BrewerDP. Pdf

 

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option,  initially, but to subsist on what they find, but real human societies are not formed in 

that way.  To apply this argument to the history of real societies  Smith would need some 

account of how human societies were first formed, either supporting  the biblical account (as 

many others did) or explicitly differing from it. It is not surprising that he remained silent.  

The age of shepherds  

In the four stages story, the hunting stage is followed by the domestication of animals and a 

whole stage of social development in which people live from their herds of animals, before 

the start of what Smith calls agriculture, the domestic ation of food plants. This is quite 

different from the way social development is now seen. To understand how Smith justified 

his view, it is helpful to review the sort of evidence now available and compare it with the 

evidence available in Smith’s time.  

Archaeological evidence now suggests that the domestication of plants and animals  started 

before 8,000 BC, in the ‘fertile crescent’ area of western Asia and elsewhere.

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  The 

domestication of key food plants like wheat probably preceded the domestication of  animals 

(except dogs) by a little, but it was the combination of domesticated plants and animals  

(Barker 2006 145)  that spread  through  western Asia  and Europe  long  before the earliest 

period known to Smith.  Literate, urbanized civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt 

by about 3,000 BC. 

If arable agriculture and animal husbandry developed side by side, the relation between the 

two, and the proportion of animal and vegetable foods in the diet, varied according to 

geographical conditions and other circumstances. In general, arable farming was concentrated 

on the better land, improved by investment in clearance, drainage, and so on, with animal 

husbandry relegated to less fertile and more remote lands whether locally, say within the 

territory of a village, or on a larger scale. Smith himself described the process of agricultural 

development at some length in the  Wealth of Nations  (Brewer  1995), with corn grown on 

improved land and ‘waste’ land used to raise animals.  As well as animals raised in close 

association with arable, there were whole communities and geographical areas which 

specialized in animal husbandry, justifying Smith’s ‘nations of shepherds’, but not his ‘age of 

shepherds’. 

Smith, however, was dependent on written sources going back  to classical times and  to 

Homer, that is, to the first millennium BC but not much further.  In the earliest period which 

his evidence covered, both agriculture and pastoralism already existed, as he well knew.  

                                                 

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 There is a huge literature on early neolithic (agricultural) societies. Many details are disputed but the outlines 

are clear enough. See for example Smith, B. (1998), Bellwood, P. (2005) and Barker (2006). 

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Why then  did he think of pastoralism as a distinct stage coming before (arable) agriculture? 

The simplest explanation is that this view of pastoralism was the conventional wisdom 

among his contemporaries, with a provenance stretching back to classical antiquity. Shaw 

(1982–3) has documented the classical prejudice that pastoral societies are inherently 

backward or primitive by comparison with agriculture.  He  does not make much of the 

corollary that pastoralism came first, chronologically, but his citations show that, for 

example, Varro (in the first century BC) thought of pastoralism as preceding farming (1973 II 

i.4–5). What was new in the early modern period was the addition of hunting as a stage 

preceding pastoralism.

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 Civilization, literally, means ‘living in cities’. Cities grew up where 

there was good land, suited to arable agriculture, while pastoralism was generally banished to 

worse land where it supported a poor, sparse, and often nomadic population. Barbarians were, 

originally, those who did not speak Greek, but by the eighteenth century ‘barbarians’ were 

often defined as pastoralists (and ‘savages’ as hunter- gatherers).

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In his little introductory story to his lecture class,  Smith  gave an entirely conjectural 

argument. His hypothetical group of people marooned on an island ‘would more probably 

begin first by multiplying animalls than vegetables, as less skill and observation would be 

required. Nothing more than to know what food suited them. We find accordingly that in 

almost all countries the age of shepherds preceded that of agriculture’ (LJ(A) i.28–9). The 

first two sentences are hard to take seriously – what experience did Smith have of taming and 

controlling wild animals? The last sentence seems to promise evidence, but all that is offered 

at this particular point in the argument is a comment that ‘Tartars and Arabians subsist almost 

entirely by their flocks and herds’ (LJ(A) i.29), followed by an admitted exception in the case 

of North American natives.  

In the Lectures taken more broadly, however, he did build up a picture of the role of pastoral 

societies, or (in his terms) the pastoral stage, which is surprisingly convincing (given, of 

course, the limitations of the evidence).  A central role in the story is played by what Smith 

called the Tartars,  a term he applied geographically to all the people of the Eurasian steppe, 

‘all the nations north of Mount Caucasus thro all Asia‘ (LJ(A) iv.36), extending 

chronologically from the Scythians described by Herodotus and others in the fifth century BC 

to the inhabitants of the steppe in his own time.  He often extended the term to cover peoples 

who occupied other areas but came originally from the steppe, or whose form of government 

and customs were similar to those of the Tartars proper.  

The steppes, according to Smith, were bound to remain in the pastoral stage  for geographical 

reasons: ‘the Tartars have been always a nation of shepherds, which they will always be from 

the nature of their country, which is dry and high raised above the sea, with few rivers tho 

                                                 

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 The hunting-pastoral-agriculture sequence survived into the early days of archaeology, and was not abandoned 

until the end of the nineteenth century (Barker 2006 4–9).  

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 Smith did not use this terminology consistently, sometimes using ‘barbarian’ and ‘savage’ as synonyms. 

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