Agricultural Revolution (Neolithic)

Background — the Neolithic phase

Quigley's account of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution in EoC is the foundation of his civilizational schema. 'The earliest civilizations were derived from a number of closely related food-producing societies that we shall call the Neolithic Garden cultures, or, less accurately, the Painted Pottery Peoples. The latter were the first peoples to have agriculture, and thus formed the earliest producing societies in history. At the risk of considerable oversimplification, we might say that these earliest agriculturalists appeared in the hilly terrain of western Asia, probably not far from Armenia, about nine thousand years ago' (EoC 67).

The shift, in his analysis, was the moment human societies became capable of producing a surplus beyond the immediate needs of survival — and therefore capable of supporting non-food-producing specialists (priests, craftsmen, warriors, scribes). Quigley treats agriculture itself as the original 'instrument of expansion': the institutional-technological pattern that produced the surplus on which every subsequent civilizational development depended. Of his sixteen named civilizations in EoC's table, four — Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indus Valley, Cretan — are direct cultural descendants of the Neolithic Garden cultures (EoC 67–72).

The pattern is, in Quigley's analytical frame, the prototype against which every subsequent instrument-of-expansion sequence is measured. Surplus production, accumulated capital (in the form of seed grain, livestock, irrigation works), reinvestment in expanded production capacity, institutionalization of the surplus-extracting structures (priesthoods, kingships, tax administrations), and eventually the petrification of those structures into rent-extracting institutions that no longer drive expansion: this is the seven-stage cycle whose general form he develops in EoC and applies to every civilization in the corpus (EoC 84–95, 121–137).

Background — the English phase

Quigley uses 'Agricultural Revolution' a second time, in Tragedy and Hope, for the eighteenth-century English transformation: 'The conquest of the problem of producing food, known as the Agricultural Revolution, began in England as long ago as the early eighteenth century, say about 1725' (T&H 31). The English phase included the enclosure movement that consolidated commons and open fields into privately owned, capital-intensive holdings; the breeding innovations of Bakewell and the Colling brothers that doubled livestock weights between 1700 and 1800; the four-course rotation (turnips and clover) associated with Townshend and Coke; the seed drill and horse hoe of Jethro Tull; and the progressive integration of agricultural production into commercial markets for both inputs and outputs (T&H 28–35).

This English Agricultural Revolution preceded the Industrial Revolution by about half a century and was its precondition. 'The conquest of the problem of producing manufactured goods, known as the Industrial Revolution, also began in England, about fifty years after the Agricultural Revolution, say about 1775' (T&H 31). Quigley's analytical point is that the food surplus produced by the Agricultural Revolution freed labor for the factories, supplied raw materials (wool especially) for the early textile industry, and produced the rural propertied class whose capital financed the early industrial firms. Without the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible on the timeline or scale that it occurred (T&H 28–35).

Quigley's framing — the same pattern at two scales

Quigley's distinctive analytical move is to treat the Neolithic and English Agricultural Revolutions as the same kind of event at different scales. Both are the moments at which a new instrument of expansion — agriculture as such in the Neolithic case, capital-intensive market-oriented agriculture in the English case — produced a productivity step-change that supported the next phase of civilizational expansion. The Neolithic phase supported the rise of all the original Old World civilizations; the English phase supported the Industrial Revolution and the third Age of Expansion of Western Civilization (T&H 25, 31; EoC 67–95).

The pattern is, in his instrument-of-expansion theory, the most concrete recurring case. An instrument of expansion arises (a new way of organizing production); produces surplus and incentive to reinvest; drives a phase of social, demographic, political, and cultural expansion; eventually institutionalizes into an 'institution of expansion' that extracts surplus without reinvesting it; and at that point the phase of expansion ends and a phase of conflict begins until a new instrument is constructed (EoC 84–95). The Agricultural Revolution in both forms is the canonical illustration: the instrument can be a technology (the plough), a social form (the manorial system, the capitalist farm), or some combination, but the structural pattern of step-change followed by institutionalization is constant (EoC 121–137).

Quigley emphasizes one additional aspect of the relationship between the two revolutions in T&H's chapter on Western Civilization to 1914: 'The relationship of these two "revolutions" to each other and to the "revolution" in sanitation and public health and the differing rates at which these three "revolutions" diffused is of the greatest importance for understanding both the history of Western Civilization and its impact on other societies' (T&H 31). The three together — agriculture, industry, sanitation — produced the order-of-magnitude population and productivity expansion that defined the nineteenth century. None alone would have been sufficient.

Outcomes and consequences

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution's outcomes are the entire subsequent history of civilization. By 3000 BC the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations had emerged from the post-Neolithic agricultural base; by 2000 BC the Indus Valley civilization was urbanized; by 1500 BC the Cretan, Hittite, and early Chinese civilizations were in formation; and by 500 BC the canonical Old World civilizations — Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese — were in their mature forms (EoC 71–72, 95–110). Each of these is, in Quigley's table at EoC 71–72, descended from the same Neolithic agricultural base.

The English Agricultural Revolution's outcomes are more compressed and more measurable. Population doubled in England between 1700 and 1800 and doubled again between 1800 and 1900. Real per-capita income, after a stagnant century, began the upward trajectory that produced nineteenth-century European living standards. The British capacity to support large standing forces (which won the Napoleonic wars), large industrial workforces (which built the global manufacturing dominance of 1830–1880), and large emigrant populations (which settled Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and contributed heavily to the United States) was based on the food surplus the Agricultural Revolution produced. Quigley treats this entire complex as the precondition for the British Empire's nineteenth-century dominance and for the imperial system the Milner Group would later attempt to preserve (T&H 28–35, 60–75).

Legacy

For Quigley the Agricultural Revolution in both its phases is the empirical foundation of his civilizational theory. The Neolithic case is the original instance of an instrument of expansion driving the rise of complex society; the English case is the closest historical analogue in modern times and the precondition for the Industrial Revolution. Both are treated extensively in The Evolution of Civilizations and in Tragedy and Hope's opening chapters as the analytical baseline against which subsequent civilizational developments are measured (EoC 67–95; T&H 28–35).

In the longer arc of the corpus the Agricultural Revolution is the recurring counter-example to twentieth-century anxieties about decline. Quigley repeatedly notes that human societies have, more than once in the recorded past, moved from a phase of conflict and exhaustion to a new instrument-of-expansion phase — that civilizational decline is not a destiny but a recurring stage out of which new arrangements have repeatedly emerged. The Neolithic transition is, in this register, the original demonstration that human societies can in fact construct new productive arrangements that drive new phases of expansion. The hopeful register of Tragedy and Hope's final chapters — the residual confidence that a Western Civilization in crisis after 1914 may yet construct a new instrument adequate to twentieth-century conditions — rests, structurally, on the empirical fact that the Agricultural Revolution had once already done this work (T&H 1308–1311; EoC 84–95, 130–160).