جامعه‌های ماقبل صنعتی: کالبدشکافی جهان پيشامدرن

by Patricia Crone

ماجرای پیدایش، رشد و تکامل تمدن بشری داستانی هیجان‌نگیز و جذاب است که از هر زبان شنیده شود نامکرر است. کتاب حاضر روایتی از همین داستان را در دو بخش بازمی گوید: در بخش نخست، در طی چندین فصل، با دوره‌ای از تاریخ تمدن آشنا می شویم که از آغاز تاریخ تا حدود سه قرن پیش را در بر می گیرد. این دوره‌ی بسیار طولانی جهان قدیم یا سنتی یا به تعبیر مولف کتاب، جهان ماقبلِ صنعتی را توصیف می کند. در بخش دوم کتاب با این واقعیت سروکار داریم که چگونه جهان سنتی وارد عصر جدید شد و تمدن صنعتی جای تمدن ما قبل صنعتی را گرفت.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Economics, Ancient History, Politics, Islam

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Patricia Crone was Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies, where she served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor from 1997 until her retirement in 2014. Crone’s insightful work, compellingly conveyed in her adventurous and unconventional style, shed important new light on the critical importance of the Near East—in particular on the cultural, religious and intellectual history of Islam—in historical studies. Her influence is strongly felt at the Institute, where, along with Oleg Grabar (1929–2011), Crone helped to establish the Institute as a recognized center for the pursuit of the study of Islamic culture and history.


https://www.ias.edu/scholars/patricia...

Reviews

[Amin Tallan · Rating 4 out of 5]

در این کتاب نویسنده بر آن است که تصویری روشن از جامعه‌های ماقبل صنعتی ترسیم کند تا خواننده باساز و کارهای حاکم بر این جوامع آشنا شود و دریابد چه ویژگی‌ها و محدودیت‌هایی موجب شده این جوامع و شبیه به هم باشند. در این کتاب مولف در پی تاریخ‌نگاری هم نبوده است.
توصيفي از جهان پيشامدرن عرضه مي‌کند. نویسنده اول عناصر سازنده‌ي ماقبل صنعتی را از جمله اقتصاد، سياست، دين، خانواده و ... را بررسي مي‌کند و دوم به اين موضوع مي‌پردازد که چگونه جهان سنتي وارد عصر جديد شد و تمدن صنعتي جاي تمدن ماقبل صنعتي را گرفت

[mohsen pourramezani · Rating 3 out of 5]

پاتریشیا کرون در این کتاب نشان می‌دهد که جامعه‌های ما قبل صنعتی از لحاظ، اقتصاد، دین، خانواده، سیاست و… چه تفاوت‌هایی با جوامع مدرن امروزی دارد. بیشتر تمرکز کتاب نیز جامعه‌های ماقبل صنعتی در آسیا و اروپا است.
پ.ن: همان‌طور که نویسنده هم در مقدمه می‌گوید، کتاب یک شناخت کلی در مورد وضعیت جامعه‌های ماقبل صنعتی می‌دهد. در مجموع کتاب روان و خوبی بود برای به دست آوردن یک فهم کلی از جوامع در آن دوران اما یک جاهایی هم حوصله سربر و کش‌دار می‌شد. شاید با آوردن مثال‌های بیشتر و و جذاب‌تر به جای توضیحاتی که تکرار می‌شدند، جذابیت کتاب بیشتر می‌شد.
پ.پ.ن: یک روز که داشتم پیاده از خیابان ولی‌عصر می‌آمدم پایین، رسیدم به شهرکتاب کنار پارک ساعی و گشتی زدم تویش و این کتاب را پیدا کردم.

https://goo.gl/esYo2Y

[Sense of History]

The pre-industrial past is a foreign country, they did things differently there
Patricia Crone (1945-2015) was best known as a specialist of early Islamic history (7th and 8th centuries of the Christian era) and because of that time period she was of course also very familiar with Byzantine and early Western Medieval history. But this book illustrates that she looked much broader than that period and geographical space. Here she ventures into an experiment to view history from an extreme bird's eye view: she sketches no less than the characteristics of all pre-industrial societies, richly drawing from the period from about 3000 BC to the 18th century, and looking at just about all civilization areas, including Asia, Africa and Latin America. Truly a very ambitious approach, one with which she seems a predecessor of what later became known as "Big History" and "Global History". So, all respect for that remarkable effort.

