John Landers

“Low productivity meant that most people could afford only the means of subsistence, and the resulting conditions of mass poverty further limited the expansion of production through a failure of demand. Low productivity restricted the division of labour because a large majority of the workforce was needed to produce food for the minority of non-food producers. This restriction impeded social differentiation in general, and the development and transmission of society's 'stock of knowledge' was rarely the province of specialized institutions. Technical knowledge in particular was transmitted orally, through informal networks often based on kinship or affinity, and various institutionalized forms of 'learning by doing. These modes of transmission favoured a conservative particularism in technology, which often associated the perpetuation of existing practices with respect for tradition in general and even with the maintenance of ethnic or other forms of collective identity.”
― John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West

“Characteristically contested and ambiguous, frontiers were zones of shifting alliance and unstable identity. Just as the spatial frontier was terra nullius to an imperial power and fit only for colonization, so the time frontier was a zone of worthless indolence in the eyes of moral reformer and capitalist alike. But to its inhabitants it was one in which economic activity yielded to an intensity of social life, of informal gatherings that reworked the multitude of networks and alliances on which life in small-scale communities depended.”
― John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West