Climate Change and the Course of Global History: The Mid-Holocene, the Late Neolithic, and the Urban-State Revolution

During the millennia following the Younger Dryas, human populations around the world crossed a fundamental boundary, reshaping their access to the earth’s primary productivity through domestication and the opening of the agricultural revolution. If this occurred in a geological instant, it was also, as we have seen, an uneven process when viewed in historical time. The earliest centers of agriculture were focused in environmentally bounded mid-latitude regions where genetically malleable plants and animals were available for domestication. Elsewhere, particularly across the tropics, much more diffuse and extended domestications unfolded as human populations responded to climatic change and subtle tensions between their numbers and the wild resources around them. Across wide stretches of the semiarid and temperate Old World, the Neolithic agricultural package that developed in the Levant and Anatolia spread east and west. The transition to more complex social forms and to the rise of the city and the earliest states was embedded in this uneven story of the Neolithic, and it is the central problem for this chapter. We may define this complexity as the hierarchical and interdependent practices and institutions of civil society and the state that, in derivative forms, persist into the contemporary world. Most important, these involve the economic and political arrangements that allow large populations to live together in relative harmony in cities and their associated hinterlands, bounded and governed by legal systems enforced by a polity wielding sufficient force to keep the peace and protect the people from external harm. But we shall see that they also involve an earlier emergence of village-based hierarchies of households defining themselves one against another in material productivity and the accumulation and transmission of property.