Unfortunately, I find her experiment not really successful. A thematic screening of civilizations, cultures, states and empires over more than 5 millennia necessarily ignores the enormous diversity inherent to that long period of time: how the hell can you put let’s say, the Sumerian civilization of the 3rd millennium BCE on the same level as absolutist France under Louis XIV? Obviously, Crone was aware of that anomaly, as she concedes in her introduction. So, apparently you should take this book as an attempt to give a non-historical or less-educated audience an insight into how different life was before the Industrial Revolution. It is as if Crone, when she taught in London, Cambridge, and later Princeton, had been struck by the lack of awareness of the fundamentally different character of pre-industrial societies. That explains, for example, the long chapter in which she tries to explain at all costs why in pre-industrial societies religion was so important, conscious that to a (great) part of modern, Western audience this seems absurdly implausible. So, if you look at this book with those eyes (an initiation into, making us aware of a somewhat strange way of life), then you can probably call this experiment a success.

But then there still are some methodological and epistemological problems. For starters, she constantly makes the distinction between 'primitive' and 'civilized' societies. Especially that qualification 'primitive' bothered me. This is a concept that is no longer accepted today. She defines primitive as “lacking in social, economic, political and other differentiation on the one hand and poor in culture, both material and intellectual, on the other", and, of course, that is a very negative angle. She doesn’t use the more common description of 'traditional societies', because she consciously limits herself to what she calls 'civilized' societies, and, consequently, that are societies where there is social, economic, political and other differentiation and a higher degree of culture, both material and intellectual. By now it should be clear that with these definitions she is turning herself into problems. Besides, in practice, she constantly falls back on the criterion of the state order: almost all her examples refer to societies where that state order had an important impact, which in itself is a strong delineation.

My second important point of criticism is that her approach, namely making a cross-section of societies over 5 millennia, ignores the dynamics, the growth, the cumulation of human experience and the interaction between different groups, cultures and areas of civilization. I can understand she wanted to get rid of the very artificial ‘rise and fall’-approach of people like Spengler and Toynbee. But the result is that her sketch of pre-industrial societies necessarily appears very static, and does not do justice to the sometimes violent dynamics within and between societies. In that sense, Crone is not at all in line with what has become the merit of Global, Transnational and Interconnected History.

That static approach also forces her to correct her cross-section of pre-industrial societies in a second part, outlining why European (and North American) civilizations have broken with that pre-industrial character, evolved to another level, and carried the whole world with them. Here she comes with an unusual and somewhat refreshing look. She sketches the Industrial Revolution as a failure: where some countries – China for example - had managed to achieve a successful equilibrium, viewed from that pre-industrial archetype, that did not happen in Europe. On the contrary, there things have gotten out of hand, and evolved into a completely different form of society that is almost the opposite of 'balance', as is now evident from ecological and other derailments. This is out-of-the-box thinking that surprises, and that offers new perspectives. It also responds to the methodology that Crone had introduced in her introduction, namely, to take pre-industrial societies at their own value and to make abstraction of what later became industrial society.

Unfortunately, and that is my last criticism, our author does not uphold herself to that last standard. In about all chapters she emphasizes how different pre-industrial societies were from today's modern industrial society. Phrases such as “by modern standards…” are constantly emerging, to indicate the contrast with today. It’s a grave form of inconsistency in this book. But, to be honest, you can't really blame Crone for doing this: after all, we can't but look at the past with what we know in the present, although we have to guard ourselves against teleological thinking. Nevertheless, Crone should have known better, and not have promised a completely different view.

