The Agrarian Revolution and Roots of Inequality

The agrarian revolution was not a triumph but a trap, leading inexorably to inequality.

The reasons for the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the pivotal questions in human history, and yet it resists a single neat explanation. At stake is not only why people began farming, but why that shift was so consistently tied to hierarchy, inequality, and eventually the state. Across anthropology, archaeology, and political economy, scholars have wrestled with whether agriculture was a revolution, a drift, or a trap — and whether inequality is a contingent outcome or a structural inevitability.

Jared Diamond reframed the problem in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) by focusing less on why farming happened than on where it was possible. The decisive factor, in his view, was geography: the uneven global distribution of domesticable plants and animals. The Fertile Crescent, with its large-seeded cereals and herd animals, offered humans a ready-made package for agriculture, while other regions had far fewer candidates. China had rice and millet, the Americas maize and beans, but Africa and Australia lacked comparable resources. For Diamond, this ecological lottery explains why agriculture arose independently in only a handful of centers and spread outward from them, setting the stage for denser populations, new technologies, and, ultimately, conquest. His account frames the geography of possibility, but leaves open the question of why people, once given the raw materials, actually adopted farming and reorganized their societies around it.

Marshall Sahlins set the tone for a critical tradition in Stone Age Economics (1972), coining the phrase “original affluent society.” For him, hunter–gatherers were not poor or desperate but lived well on relatively little labor, meeting modest wants with diverse diets and ample leisure. Population was managed by spacing births and limiting density (essential to maintain mobility), ensuring that groups stayed below the carrying capacity of the land. Farming, in this view, was not a rational response to scarcity but a paradoxical step down: more work, worse food, and greater vulnerability, offset only by the fact that surpluses could be produced. Those surpluses, once created, opened the door to hierarchy and inequality, making agriculture less a triumph of progress than the entry into a system of appropriation.

Yuval Noah Harari carries that skepticism into Sapiens (2011), where he describes the “agricultural revolution” as a long, unintended slide. Foragers began by tending stands of wild wheat or corralling animals, each step seemingly a small convenience, each yielding a short-term gain in reliability. Over generations, these small shifts locked people into farming, a treadmill of ever-harder work, poorer health, and dependence. Harari emphasizes the gradual, bottom-up nature of the process: no elite conspiracy, no sudden rupture, just a sequence of marginal choices that eventually reshaped human societies.

James C. Scott, in Against the Grain (2017), adds a sharper political edge. He stresses that small-scale cultivation long predated the first states, but argues that states only formed when societies became organized around cereal grains. The properties of wheat, barley, rice, and millet made them measurable and fungible: visible in fields, harvestable at once, divisible into standard units, transportable, and durable. In short, grain was the original money. It was taxable precisely because it was visible and required planning and commitment in a way that roots, tubers, and foraged foods did not. For Scott, early states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China were essentially coercive “grain machines”, fragile yet persistent structures that forced people to farm labor-intensive grain so that surpluses could be appropriated. People did not flock into these states willingly; many fled them, and collapse often meant liberation back to freer, more mobile life styles.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in Why Nations Fail (2012), approach the problem through their core thesis that institutions explain prosperity or poverty. For them, hierarchy and inequality were already emerging among sedentary foragers like the Natufians, who built permanent dwellings and accumulated assets long before they became full farmers. Once mobility was constrained, conflict resolution and property rights required more elaborate institutions — which often tilted extractive. In this reading, farming was less the origin of stratification than a technology that elites could exploit once institutions had already created inequality. This is almost the mirror-image of James Scott’s account, which makes the taxability of grain the hinge that created states; Acemoglu and Robinson instead put institutional arrangements in the driver’s seat. Their inversion of the usual surplus-first story is thought-provoking, though it rests on thin archaeological evidence and can feel stretched to fit their broader framework. Still, the claim that institutions channel the consequences of subsistence strategies remains a powerful lens, especially once we move into periods with clearer historical records.

Walter Scheidel offers yet another perspective in The Great Leveler (2017). For him, inequality is structurally built into any surplus-producing society. Once wealth can accumulate, elites will capture it, and peaceful politics has never been able to reverse the trend for long. Only catastrophe—his “Four Horsemen” of leveling: war, revolution, state collapse, and pandemic—has ever durably reduced inequality. The egalitarianism of hunter–gatherers was a function of ecological limits: low density, little surplus, and mobility. Once agriculture and density enabled surplus, inequality became the norm. Scheidel’s lesson is bleak: egalitarian moments are rare, violent, and fragile, while inequality is the steady state of history.

Gregory Clark, in A Farewell to Alms (2007), pushes the skepticism further. He argues that from the Neolithic through the 18th century, all societies remained trapped in a Malthusian cycle: whenever productivity rose, populations grew until living standards sank back to subsistence. In his view, inclusive or extractive, ancient or early modern, institutions made little lasting difference to ordinary people’s material well-being. Only with the Industrial Revolution, building on the Scientific Revolution, did technological progress finally outpace population growth. From Clark’s perspective, the coincidence that post-1688 England — with its relatively inclusive institutions — was the first to industrialize may flatter the institutional story, but it does not prove it. For thousands of years, human societies varied their institutions, but until modern science and industry broke the trap, the mass of people lived and died dirt poor.

Taken together, these perspectives trace a striking circle of ideas. Diamond explains why agriculture arose in some places and not others; Sahlins emphasizes that it was unnecessary from a subsistence point of view; Harari describes how people stumbled into it; Scott shows how states arose once surpluses became legible; Acemoglu and Robinson argue that institutions drove it, though their case is thinner in deep prehistory; Scheidel insists that inequality is the inevitable outcome of surplus and density, broken only by disaster; and Clark suggests that until very recently, all of this mattered little for ordinary living standards. What unites them is the recognition that once people moved beyond high-quality subsistence, the logic of surplus, specialization, and coordination created the conditions for hierarchy and exploitation. Surplus made expropriation possible; population density made control feasible; coordination and management made hierarchy hard to avoid. Egalitarian abundance could exist only so long as societies stayed mobile, dispersed, and lightly provisioned. Beyond that threshold, wealth and inequality emerged as inseparable companions: the very conditions that produced wealth inexorably produced inequality.

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