we're both somewhat right, somewhat wrong. _Some_ peasants -- serfs -- were considered property of their lords, or well, of the land that the lord oversaw. If they ran away, they were rounded up and brought back, usually with a beating or worse. But there were also free peasants that rented said land. I didn't really mention them, because they deliberately chose to rent said land - they _could_ have tried their luck anywhere, but they _decided_ to try their luck on this lord's lands, and so, I thought, weren't really relevant to the conversation.

But it's not exactly irrelevant, either, right? It does add to the confusion to leave it out, so, my bad.

As far as the black plague, what gave even serfs so much leverage was the fact that there were so few people in all categories around anymore. Fewer peasants to work the land, so the prices of the free peasants went up commensurately. But even serfs who wants to run far away and set themselves up as free peasants elsewhere could frequently get away with it because a) fewer men on horseback to spare to chase them down, and b) the other lord they went and rented land from didn't have enough peasants to work his land either, and had a real vested interest in making sure they weren't caught and brought back to their original lord.

There’s not even a need for armed men on horseback. The lord/patron is your protector against overly draconian laws where just about everything is punishable by death. Lose the patron and next time you e.g. look at the neighbors’ wife, you get to be shorter by a head for entertainment of the folks with a patron. Some of these patron’d folk might have killed somebody last week for which they get to spent time with a priest working on the salvation of their soul and no further punishment.

Source: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.

The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.

For sure and that doesn't decrease the value of the protection. There seems to be this somewhat quaint idea that the crops belong to the peasant because he/she planted and grew them.

That's a very modern concept. In the natural world they belong to whatever entity is able to take them.

Life has always been about grabbing as many macronutrients as you can by whatever means possible.

The eternal thug motto: better my boot than the sword of that other thug.

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