[سید اکبر · Rating 5 out of 5]

به گمانم اتفاقی که پس از خواندن این کتاب به شما دست می‌دهد، نه آگاهی از چگونگی زندگی و ... در جهان پیشامدرن است؛ بلکه مدارا از نتایج این کتاب است. بخوانیدش حتی دو بار بخوانید.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Truly an ambitious book: Patricia Crone tries to give a cross-section of pre-industrial societies. What she certainly succeeds in is showing how different these societies were from later industrial and post-industrial societies. The breadth of her perspective is also meritorious: almost 5,000 years of human history, spread over the whole world. But she clearly gets stuck in various methodological and epistemological problems.
This book originally appeared in 1989, and although this is the 3rd updated edition (published in 2015, just before her death), it contains only minor changes; for example, the bibliography has only 2 works after 1988. The recent historiographical approaches of Global, Transnational, Interconnected and Big History clearly have made this book very dated.
More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Shantia · Rating 3 out of 5]

اين سوال احمقانه اي كه "چرا ايران عقب ماند و غرب پيشرفت"، و يا "كتابهاي ابوعلي سينا تا همين چند سال پيش تدريس ميشده در دنيا!"،" اين اروپاييها كتابهاي ما رو دزديدن و ترجمه كردن و پيشرفت كردن"، " موقعي كه ما تخت جمشيد داشتيم اونا هيچي نداشتن و وحشي بودن" و اينچيزا! اين كتاب به اين سوالها و اين موقعيتها جواب ميده. البته ممكنه اين موارد صحيح باشه اما جنبه انفعالي و ايستايي كه اين تفكر تلقين ميكنه منظورم هست. اين كتاب به شما ميگه چطور اروپا جدا شد از بقيه دنيا! چرا انقلاب صنعتي تو چين شروع نشد؟!

[Vadim Polikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book that everyone should read. The author is a professor of history at Princeton and her stated purpose for writing the book is to teach all those hopelessly misinformed undergrads that show up to campus that the life they lead in the modern world today is nothing at all like what the world was like throughout the vast majority of history. We are used to strong central governments, widely shared political power, social safety nets, market based economies, and technological progress, which of course were all totally absent just a few hundred years ago. I’ve read widely on pre-industrial history, and I arrogantly thought this would be a review for me. It was indeed a review in many respects, but in the course of the well-written chapters, I found myself solidifying things I knew into a better, more structured framework and uncovering gems in each section. I’m really glad I found the book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of their historical knowledge.

The writing is excellent - easy to understand, no nonsense, with plenty of examples from civilizations from across the world and different time periods. The book is structured into 9 chapters. The first chapter “Introduction: What is a complex society” introduces the reader to a thought experiment of what if our ship (with a bunch of people) was shipwrecked, how would we form a society, especially if there are other hostile natives on the island? Very quickly it becomes apparent that we would need to organize to protect ourselves and people would specialize. Leaders, soldiers, and food producers who support the soldiers and leaders would emerge. The thought experiment is useful and shows neatly where much of the analysis takes off - in societies that have become complex enough for specialists and have a need to organize that complexity to maintain a stable society. So the book is focused on societies much more complex than hunter gatherer bands, but less complex than modern nation states.

Part 1 “ The Pre-industrial pattern” is broken up into chapters on Socio Economic Organization, The State, Politics, Culture, Society and the Individual, and Religion. Part II “The Departure from the Pattern” ends with two chapters - the Oddity of Europe and Modernity. I realized at the end I must have bought the book because of some reference to these last two chapters, but I was very happy to have read the first 7 chapters to get here.

The book was originally written in 1989 (and has gone through multiple editions, the most recent one in 2015), and as a result it’s delightfully void of politically correct tiptoeing. For example, “barbarians” and their invasions play an important role in shaping ancient societies, but that is rarely discussed in more recent books because “barbarian” sounds terrible in today’s morally relativistic society. This book deals with “barbarians” in a refreshingly straightforward manner:

“The pre-industrial world was full of primitive peoples, hunter gatherers, cultivators and pastoralists, of whom a tiny fraction survived long enough into modern times to be immortalized by anthropologists. In pre-modern times most of them were as blissfully ignorant of the existence of civilization as were civilized people of theirs, but inevitably there were areas where the two came together. When this happened, the primitive people were branded as barbarians, a term now used by historians to designate people who were perceived to be lacking in all those features which add up to civilization and who were aware of this fact, having had sufficient dealings with their neighbors to lose their primitive innocence in both cognitive and other respect.
Barbarians were typically dangerous people because they knew enough about civilization to both covet and despise it, the former because it was rich and the latter because its members were effete ‘slaves’ who could not practice self-help. Many barbarians were simply raiders but, as mentioned above, the flow of wealth and ideas from a great power to a marginal region was liable to transform its inhabitants into conquerors. Time after time states proved to be so weak that even small numbers of ill-equipped barbarians could overrun them.”

