Population Pressure and Methods of Cultivation: a Critique of Classless Theory

Abstract

Population pressure has recently emerged as a fashionable explanation both for the shift from semi-nomadic slash and burn agriculture to settled cultivation and for the intensification of already settled cultivation. Thus Boserup (1965) and her followers account for an entire sequence of agricultural transformations through population changes. Others explain the fifteenth-century decline of rents and agricultural prices coupled with the prosperity of laborers and artisans by the decline in population following the Black Death. Or again, a seemingly new orthodoxy, which replaces the Hamilton-Keynes thesis, holds that the Elizabethan inflation resulted not so much from an influx of New World treasure, as from the rapid growth of population in the sixteenth century.

* Reprinted from S. Diamond (ed.), Towards a Marxist Anthropology (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).