Unit 8
Early Economies
Introduction to Unit
This unit explores the basic problem of how people made a living in the past. How did people distribute the goods
they produced, and how did they gain access to what they needed to survive? How did societies establish systems
of exchange based on differing concepts of value? What kinds of things were considered valuable: land, labor,
commodities like gold and salt? How did some people accumulate wealth? How did different political systems
structure the distribution of goods and services through taxation and tribute? How was money used? And finally,
how did markets work? The answers to these questions illustrate the diverse ways and means people secured food
and shelter and even accumulated wealth—however that wealth was defined. They also show how ways of
making a living were embedded in political structures and were shaped by historical forces of change.
Learning Objectives
· Identify how different types of early economies worked to meet the basic needs of people.
· Trace the causes—including different political structures—of economic growth and change in early
economies.
· The term “political economy”refers to the relationship between political structures and the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Compare how the early histories of England, Japan,
China, and the Andean highlands shaped the types of political economies that developed in each place.
Preparing for This Session
Read Unit 8 in the Bridging World History online text. You may also want to refer to some of the Suggested
Readings and Materials. If you feel you need more background knowledge, refer to a college-level world history
textbook on this subject (look under the index for Money, Manors, Feudalism, Japan).
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Unit 8
Unit Activities
Before You Begin—15 minutes
The case studies used in the video are Norman and Medieval England, Heian and Kamakura Japan, Sung China,
and the early Incan Empire. Discuss what you predict from your background knowledge will be the types of visual
and textual evidence used to interpret the economies of England, Japan, China, and the Inca in the time period
from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE.
Watch the Video for “Unit 8: Early Economies”—30 minutes
While you watch the video, keep track of the types of evidence used to explain the economies of England, Japan,
China, and the Inca in the time period from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.
Activity 1: Labor Obligations and Taxation—40 minutes
Use the following sources to compare labor obligations and taxation in Norman England, Heian Japan, Sung
China, and the early imperial Incan empire. How did the four state systems control labor? Did governmental
requirements for labor seem to affect the economies? What other kinds of evidence do you need to assess the
ways the economies were affected?
Norman England
In 1035, the Norman conqueror William ordered the creation of an inventory of what he had claimed in England.
It was called the Domesday Book, and his deputies recorded in it the value of what the Normans conquered.
William used the records to decide how to distribute the fruits of the conquest both to himself and to his followers. That valuation and distribution of wealth is a common element in the way societies have dealt with economic issues throughout history. With the assessment, William and about 200 other new aristocrats, along with
about 100 major churches, owned approximately 75 percent of the assessed value of the entire country. The
majority of the people worked as agricultural laborers on private estates or manors.
In a manorial record, 1037:
They say that John of Cayworth holds one house and 30 acres of land, and he owes two shillings a year at
Easter and Michaelmas, and he owes one cock and two hens at Christmas worth four shillings .... And he ought
to carry the manure of the lord for two days with one cart, using his own two oxen, the work to value eight
pence, and he receives from the lord three meals of the above value each day; and so the work is worth three
pence clear .... (Kevin Reilly, Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader [Boston and NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000],
1: 237–38.)
Heian Japan
The estates, or “shôen,” really grew out of the breakdown of the imperial government in the late eighth century;
between the eighth and eleventh centuries, noble families or religious institutions such as the temple of Todaiji,
the Buddhist temple in Nara, or the temple of Toji in Kyoto amassed large estates in the thousands of acres.
Everyone who lived on an estate had certain rights and obligations no matter what their social status—ranging
from the estate owner to the managers, who represented the interests of the usually absentee landlord, down to
the tenant farmers. Tenant farmers either received some living from the land they farmed, or they paid rent on the
plots they farmed. The typical farmer’s household paid three kinds of taxes: a tax in the form of grain, a tax in the
form of textiles, and a tax in the form of labor service to the state. In practice, the grain tax could be converted into
more of the other two, and the labor tax could be converted into more textiles. Cloth, especially silk, came to serve
almost like currency in this system.
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Incan Empire
The Incan empire was a system of widely separated ecological niches, each producing its own range of goods that
supported its inhabitants: potatoes and llamas on the high plateau, maize and peppers in the valleys, and honey
and nuts in the Amazon rain forest. The empire operated without money or markets. In a region without large
beasts of burden or wheel carts, the great labor need was for human bearers to transport goods across ecological
niches, or for maintenance of the road system. Hence, taxes were always measured by labor, whether they were
at the local or imperial level. The Incan bureaucracy was organized at the local level around a kin group called the
“ayllu.” Everyone belonged to an ayllu, because this sort of group was the basis for the distribution of farmlands,
pastures, and other resources. A local lord called a “kuraka” ruled the ayllu. The Incas used the kurakas to rule indirectly. The kurakas maintained authority by distributing material goods and food. These goods included cloth,
maize, beer, and cacao.
[One of the ethnic groups subject to the Inca] the Wankas were sent to tend fields of food and to make
clothing and maids were named for their wives; and native clothing and all things that they could produce
were ordered put into storehouses, and similarly, it was ordered that those who worked in their fields and
houses receive something from the storehouses. (Terence D’Altroy and Timothy K. Earle, “Staple Finance,
Wealth Finance, and Storage in the Inka Political Economy,” Current Anthropology 26, no. 2 [April, 1985], 193.)
Sung Dynasty: Northern (960–1126) and Southern (1127–1279)
As during the previous periods, most peasants in Sung China remained in their natal regions and worked as
tenant farmers to escape paying taxes to the government. An increase in agricultural production, due to the government’s import of Champa rice and support of new irrigation technology, led to increased wealth for the individual farmer. The large landowners and religious orders found ways to evade their obligations, so the burden of
taxes often fell to the independent small farmers who paid their taxes using copper coins or silver rather than
grain. Contributions to the government granaries continued, however, to help provide grain to the general population during times of famine. The Sung administrators, selected on the basis of rigorous civil service exams,
decided to diminish the traditional labor obligations for peasants. Some peasants went to the expanding areas
around cities to work as day laborers. Urban life became more attractive as foreign trade increased through the
southern seaports. Chinese merchants’ status improved when the government encouraged the export of Chinese
goods as far as East Africa. Foreign merchants, including Arabs and Muslims, were allowed to operate in the
southern port cities. By the mid-twelfth century, the southern Sung dynasty received about one-fifth of its state
revenue from maritime taxes. There were also expanding systems of credit based in part on the government
printing more paper money. The peasants still owed military service to the state, but many were able to buy their
way out; during the later period of the Sung dynasty, diplomacy with antagonistic northern neighbors generally
held sway instead of war. Increased commercialization of the economy—especially along the Yangtze River—
accompanied the growth of urban centers. Hangzhou, for example, had a population of 391,000 households, compared to Rome’s average population of about 35,000 households and London’s of about 20,000 households. The
Sung population surge led to greater domestic demand for goods and services, including better transportation
networks. For many elite women, foot binding became a fashion and a sign of conspicuous consumption,
showing that those wives and daughters did not have to do any work.
The experience of Wang Ge, a twelfth-century industrial entrepreneur, illustrates the magnitude of economic
opportunity and enterprise that existed at that time. With a small capital investment, Wang acquired a timbercovered mountain. He began to produce charcoal, employing local farmers in the off-season. Local iron ore
deposits allowed him to set up two iron foundries, employing about 500 workers. Wang ran one of the foundries
himself. A manager supervised the other. With the profits from the foundries, he acquired two more assets: a wine
shop and a lake where he employed several hundred families in the fishing trade.
Description of Hangzhou, 1235:
Various businesses are designated by the word ‘company’ ... even physicians and fortune tellers are included ...
artisans sometimes call their businesses ‘workshops,’ such as a comb workshop, belt workshop, gold and
silver-plating workshop. (Patricia Ebrey, Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook [NY: The Free Press, 1993], 179.)
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Unit 8
Unit Activities, cont’d.
Activity 2: Manors, Shôen, and Peasant Revolts—45 minutes
Use the following sources to compare manors with shôen.
During the Heian period, shôen were multi-household agricultural operations, but with the following additional
characteristics: Shôen were parcels of land with clearly defined boundaries that were registered with the central
government; the government recognized the shôen with some degree of special treatment compared with regular “public” land. Shôen typically enjoyed favored tax treatment, and many were exempt from taxes altogether.