There are many, many little nuggets of wisdom and “aha” moments found throughout the book. Here is one from the thought experiment:

“All we wanted, back on our primitive island, was to defend ourselves: we set up some of us as rulers to preserve all of us. But in so doing we have exposed ourselves to what one might call the dilemma of the golden goose: one cannot specialize in the production of wealth (or for that matter children) without becoming both highly desirable AND defenseless; the very fact that labour is divided up dictates that gold-bearing creatures are weak. Industrialization greatly modifies this dilemma, and there were occasional societies in pre-industrial times in which food producers retained a measure of political power. To this must be added that there are many different types of power in all human societies (military, economic, political, ideological and many more), so that history never reduces to a simple story of food producers versus rulers; the thought experiment is highly simplistic in its disregard of this fact. But even so, the division of labour from which the state ensued almost invariably transformed the free agriculturalists of primitive society into miserable peasants, that is to say rural cultivators whose surplus was forcibly transferred to a dominant group of rulers.”

Here is another just a few pages later: “What this means is that descent rather than market forces determined who should do what: work had been allocated in advance to the social group into which one was born. The advantage of this lay in the automatic manner in which people were recruited and trained for their jobs. There was no need for elaborate educational systems (people were taught by their parents), or for job centers and other forms of impersonal labour exchange; nor indeed was there any need to advertise for a new occupant of the throne when the ruler died. It solved the problem of job allocation with minimal organization, or in other words it was cheap. (By contrast, consider the costs of a presidential election, or even the fuss and bother of filling a university post; it would be a lot easier to simply appoint the son.) It also worked, after a fashion, because most work was unskilled and because such skills as were required changed very slowly: if anyone can do a job as well as anybody else, elaborate procedures for job allocation are superfluous; and if skills do not change from one generation to the next, parents can train their children as well as anyone else. It did produce inept rulers, although some very impressive ones; and when even artists came to be recruited by heredity in fifteenth century Korea, it produced inept painters too.”

The best part for me of course was the last two chapters about why it was that Europe deviated from the normal pattern of pre-modern societies. I had highlights on nearly every page of the last two chapters. The argument fits neatly with the preceding chapters on pre-modern society, so I am not going to do it justice in a review, but in general the argument is as follows:

The land: Europe was fed by rain and agriculture was not labor intensive and was highly fertile with the invention of the heavy plough. It was also not surrounded or dotted by desert, tropical forest, or forbidding mountains where barbarians can be based (and surge forth to destroy nascent states) (no internal barbarians). It was also protected from external barbarians. Finally, it has a wide variety of resources, creating an internal market with ample coastline and navigable rivers. There was a unique late marriage pattern so Europe didn’t fall into the Malthusian trap because it was easier to regulate fertility. Feudalism emerged out of the collapse of the Roman empire as the external barbarians settled once and for all and people looked to protect themselves as the state completely collapsed. Fiefs became hereditary and the state was just a bunch of private relationships and contracts without a strong central power to collect taxes. This relationship was too simple to support a complex society with rich potential and kings began to appear. But they were so weak they had to actually work for power, by dispensing justice and cultivating their domains:

“Thus the monarch’s inability to tax his subjects (except in emergencies and by their consent) led to the characteristically European conflation of government and estate management. Every king or prince had to nurse his domains, seeing to their productivity, ensuring that they were properly administered and adding to them by marriage and judicious use of force as best he could. Obviously, this made for a reconstitution of public power along lines very different from those which prevail where immense areas are united by conquest and loosely held together by a single tax-collecting apparatus. Both the king and the magnates whose territories he has in due course to take over governed on an intensive rather than extensive scale, with the result that self-help groups and robber barons were eliminated with a novel thoroughness.”

