As I understand it, the earliest division of society into masters and slaves had to be preceded by the transformation of hunting and gathering into herding and growing - and the accumulation of a storeable, possessable surplus of wealth. Only then can some make others work the fields and tend the herds.
In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, the mammoth-hunting Cloud People force the coast-dwelling, fishing and gathering Tulat to walk for days through the interior, "...bearing the gifts required of them." (p. 187)
"Having come back, you would spend more days getting together the next load. Not much time or strength was left to take care of your own livelihood." (p. 188)
I would say not nearly enough time or strength...
4 comments:
Actually, hunter-gatherer economies usually have a lot of "slack". About four hours of labor per adult per day (with broad seasonal variations) is enough to satisfy basic subsistence needs, much less than is necessary in most agrarian economies. The rest of their time is spent on cultural production (ritual, ceremony, etc.), on the low-level but endemic raiding and fighting to which these societies are prone, and to sheer idleness.
There's no point in producing more, among nomads with little exchange or capacity for storing surpluses.
So external demand could be met by cutting into leisure time -- which would probably be perceived as extremely oppressive.
Slightly more advanced hunter-gatherers like the sedentary Haida and the other potlatch tribes of western North America often had quite severely hierarchical societies -- the Haida had mass slavery (about a third of the population), a caste of nobles, and a class of free commoners between them.
My objection to the Tulat of THE SHIELD OF TIME was that they were too primitive. They apparently don't have spears or hafted weapons and tools, but current archaeological consensus is that those were common well before h. sapiens sapiens; hunting spears (and butchered large animals) are present from sites dated to at least 400,000 years BP, and isotopic ratio analysis of Neanderthal bones indicates that they were specialist big-game hunters.
SM Stirling,
Great to hear from you again! And you have certainly questioned/criticized/corrected some of my assumptions: external demands could cut into leisure time; some hunter-gatherers had hierarchies; the Tulat should have been more technologically advanced.
I am drafting a slightly longer than usual post about UNDER THE YOKE, to be published tomorrow.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling:
Darn! You have pointed out a fortunately RARE major error made by Poul Anderson in one of his books. Unless the "Beringia" section of THE SHIELD OF TIME was written before it was discovered that Neanderthals were big game hunters hundreds of thousands of years ago. SHIELD was published in 1990, when DNA analysis was only just beginning to be used. Which means Poul Anderson did not know he was very likely making a mistake about the Tulat.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
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