Sometimes Books Don't Work
Reflection on Patricia Crone, "Pre-Industrial Societies"
Compared to most Americans, I read a lot—more in some fortnights, or even the occasional week, than most Americans read in a year. (Compared to some folks I know, I read very little.)
Reading this much gives me a less intimate relationship with any particular book than my sense is that most people, even most readers, have. When people ask me what my favorite book is, I stare blankly—favorite altogether? Not favorite for what or when or under what conditions? The question just doesn’t make sense; how could one have a favorite book any more than one has a favorite glass of water?
After all, I read because it’s work these days; nothing will kill your love of books or your affectations of a bookish nature faster than being in a doctoral program. In grad school, one learns to gut books like they were fish—and not artisanally, either: by the time of comprehensive exams, you should be able to extract the thesis from a book like a Russian factory worker debones part of today’s catch. (That image is brought to you by the 2014 film Leviathan.) It’s hard to speak of love or affection under these circumstances.
Still, sometimes I read more for fun, or at least professional development, than at other times. And that allows for more reflection, or at least for the option of dropping out of a book faster than otherwise.
So it is with Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies, which is definitely more in the non-required reading stack, but which I checked out because I thought it might help me build up my foundations of The Politics of the End of the World, a course so multidisciplinary it threatens to break me. In particular, I wanted to better understand what separates us—you know, post-industrial, wealthy, living lives of undeserved leisure—from those folks back then, both the grinding peasantry and the gilded elites.
Crone’s ambition is to show us, and she means pretty much the people reading this newsletter, how different pre-industrial societies were from ours. This is not a book about any given earlier civilization but, in principle, about the average pre-industrial society. Her thesis is simple: these were societies of extreme wealth inequality, couched in systems of enormous poverty (“scarcity”, she says), in which organizational capital was particularly scarce, lending particular significance to phenomena like religion and governmental organization (principally the organization of arms), which could transcend the concerns of local agrarian workers and generate a thin layer of complexity atop the relentless drudgery and superstition of local life.
There’s not much in this book for me. Maybe there would have been had I read this a lot earlier in my career; maybe some of the insights into the world of peasant repression and wealth accumulation through conquest would have hit better had I not read similar arguments across dozens of semi-remembered books about the pre-modern world.
But I doubt it. When one sets oneself an enormous task, one is usually setting oneself up for disappointment. Crone’s task is huge: explaining the usual range of variation of human societies from the hunter-gatherer period to the industrial age. Her failure is proportionate.1
One flaw is that she draws from a ludicrously limited set of examples: many European or familiar to European-descended folks (Rome, Israel and Judea, half-remembered Sumeria and Assyria—standard British Museum stuff) and a good leavening of Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Indian, and occasionally Southeast Asian references. Yet this leaves out a lot. I’ve long thought that Western Europeans slight the experiences of the “New World” and the scant attention to how Aztec, Maya, or other societies might have been different, or even existed, is plain. So, too, are the extremophile civilizations like that of Polynesia or the Himalayas neglected. And there’s practically no attention given to nomadic civilizations, most of which would have displayed wildly different tendencies than here.
The periodization is similarly unclear. Yes, economic growth was quite slow over the period 10,000 BCE to Jane Austen. But it did happen, and simple accumulative wealth also took place. I find it a little hard to believe that Ming China was more or less “the same” as that of the Han, for example, not least because it was not just economic but cultural wealth that accumulated—and the weight of tradition in continuous or semi-continuous cultures seems to displace at least some of the role for myth.
Then, too, this is a work of strikingly conventional history. Disease? Language? Archaeology? Osetology? No room for those here—we are in a world of scribes and records. Theory? Gender? No thanks, we have assumptions.
Perhaps most damningly, a book about everything is, ultimately, a book about nothing: when early modern Vietnam and ancient China and biblical Israel are dropped in the same paragraph, it’s hard to see connective tissues. Had the book been laid out by an anthropologist, I assume there would have been more consistent attention paid to categorizing and taxonomizing early cultures, but alas none such is here—the book is strictly thematic and achronological.
I don’t necessarily mean to turn you off from this book, although to be frank you might be better served by watching some National Geographic and Smithsonian specials (or visiting a top flight museum) than reading this. Rather, I want to share something about how the job of a professional thing-knower happens—not just through happy and productive engagement with always scintillating texts, but sometimes with disappointing engagements with texts that have shortcomings.
After all, Crone’s book has some value—sometimes one needs a citation to discuss how different the earlier eras were from the assumptions underpinning today’s. And Brad DeLong hasn’t written a better book about life in pre-scarcity societies quite yet. But still I wish this had worked out better.
I read Crone’s Wikipedia article soon after I checked out. Apparently sweeping projects that fell short of engaging experts were something of a calling card.