The weakness of kings also led to representative institutions. Then, there were cities that grew up relatively unmolested by kings and rural aristocrats who didn’t really understand the danger independent cities would pose to them (they were just happy with the tax revenue the cities generated).

Europe was also unique in that it was a composite culture:

“Europe was formed by barbarian invaders who adopted a religion of Hebraic origin which had long existed with Graeco-Roman culture, or in other words there were three quite different components to European civilization.”

Each of these components competed with one another and kept unification from occurring (no monocultural empire being created). The synthesis between these three elements was important:

“Christianity and classical culture were two completely different worldviews which had come together by historical accident and which had fallen into the hands of alien barbarians by yet another turn of fortune. Europe had unwittingly equipped itself with a potential for fundamentalism in three quite different directions, being encouraged by piety to restore original Christianity (as attempted in the Reformation), by learning to revive the original classics (as attempted in the Renaissance), and by politics to rediscover its barbarian roots (as attempted in Romantic nationalism). Each revival undermined the compromise, necessitating new thought for the recovery of a coherent worldview.”

The synthesis of classical thought and Christianity led to scientific thought:

“Classical thought was conceptual and strictly deductive: human reason postulated the operation of regularities in the universe, but empirical testing was disdained on the ground that theory was above the haphazard behavior which we can actually observe...Christianity, on the other hand...strictly inductive: the universe is run by a personal and omnipotent God who may behave any way he likes, meaning no regularities can be postulated...human reason can only observe. It was the interaction between these two views which issued in the conviction that the regularities postulated by deductive thought must be systematically tested by empirical observation: if the regularities are the laws by which the omnipotent God chooses to run the universe, they must display themselves in God’s daily practice too”

So all this led to Capitalism showing up in Europe:

“Medieval and early modern rulers set the scene for the bourgeoisie, first by allowing it to manage its own cities in accordance with its own wishes and next by clearing their kingdoms of unruly nobles, robber barons and self help groups, assisted by the wealth and skills of the burghers themselves: this alliance between state and bourgeoisie is distinctly unusual. The growth of urban wealth and skills also assisted the expansion of the state at the cost of the ecclesiastical jurisdictions, while at the same time contributing to the emancipation of thought from Church control. New modes of thought on the one hand and the happy coincidence between the wishes of the equally greedy rulers and bourgeoisie on the other led to the formation of colonial empires and the influx of an immense amount of tributary and commercial wealth capable of investment into manufacturer at the same time the erosion of the political and economic power of the nobility pressurized the latter into commercial exploitation of the land, be it by evicting their tenants or by selling off land to them, either way by drawing rural populations into the commercial network and creating new markets for commodity production, which was transformed by the growth of scientific and technological thought in its turn.”

“Europe was inventive in different areas from other civilizations, having a penchant for technology which still has not been explained… Whatever the ultimate explanation for this penchant may be, the extreme primitivity of barbarian Europe certainly plays a role in it. Outside Europe, the state created sophisticated elites utterly different from the masses in all and every respect; but the unwashed, vermin infested, badly clothed, badly housed, illiterate and half-studied barons and clerics who held sway in medieval Europe were barely distinguishable from the serfs they ruled; even thirteenth century crusaders of the most sophisticated variety struck polished Muslim gentlemen as appallingly crude, and by the time the European aristocracy began to acquire proper manners they had lost their monopoly on setting the tone, a bourgeoisie embodying conspicuously different values having appeared. It was the failure of the European elite thoroughly to distance itself from the masses which made technology respectable, not just for military armoury and amusing gadgets, but also for labour saving and other devices of the most prosaic kind. Differently put, a state without money generated an aristocracy without manners and bearers of high culture without a proper disdain for flywheels and cranks, let along for uneducated men who put such things together.”

