The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs suggested in her book The Economy of Cities that agriculture was invented to feed the first cities, rather than cities being made possible by the invention of agriculture. This goes too far, and archaeologists have discredited the idea of urban centres preceding the first farms. The largest permanent settlements of hunter-gatherers cannot be described as urban even among the fishermen of the Pacific coast of North America. None the less, there was a germ of truth in her idea: the first farmers were already enthusiastic traders breaking free of subsistence through exchange, and farming was just another expression of trade. In Greece, farmers arrived suddenly and dramatically around 9,000 years ago. Stone tools suggest that they were colonists from Anatolia or the Levant who probably came by boat deliberately seeking to colonise new land. Moreover, these very earliest Greek farmers were also apparently enthusiastic traders with each other and were very far from being self-sufficient: they relied upon specialist craftsmen to produce obsidian tools from raw material imported from elsewhere. This is once again not what conventional wisdom envisages. Trade comes first, not last. Farming works precisely because it is embedded in trading networks.