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was little or
no cultivation of the ground, and cattle was the principle part of their property’
(LJ(B) 31–2).
The concentration of authority in the hands of chiefs (or kings) in Homeric times was so close
to that in pastoral societies that Smith cited Homer to illustrate his argument about authority
in pastoral societies: ‘at the time of the Trojan wars there were severall nations who were led
on by different chiefs.
…
But this was not an infringement of the democraticall form of
government, as these persons had not any authority more than was acquired by their private
influence’ (LJ(A) iv.11–12). Smith was perhaps not wholly consistent, since elsewhere (in
the Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations) he emphasized the extent to which the Greeks had
already surpassed the pastoral stage: ‘Homer paints the actions of two nations who, tho’ far
from being perfectly civilized, were yet much advanced beyond the age of shepherds, who
cultivated lands, who built cities
…
’ (ED 27).
Smith gave a rather similar account of the Germanic tribes on the north-eastern frontiers of
the Roman empire more than a thousand years later. ‘[T]he northern nations which broke into
Europe in the beginning of the 5 century
…
were arrived at the state of shepherds, and had
even some little agriculture’ (LJ(A) ii.97). They ‘had better notions of property [than Tartars]
and were a little more accustomed to the division of lands’ (LJ(B) 50), but, like the Tartars,
they could advance as a mass to devastating effect.
‘The fall of the western empire is the third great revolution in the affairs of mankind of
which ancient history has preserved any distinct or circumstantial account. It was brought
about by the irresistible superiority which the militia
…
of a nation of shepherds has over
that of a nation of husbandmen, artificers, and manufacturers.’ (WN V.i.a.36)
The age of agriculture and the gro wth of commerce
In Smith’s account of history, agriculture came after pastoralism, but its origins were still
beyond the limits of the evidence available to him. Modern archaeologists would put the first
agriculture many thousands of years before the earliest (written) evidence available in the
eighteenth century. Smith had a shorter (conjectural) history in mind – it is possible that he
thought of the beginnings of agriculture as only just before the Homeric age of Greece, and
therefore only just beyond the reach of his earliest sources.
The main case study discussed in Smith’s lectures deals with the origins of Greek city-states,
and particularly of Athens. The basic story is quite simple. On the steppes (Tartary) it was
impossible to develop beyond the pastoral stage, but when Tartars (or people in that stage of
development) arrived in Greece, they found conditions favourable for settled agriculture.
Attica (the territory around Athens) was not the richest part of Greece, but it was particularly
well placed for defence, since ‘[t]wo thirds of Attica are surrounded by sea, and the other side
by a ridge of high mountains. By this means they have a communication with their
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neighbouring countries by sea and at the same time are secured from the inroads of their
neighbours’ (LJ(B) 31). ‘As the country was so much securer than the others, people flocked
into it from all hands’ (LJ(A) iv.58) and ‘Attica was the country which first began to be
civilized and put into a regular form of government’ (LJ(A) iv.57).
The claim that Attica was the first ‘which began to be civilized’ is striking. In the context,
which deals with early Greece, that may only mean that it was first in Greece (though Greek
tradition made Argos the first city). If it were intended as a more general claim (the first
anywhere) it would be more surprising, reflecting perhaps both the real lack of evidence of
earlier periods and Smith’s blind spot for the Middle East. Even the Greeks themselves
thought of Egyptian civilization as older than their own.
Given suitable geographical conditions, progress follows. Thus he considered a people with a
‘Tartarian’ government who
came from thence to settle in towns and become republican (in many parts of Greece, and
the same was the case in Italy, Gaul, etc.).We may easily conceive that a people of this
sort, settled in a country where they lived in pretty great ease and security and in a soil
capable of yielding them good returns for cultivation, would not only improve the earth
but also make considerable advances in the severall arts and sciences and manufactures,
providing they had an opportunity of exporting their sumptuous produce and fruits of their
labour. (LJ(A) iv.60)
The two necessary conditions are that the soil be improvable, and that there should be
opportunities of transporting and trading their products. In Greece, but not in Tartary, ‘all the
necessary circumstances for the improvement of the arts concurred’ (LJ(A) iv.62).
In its simple form, the agricultural stage refers to ‘nations of husbandmen who have little
foreign commerce, and no other manufactures but those coarse and household ones which
almost every private family prepares for its own use’ (WN V.i.a.6). Smith, however, treated
this stage as no more than a starting point. Given the conditions summarized above, a more
extensive division of labour will emerge and commerce will grow correspondingly. ‘When
the division of labour has been once thoroughly established
…
the society itself grows to be
what is properly a commercial society’ (WN I.iv.1).
As society progressed through Smith's first three stages, each transition added a new source
of food to what went before (though there is no reason to think that hunting was entirely
abandoned in later stages, and animal husbandry certainly continued in the agricultural