In addition to special tax status, the “sovereignty” of the land making up a shôen was sometimes altered so that
local government officials or their agents were not permitted to enter it or to regulate its internal affairs. The
shôen were almost like small city-states, sovereign unto themselves. Not all shôen were completely alienated from
taxes and government control, but most enjoyed a substantial degree of special treatment in these two areas.
Everyone who lived on an estate had certain rights and obligations no matter what their social status—ranging
from the estate owner to the managers, who represented the interests of the usually absentee landlord, down to
the tenant farmers. And the economy was changing as well. As more payments were made in money, and regions
became more specialized in the goods they produced, market activities increased. By the fourteenth century,
because of commercial development and increased trade with other Asian countries, the Japanese rural population was able to expand their production of rice, silk, linen, salt, cooking oil, iron, charcoal, lacquer wares, and even
mushrooms.
In England in this period, 90 percent of the population made their living from agricultural production. The principal social and economic unit organizing this production was the manor—an estate owned by a wealthy
landowner and farmed by tenants who were either free peasants or serfs (people who owed obligations of produce or labor to the landowner). The typical manor was a large agricultural estate with fields, meadows, and
forests. The lord was usually a prominent political or military figure who—with his deputies—provided government administration, police services, and justice to the people who lived in the villages attached to the manorial
estate. By the end of the eleventh century, agricultural production within the manor system was increasing due
to technological innovations. Increased productivity resulted in greater agricultural surpluses, which peasants
then sold in markets. This led to a boom in the number and size of towns and cities, which in turn led to an
increasing number of alternatives to life on manorial estates. Between 1100 and 1300, approximately 140 new
towns were documented in England. Urban centers gradually began to offer opportunities to peasants from the
countryside: trade in such goods as wool, cloth, and timber, handicrafts, and other jobs. This slow development
of a commercial economy eventually resulted in the collapse of the manorial system in England.
Use the following sources to compare the causes and methods of peasant revolts in Medieval England
(1216–1347) and Kamakura Japan (1185–1333).
There were two causes of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: Parliament passed a statute of laborers in 1351 to
limit wages for agricultural workers; it also reduced the mobility peasants gained as a result of the decreased labor
supply due to the bubonic plague epidemic. Then, the king tried to raise a poll tax in 1378 to pay for another war
with France. The rebellion unified a wide range of English people, from agricultural workers to townsmen to
Londoners. The revolt was extremely violent. The rebels actually executed the Archbishop of Canterbury, but
when the peasants tried to persuade the 14-year-old king Richard II to abolish the fees and obligations that tied
them to manors, he refused. So, the peasants eventually gave up and went back to their villages.
John Ball, a priest who spoke regularly to the people gathered in the marketplace, expressed the sentiments of
the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381:
Good people, things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are
no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same. In what way are those whom we call lords
greater masters than ourselves? How have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in bondage? If we all spring
from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us,
except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend? They are clad in velvet and camlet lined
with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices, and the good
bread: we have the rye, the husks, and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine
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Bridging World History
Unit Activities, cont’d.
manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our
labour, the things which keep them in luxury. We are called serfs and beaten if we are slow in our service to
them, yet we have no sovereign lord we can complain to, none to hear us and do us justice. Let us go to the
King—he is young—and show him how we are oppressed, and tell him that we want things to be changed,
or else we will change them ourselves. If we go in good earnest and all together, very many people who are
called serfs and are held in subjection will follow us to get their freedom. And when the King sees and hears
us, he will remedy the evil, either willingly or otherwise. (Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton,
[Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968], 212.)
Shôen encompassed more than large farms; they often included woodlands and fishing villages as well. With the
rise of the foot soldier in the massive armies created during the Kamakura shogunate, commoners could increase
their social status by challenging the local representative of the absentee landlord. Japanese laborers felt they had
a legitimate right to rebel, since their expectations were not being met. But rather than resorting to rioting and
destruction, Japanese rebels formed a well-orchestrated theater of protest. Before fleeing into the forests and
mountains, peasants would present their landlords with petitions listing their grievances, sometimes invoking
Shinto deities to support their claims:
If we have spoken falsely, may the vengeance of all the deities, great and small, of the 66 provinces of Japan,
especially that of the temple’s Daishi and Hachiman and of Myojin and the related deities of the five shrines of
the estate, be visited upon us. (Thomas Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan [Princeton University Press, 1992]: 73.)