Of course there was also the competition between the states:
“The first thousand years [of its formative period] had issued in a system of of protonational states, and competition between these states was the motor of European history thereafter, as has often been observed”

Finally, this nugget of insight:

“There is only one respect in which all non-European civilizations genuinely resemble each other more than Europe, and that is their successful discovery of durable solutions to the problems inherent in pre-industrial organization. Europe failed: [continued in comments]

[Anıl Bülent · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book was not as good as the title tries to impose. To many confusing examples that doesn't relate to real world history. Maybe I'am too critical, but the distant relation with the actual development in societies and the "in-a-box" societies Patricia Crone creates was too much to handle. If you are looking for a very controversial way to look at pre- industrial societies, with very few connections to actual historical examples and situations this is the book you are looking for.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

نه آنچنان که انتظار داشتم اما در مجموع تصویر لانگ شات گونه جامعی از مناسبات و اتمسفر دنیای پیشامدرن به دست میدهد، مشکل اصلی من شاید به تحلیل گاها زیاده ازحد اقتصادی ش برمی گردد وترجمه ای که هرچند ثقیل نیست اما میتوانست خوانش کتاب را روان تر و ساده تر کند.

[Muharrem Enes Erdem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patricia Crone's Pre-Industrial Societies is a great book for sociology and international relations undergraduate students who wants to be informed about how can history can be merged up with political and sociological history up to the industrial revolution. Although there are some parts that I like, I mostly regret reading this book, since it did not give me any new information, and I am saying this out of ignorance or snobbishness. It just did not. I did not like the language used in the book, the arguments are sacralized, the writer wants to convince us that she is writing the sole truths, and because of that, I guess, there are no footnotes to check the truth of the arguments.

There was a part, where she talked about how should a modern historian write, and the solution that she gave was "just think like an atheist." I get it, she mostly suggested that believing in something while writing history is not objective, however atheism is not objective too. Thus, the position she put herself coincides with the argument that she suggested. Atheism too, is a belief, in my opinion, which consist of not believing any divine creator. Thus, it also conceptualize itself as a "side" in context, in the plane; and that makes it a different religion. And because it can be considered as a different religion, being atheist does not make you a objective person, it just makes you a person who does not believe in a certain creator.

All in all, the idea of the book is great, and there are some parts where she shone; however, it is not good in terms of language usage, argument building and not including different perspectives on differential subjects.

[AC]

Not aure if I will ever go back to this. It has the unique value that Crone *does* understand (which very few do) the essence of an archaic, pre-industrial society...almost. But she starts with the State and ends with religion, which is exactly backwards, and which makes the book plodding to read. It is too difficult too students.

[Yalin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crone's work is easy to read and understand, and thus accessible to all types of readers. The analysis of pre-industrial societies and the dynamics that have made them, as well as the discussion of how Europe has become a deviation from the norm of the analysis is quite well done. Overall this book is an enjoyable read in sociology.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, the author tries to define industrial societies as in the ones we all know and contrast that with the pre-industrial societies that feel pre-modern. I don't know if the line is as clear as the author makes it. Sure, in one sense it can feel like it's obvious. Ancient Sumeria didn't have a lot of the same nation-state governance, but different systems evolve at their own paces for all kinds of reasons. I'm not I learned a whole lot from this book.

[Usfromdk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given the very general and overarching nature of the coverage there were many places throughout the coverage where I felt inclined to quibble about the details and/or add notes in the margin (especially in the context of cultural evolution I find the book's coverage a bit lacking - Boyd, Richerson, Bowles, Gintis, Heinrich, etc. are all missing from the bibliography, and it's not like some of their insights are not relevant to the coverage in specific parts of the book), but overall this is a great book. People with some background in the various fields involved will know a lot of the stuff included already, but even such readers are, it seems to me, likely to come across some new ideas and perspectives if they read this book. If more people read books like this, I'd be much more inclined to discuss in public the sort of topics for which the coverage in the various chapters is relevant; it's always annoying to discuss matters with ignorant people who do not know that they are ignorant, and ignorance is unfortunately a default position which applies to many things people may not know that it applies to. If you want to understand how different life used to be like for your ancestors who lived centuries ago, you need to know the sort of stuff this book covers - the past was a different place, much more different than people unfamiliar with it has a tendency to give it credit for. One of the brilliant things about Crone's book is that she's very good at picking out specific aspects of the past/topics in her coverage which people tend to systematically misunderstand, leading to them making wrong implicit assumptions they are not aware that they are making (precisely the sort of wrong implicit assumptions which can incidentally be annoying to address during a conversation on such topics, because they tend to remain unverbalized and thus hidden from the view of all conversation partners, including those who know better; and so they may be hard to address even when they might be doing a lot of work).

