Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional culture - Difference between primitive society and agrarian society

Difference between primitive society and agrarian society

Differences between primitive and agrarian societies:

Primitive societies: are based on kinship relations, have a small population, and an egalitarian approach to distributing economic life. Control of society is maintained by tradition and patriarchy without customary law or governmental authority. In a typical primitive society, there is no dedicated leader. People of the same age and sex have equal social status.

Agricultural societies: are societies that depend on agriculture for their subsistence, and are basically characterized by a self-sufficient natural economy. Compared with the nomadic world, the growth rate of farming production is greater than that of nomadic production. The inevitable tendency of farming to become sedentary has made it possible for its development, and the consequent development of society and civilization, to have a greater and more stable continuity of inheritance.

Formation of an agrarian society

An agrarian economy can develop to a high level, including crafts, commerce, and markets, towns, and so on, and there can be varying degrees of interaction between the various agrarian regions and varying degrees of influence.

About 10,000 years ago, farming and animal husbandry began to occur in the ancient world. Several distinctive centers of farming emerged in the world. The earliest was Western Asia, in the belt around Mesopotamia, where the inhabitants were the first to domesticate wild wheat and develop farming centers that grew wheat and barley. Next were East and Southeast Asia, including China.

The Yellow River basin in China cultivated wheat. The area south of the Yangtze River in China to Southeast Asia and the Ganges River in India was characterized by the cultivation of rice. One other center that grew corn was Mexico. Peru may be another center for growing corn. There is also the interior of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, where academics believe there may also be centers of farming that developed on their own as well.

After the farming centers were formed, they slowly grew to where it was easy to farm. After thousands of years, as far as the Eurasian continent is concerned, China from the Yellow River to the Yangtze River, India from the Indus River to the Ganges River, West Asia and Central Asia from Anatolia to Iran and Afghanistan, and Europe from the Mediterranean coastline, have all successively become farming and semi-farming zones.

This zone stretches between the two ends of the Asian and European continents, forming a long arc to the south. Historians call this long arc the agrarian world. Farming was originally combined with animal husbandry. In Eurasia, easy to farm the zone is basically south, that is, from east to west formed the farming world.