WHY DO LAWS OF NATURE NOT ALWAYS WORK? 385
power to exact imports without making any economic return;1 and the
only other notable variation on the prevailing economic pattern of sub-
sistence farming was an exchange of cereals and other products of
agriculture for products of stockbreeding between the Nomads of the
Steppes and their nearest sedentary neighbours. Classical examples of
this unusual trade in commodities that were necessities, not luxuries,
had been the importation of grain into the homeland of the Hellenic
Civilization round the coasts of the Aegean out of the Russian agricul-
tural hinterland of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe from
about the sixth century B.C. to about the tliird century of the Christian
Era, and the importation of the same staff of lif e out of Sicily and Apulia
into a sixteenth-century Spain2 whose heart had been given over to
breeding sheep for wool.3

The Western Society continued, like its contemporaries, to live under
this traditional economic dispensation for some three centuries (circa
A.D. 1475-1775) after it had won its economic victory over these other
living civilizations in terms of the traditional economic values by mono-
polizing the Oceanic maritime trade in luxuries and impounding the
World's largest still uncultivated reserve of cultivable land. During the
last third or quarter of the eighteenth century, however, a new economic
revolution—almost comparable in magnitude to the earlier revolution
from food-gathering and hunting to agriculture and stock-breeding—
declared itself in Great Britain and spread thence progressively to Bel-
gium, Germany, and the Northern United States and eventually to
Japan and other Westernizing countries beyond the original bounds of
the Western. World.

The two outstanding features of this fresh economic revolution were
a sudden increase in population at a steeply accelerating rate and a con-
comitant rise of commerce and manufacturing industry to a decisive
preponderance over agriculture as the standard occupations and staple
sources of livelihood, no longer merely in tiny, rare, and insulated urban
enclaves, but throughout whole countries and regions previously dedi-
cated to subsistence farming. This sweeping subordination of agriculture
and stockbreeding to industry was the more impressive considering that
Western agriculture and Western stockbreeding, so far from remaining
stagnant or regressing, were actually passing at this time through a
simultaneous revolution in which their productivity, like the produc-
tivity of urban industry, was being notably increased by the jettisoning
of traditional methods in favour of new experiments that were as
rational as they were radical. The eighteenth-century technological
revolution in agriculture4 ran neck and neck with the eighteenth-century

i See VI. vii. 87-91, for the digging of the Grand Canal in China, after the political
unification of the main body of the Far Eastern Society by the Sui Dynasty, in order to
bring foodstuffs to a northern capital from a southern centre of agricultural produc-
tion.

* See Fueter, E.: Geschichte des Europmschen Staatensystems von 1492-1-559 (Munich
and Berlin 1919, Oldenbourg), p. 96.

s Klein, jf: The Mesta: A Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273-1836 (Cam-
bridge, Mass. 1930, Harvard University Press).

* See Ashton, T. S.: The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (London 1948, Oxford
University Press), pp. 6-7.

E 2915. is O