Activity 3: Trade Routes in Afro-Eurasia—25 minutes
Trace expansion of trade with changes in political economies. Compare maps showing the areas under political
control with trade routes developed during the following time periods.
Vikings
Crusades
Item #6646. Anonymous, THE CRUSADES (2001). Courtesy of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Item #6843. Anonymous, RAIDS AND INVASIONS IN THE ERA OF
POLITICAL DISRUPTION [c. 300–1000 CE] (2001). Courtesy of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Tang, Abbasid, Byzantine Silk Roads
Item #6501. Hot Pepper Studios, created for Bridging World
History,MAP OF SILK ROADS (2004). Courtesy of Oregon Public
Broadcasting.
Expanded Chinese Trade Routes
Including Korea, Japan, South China Sea,
Indian Ocean, East Africa Routes
Shift to South of Sung Dynasty
Item #6844. Anonymous, LIAO AND SONG EMPIRES [c. 1100]
(2001). Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Mongols’ Silk Roads
Item #6123. Anonymous, THE MONGOL DOMAINS IN EURASIA
IN 1300 (2001). Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Item 6831. Hot Pepper Studios, created for Bridging World
History, MAP OF EXPANSION OF TRADE ROUTES IN 12TH–13TH
CENTURIES (2004). Courtesy of Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Black Death
Item #6828. Hot Pepper Studios, created for Bridging World
History, MAP OF AFROEURASIAN SPREAD OF PLAGUE (2004).
Courtesy of Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Activity 4: Images of Early Economic Activities—25 minutes
Analyze the images below by:
· Determining the subject, occasion, audience, purpose, and speaker in the images.
· Identifying the gender status and roles of men and women in the images.
Write a summary statement about the relationship between political structures and the production, distribution,
and consumption of goods and services revealed from your analysis of the images.
Item #4463. Anonymous, PEASANTS REAPING THE HARVEST UNDER THE
SUPERVISION OF THE LORD’S OFFICIAL (c. 1300–1325). Courtesy of The
Image Works.
Item #3376. Anonymous, PEASANTS RECEIVING
THEIR LORD’S ORDERS BEFORE GOING TO WORK,
1400S (n.d.). Courtesy of North Wind Pictures.
Item #4126. Anonymous, THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT OF 1381 (c. 1460–1480).
Courtesy of The Image Works.
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Unit 8
Unit Activities, cont’d.
Item #5484. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, INCANS
CARRYING FOODSTUFFS TO A STOREHOUSE (1615).
Courtesy of Pictures of Record, www.picturesofrecord.com.
Item #4392. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, INCANS
HARVESTING POTATOES (1615). Image donated by
Corbis-Bettmann.
Unit 8
Item #5483. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, INCAN
WOMAN MAKING CLOTH AND THREAD (1615).
Courtesy of Pictures of Record, www.picturesofrecord.com.
Item # 5482. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, INCAN
WOMEN SPINNING WOOL AND THREAD (1615).
Courtesy of Pictures of Record, www.picturesofrecord.com.
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Bridging World History
Unit Activities, cont’d.
Item # 3431. Hui Wang, THE KANGXI EMPEROR’S SOUTHERN INSPECTION TOUR: TEMPLES AND PEOPLE (c. 1691–1698). Courtesy
of WorldArt Kiosk/Kathleen Cohen.
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Unit 8
Homework
Read Unit 8 in the online text, Section 3, Reading 1: Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Trade,
Transport, Temples, and Tribute: The Economics of Power,” in In the Balance: Themes in Global History (Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1998), chap. 6 and answer the following questions.
Reading Questions
· What are some examples of goods that were traded locally? In regional areas? In long-distance trade?
· Who traded the goods locally? In regional areas? In long-distance trade? What role did Malay merchant
mariners play?
· What kind of transportation was used to move the goods?
· Where were the trade cities?
· What was the relationship between trade and political powers like Srivijaya?
· What kind of bureaucracy did Srivijaya use to manage the wealth from trade?
· How did trade and Buddhism work in Southeast Asia?
· Compare how Majapahit and the city-states in Southeast Asia managed trade.
· How did the spread of Islam to Southeast Asia affect trade in the region?
Optional: Visit the Web Site
Explore this topic further on the Bridging World History Web site. Browse the Archive, look up terms in the Audio
Glossary, review related units, or use the World History Traveler to examine different thematic perspectives.
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Bridging World History