6 - Labour Burden and Social Structure

Summary

The clover-fields increase the work greedily.

M. H. Løvenskiold, 1796

Toil – persisting, unending and fundamentally at odds with human-kind's propensities as shaped by the hunting experience – was the lot of all farming populations.

William H. McNeill, 1977

LABOUR BURDEN AND WORKING HOURS, 1500–1800

In The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965), the Danish economist Ester Boserup formulated the general thesis that growth in agriculture is inextricably bound up with (1) an increasing use of labour and (2) a decreasing yield per working hour. In other words, growth in agriculture is achieved only through increasingly labour-intensive forms of farming in the course of which the yield from every extra hour of labour gradually decreases.

The optimal ratio between labour and yield is achieved by the slash-and-burn method in which, after burning off a forest, two or three crops are cultivated in the weed-free, nutrient-rich ash, whereupon the area is abandoned for twenty or thirty years until the forest has grown and is ready to be burned off again. Working days of two or three hours and long periods during which there is nothing to do is the rule in societies that live on the slash-and-burn method. It is unlikely that this privileged form of farming has been used in Denmark since the Stone Age, and today it is practised only in a rapidly diminishing number of areas in the tropics.

The slash-and-burn method can support only a small population.