The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Copper smelting was a practice that makes no sense for an individual trying to meet his own needs, or even for a self-sufficient tribe. It requires a stupendous effort to mine the ore and then by virtue of elaborate bellows to smelt it in a charcoal fire at more than 1,083°C, just to produce a few ingots of a metal that is strong and malleable, but not very hard. Imagine: you have to cut wood and make charcoal from it, make ceramic crucibles for the smelting, dig and crush the ore, then mould and hammer the copper. Only by consuming the stored labour of others – by living off capital – could you even finish the job. Then, even if you can sell copper axes to other hunter-gatherers, the market is likely to be too small to make it worth your while setting up a smelting operation. But once agriculture has provided the capital, increased the density of people, and given them a good reason for chop ping down trees, then there might be a market large enough to support a community of full-time copper smelters, so long as they can sell the copper to neighbouring tribes. Or, in the words of two theorists: ‘The denser societies made possible by agriculture can realize considerable returns to better exploitation of the potential of co-operation, co-ordination and the division of labour.’