For someone who does not know a great deal about what the past was like 'in general', how different life in a complex society, say, 700 or 2000 years ago was to the life of today, this book is a must read. As the author put it in the introduction, "Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are [...] born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them." This book will help its readers appreciate how different things used to be for people living in the past. Reading the book may also help some people better appreciate how people with different cultural backgrounds may perceive the world differently from the way they themselves perceive it.

'People like me' will probably hate the fact that there are no inline citations, but I did not punish the author for this as I deemed that 'it's simply not that kind of book'. You couldn't write the sort of book Crone has written if you had to source everything, and a more 'technical'/'in depth' coverage of specific aspects of the coverage would likely have been a bad idea as any such approach in my view would likely have 'blown up in the authors face', making the book impossible to write in the first place. Read it, and judge it based on what it is, not on what you'd have liked it to be.

[Walter Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this book will make it a lot harder to believe the societies and economies in sword and sorcery fantasies. It breaks down how pre-industrial societies actually worked, all around the world, and especially how we can misunderstand them using models from the modern, industrial world.

The scope is tremendous, nearly 10,000 years of societies in Europe, Asia, India, Arabia, Africa, and the Americas. A small part of this could be a lifetime of study.

I have the 2003 edition, but I don't think there is much different between the editions, mostly some material near the end about the modern world. They seemed to have switched to a low-budget proofreader around page 150, because there was about one typo per page for a bit. And one later page had two versions of two different lines, oops! But none of that interfered with what I learned from the book.

[Jacob Heartstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a seminar about pre-industrial non-European societies at university, and I quite liked the way the author wrote and the way she explained her theses (though some of them were so generalizing as to be almost controversial, but I guess that for many readers this is one of the charms of this book). Also, some scientific concepts introduced are almost outdated today, seeing as the book was first published in 1989.

Other than that, however, I retain the opinion that it paints a pretty good (if broadly generalizing) picture of the essential keypoints and peculiarities common to many if not most pre-industrial societies, and it is super easy to read and to follow the author´s reasoning.

So, I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in this specific topic.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am found this book very intriguing as an approach to what makes industrialized societies different from / similar to all the other forms of civilization that have existed. However, if you are more interested in the diversity of non-industrialized societies in themselves, I imagine this book might seem like a list of simplistic generalizations. If you're interested in the overall argument rather then details and examples, its a very fast read. I disagree strongly with a lot of her very Weberian conclusions about industrial society, but its still an interesting framework that she provides.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End.

[محمدحسین بنـکدارتهرانی · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب از هر حیث عالی بود. محتوا درجه یک، ترجمه مناسب، ویرایش و طبع پاکیزه. بر کافه‌ی مومنین علی‌الخصوص علمای اعلام فرض ست که این کتاب را بخوانند و خوب در فقراتش بیاندیشند

[Farid · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتابی خواندنی بدون جزییات خسته کننده و برخاسته از یک عمر ماطلعه علمی نویسنده اش
این کتاب را می توان حاصل عمر خانم پاتریشیا کرون درباره تاریخ جهان دانست

