"The First Economic Revolution" As Fiction

Abstract

In an earlier issue of this journal Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas proposed to explain agricultural revolution as both cause and effect of a revolution in rights. 1 In their view population pressure led to a gradual shift to cultivation which must, they argue, have occurred simultaneously with a change in rights, which then provided incentive for shift to cultivation and for human progress which followed. In this comment I shall argue that North's and Thomas's story is tautological; that it is marred by rather curious economic theory; and that assumptions which they make about prehistoric man are not supported by anthropological and archaeological reports, including some of sources which they themselves cite. The story North and Thomas tell is a simple one: once upon a time there was an abundance of animals and thus constant returns to hunting. Population grew. As population grew, groups hived off to form new bands, but eventually those groups inside the population frontier would feel pressed to regulate population. However, they would fail because, in pre-agricultural world, there was common property by which North and Thomas apparently mean no rights at all (free access by all).2 In absence of any territory of its own, each group would lose out to other groups whose population continued to grow. Thus population would continue to grow at such a rate that eventually, because of diminishing returns to hunting and gathering, agriculture would replace hunting simultaneously with assertion of exclusive rights over area being farmed.3 Two assumptions are necessary for this story: (i) that population grew sufficiently rapidly before agricultural revolution to cause shift to agriculture, and (2) that there were no rights for pre-agricultural peoples. The basis for these assumptions is not empirical there is a dearth of evidence for either. Rather it is tautological reasoning: rapid population growth occurred because there were no rights to make population control feasible and there were no rights until population reached some critical level. The importance of population growth in North and Thomas story is