World 1.0

The agricultural revolution: a socio-economic revolution

Hunters and gatherers were nomadic. They were following their food sources across the land. With agriculture, producing their food supply at the same place means humans settle down, becoming sedentary. 

Hunters and gatherers societies were generally egalitarian, sharing the proceeds of hunting and gathering between all group members.

Planting a grain of wheat or of wild rice will end up dissolving the pre-agrarian social organization.

The plot of land becomes the property of the individual who sweated and laboured to clear it. The food from this land is no longer shared, but bartered at first, then eventually exchanged for money.

Food surpluses from agriculture give rise to an elite class, to guarantee the survival of the group. Their job is to manage these surpluses, to ensure that in case of bad harvests, the stored reserves can allow the community to survive.

Early agricultural societies will become hierarchical, with leaders managing resources and no longer involved in the direct production process.

The human population will gradually increase, slowly with the ups and downs from good harvests alternating with bad crops and famines.

Yet irrigation can create waterlogging or cause salinization of the soil after decades and decades of evaporation, thus making the land infertile.

These negative long-term ecological consequences can cause civilizations to collapse, like in Mesopotamia for instance.

World 2.0

The industrial revolution transforms lifestyles

In 1776, a Scot, James Watt, improves the steam engine. This technological innovation drastically disrupts the economic, social and ecological life, and eventually geopolitics. 

People leave the countryside, where the mechanization of agriculture is creating unemployment. They migrate and crowd into cities, where new factories need labourers. 

Factories burn coal to heat up the water in order to produce the steam that powers the machineries. Smoke from the industrial chimneys fills the streets like fog (quite common in the British Isles.) 

A new word is then invented to describe this new reality of the industrial habitat, the city: “Smog”, born out of the marriage between “smoke” and “fog”. 

Cholera pandemics. At the same time, urban population density combined with the lack of hygiene give rise to epidemics such as cholera in London, England or in Paris, France.

Indeed, people continue to live in cities and towns the way they used to back in the countryside. So they discharge their wastes anywhere. Eventually, the Thames or the Seine river become open sewers while still a source of drinking water, though increasingly polluted.

At the same time, more international trade with steamboats contributes to spreading the cholera virus across the world. Cholera finds a fertile ground in these overcrowded and unsanitary early cities and proliferates.

Society reacts. These public health crises will give rise to new ways of protecting urban health and nurturing public health.

The creation of sewers and drinking water networks and the collection of garbage are the first public health measures to improve the quality of life in these new industrial human habitats. 

Advances in industrial agriculture and the abundance of food also trigger a population explosion. People are better fed, better protected by preventive hygiene measures and in the case of diseases, better treated thanks to the advances of science (thanks in particular to Louis Pasteur and vaccines from 1882 onwards.) 

New healthy public policies. In the wake of the industrial revolution, the socio-economic landscape experiences tremendous changes, while public policy is trying to keep up.

Eventually, child labor is outlawed, while the six days work week of up to 16 hours a day is gradually capped. Public policy is simply copping with the upheavals in the private sector that James Watt’s technological innovation had initiated.

New wave of globalization. International trade is also developing thanks to steamboats, also contributing to the expansion of the colonization of other continents.

The power of the European countries where the industrial revolution was born allows them to continue to exploit natural resources elsewhere in the world.