[mike osman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crone ambitiously attempts to outline the main characteristics of agrarian civilizations (everything between Sumer of 3000BC to the early modern period). It begins with a hypothetical scenario of how people might reconstruct a society if they were shipwrecked on a deserted island. The actual historical part really starts with Chapter 2 (Socio-economic Organization), which describes the population and economy of agrarian societies. Markets in produce, land, and labor were generally weakly developed. Towns were parasitic on the countryside, since they were mainly places where elites or administrators spent wealth acquired from taxing peasants. Chapter 3 describes states, whose main purposes were to wage war (mainly to obtain or defend taxable territories) and to collect taxes. Rulers might get involved in religion or in economic matters to raise revenue, but pre-industrial government was typically minimal government. In Chapter 4, politics is described as a concern of the elite (sometimes only the top 1-2%), with hereditary aristocracies conflating public with private powers. Rulers tried to make the aristocratic elite homogeneous and coherent by forging an alliance between state, church, educational institutions, and wealth. Rulers feared and tried to suppress popular organization, even for ostensibly benign purposes, which could nevertheless lead to revolts. Chapter 5 distinguishes between high and low culture. Formal education was expensive (and usually for the elite), while commoners learned their social roles and work skills from their parents or through apprenticeship. Since elite culture only floated at the top of society, there was no "national culture" and the masses were often left to their own superstitions. Chapter 6 describes how these societies were usually hierarchical and organic (i.e., they viewed their societies as a single organism, in which everyone had their assigned role to play, and individuals usually identified with the social role). Societies were organized by rank and status, and not by class. Marriages were generally arranged. The failure to live up to one's role usually resulted in shame rather than guilt. The chapter on religion (chapter 7) seems a bit muddled. Crone grudgingly admits that a major function of religion was to legitimate the social order, alongside the need to provide meaning. Religion may have been the opium of the people, but Crone argues it was not mere superstructure, determined by the mode of production. The last two chapters take a stab at explaining Europe's special path of development out of agrarian society into industrial society. The annotated bibliography is very useful. Overall, it is a worthwhile introduction or review, especially for those of us whose grasp on premodern history is a bit shaky.

[Will Crumbley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated how the author drew on examples from across pre-industrial civilizations, and did not just focus on European/Eurasian history. She also has crafted quite a few chuckle-inducing observations/truisms (some of which I have highlighted) which are the kind of passage you read to your spouse across the room.

However, a fair number of the author’s conclusions are supported by one or two historical examples, leaving me to wonder how many of the instances she cites are cherry-picked to allow her to draw out clean principles and sentiments from a messy human prehistory. Still worth the read, but keep a skeptical eye out.

[Reko Wenell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a short, highly readable introduction to the different set of restrictions that govern the pre-industrial world and how those restrictions tended to lead to similar societal logics. The point is to equip the reader with an intuitive understanding of these logics so that they won’t be confused by them. This enables them to better branch out when learning of these societies in the future. I’ve found it very useful in making these differences of quality clear and I’ve seen several academics recommend it as a (flawed) introductory read, so highly recommended!

[Ercan Akyol · Rating 3 out of 5]

lisans öğrencilerine okutmalık, fena olmayan bir kitap. ilk altı bölüm kitabın gerisine kıyasla çok daha iyi. kitabın din ile ilgili olan bölümü anlamadığım bir şekilde marksizmle yüzeysel ve kitabın kapsamını aşan bir tartışmaya girişmiş... kitabın avrupa ve modernite ile ilgili tezlerinin bir kısmı ise kitabın yazılış yılı göz önüne alındığında artık geçerliliğini yitirmiş durumda. ama yine de ensdüstri öncesi toplumların neliğine dair giriş seviyesinde, derli toplu bir kitap diyebilirim.

[Greg Dolph]

From Brad DeLong: her ability to generalize and draw on social science ideas that makes this a very special and valuable read. The book's brilliance lies in its ability to condense complex concepts into a narrative that is both educational and engaging. Crone's skillful handling of a vast array of historical contexts, from the Mongol Empire to seventeenth-century France, is a testament to her expertise as a historian. And Crone’s writing is clear and jargon-free

[John Old · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like this kind of thing . . .

you will like this. Precise but clear; not overly technical. It’s a broad view of what pre-industrial societies were like (in most cases). Intended to help students of a particular society to understand how it differs from other pre-industrial societies. Without this knowledge students may make misleading comparisons between pre-industrial and what they are familiar with. Interesting to a general reader as well.

[Franz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable account of what societies looked like before the industrial revolution. The landscape of such societies are as alien to most of us as the landscape of Mars.

[Bocșe Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is now one of my favorite books ever!

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another academic bureaucrat that has a crystal ball to watch all the pre-1776 TV he wants. And, of course, it's all true, cat ate the video tapes.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A model of clarity and concision.