9
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.
8
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.
8
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).
10
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.
9
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).
10
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
9
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).
10
Smith did not use this terminology consistently, sometimes using ‘barbarian’ and ‘savage’ as synonyms.