Food Production as a Foundation for Societal Complexity and Military Dominance

Key Insight

The settled existence imposed by food production enabled the storage of food surpluses, a capability largely absent among nomadic hunter-gatherers. Stored food was crucial for supporting non-food-producing specialists, who emerged first in sedentary societies. This surplus allowed political elites to control food resources, implement taxation, and dedicate their time fully to political activities, fostering the development of chiefdoms in moderate agricultural societies and kingdoms in large ones. These more complex and organized political units possessed a far greater capacity to mount sustained wars of conquest than egalitarian bands of hunters.

Food surpluses supported a diverse array of specialists beyond political leaders. They could feed professional soldiers, a decisive factor in conflicts such as the British Empire's eventual defeat of New Zealand's Maori population with 18000 full-time troops. Surpluses also sustained priests who provided religious justifications for wars, artisans who developed crucial technologies like swords and guns, and scribes who preserved vital information. Additionally, crops and livestock offered essential non-food resources, including natural fibers (e.g., cotton, flax, hemp, wool from sheep/goats/llamas/alpacas, silk from silkworms) for clothing and tools, and raw materials like bones and hides for leather, with the bottle gourd being cultivated for containers in the Americas.

Domestic large mammals fundamentally transformed land transport until the advent of railroads in the 19th century, enabling the rapid, long-distance movement of heavy goods and people. Animals like horses, donkeys, yaks, reindeer, and camels were ridden or used to bear packs, while cows and horses pulled wagons, and reindeer/dogs pulled sleds. Horses, in particular, provided immense military advantages across Eurasia, functioning as the 'jeeps and Sherman tanks' of ancient warfare; they enabled Cortés and Pizarro to overthrow the Aztec and Inca Empires and allowed the Hyksos to conquer horseless Egypt around 1674 B.C. Equally significant were the infectious diseases like smallpox, measles, and flu, which evolved from animal germs. Populations domesticating animals developed resistance, and their subsequent contact with previously unexposed populations caused epidemics that killed up to 99 percent, playing a decisive role in European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders.