Cannibals and Kings

by Marvin Harris

  The livestock picture in China was always characterized by considerable regional variation in the use of large draft and pack animals. In the north central and northeastern provinces the sum of all the horses, donkeys, and mules was almost as great as the number of cattle. This contrasts with the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal in the Ganges Valley, where horses, donkeys, and mules occur in insignificant numbers.

  The greatest difference between the Chinese and Indian livestock situations, however, lies in the vast number of pigs in China and the virtual absence of pigs from most of the Gangetic Plain. Buck estimated that on the average each farm in northern China had .52 pigs. A member of a recent delegation to China, G. F. Sprague of the Department of Agronomy of the University of Illinois, estimates that China produced between 250 to 260 million swine in 1972. This is more than four times the amount produced in the United States, “a nation noted for extensive swine production.” If the Chinese produced these animals the way they are produced in the United States, Sprague writes, they “would represent a severe drain on the available food supply.” But there is little resemblance between the production practices in the two countries. Swine production in the United States depends upon providing the animals with corn, soya meal, vitamin and mineral supplements, and antibiotics. In China swine are raised primarily as a household enterprise and, like cows in India, are “fed on waste materials not suitable for human food; vegetable refuse, ground and fermented rice hulls, sweet potato and soya bean vines, water hyacinths and so forth.” Just as Indian cows are valued for their manure, so Chinese swine are valued “almost as much for manure as for their meat.” In other words, the pig is and was the main village scavenger for the Chinese. It provided them with crucial supplements of fats and proteins and much-needed fertilizer just as the Indians derived essentials from their village scavenger, the cow. With one big difference: since the pig cannot be killed, it has to be eaten if it is to serve as a source of dietary fats and proteins. This means that as long as swine filled the niche of village scavenger, the Chinese would never accept a religion such as Islam, which specifically prohibits the consumption of pork.

  But why did the Chinese adopt the pig as the village scavenger while the Indians adopted the cow? Several factors were probably involved. First of all, the Gangetic Plain is less desirable as a habitat in which to rear pigs than is the Yellow River Basin. The fierce spring heat and the recurrent droughts to which the zebu cattle breeds have adapted render the moisture-loving pig a risky investment. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest food-producing state, 88 percent of the rainfall occurs in four months, while average daily high temperatures in May and June hover well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Northern China, on the other hand, has cool springs, moderate summers, and no marked dry season.

  Another important factor is the comparative availability of grazing lands on which traction animals can be reared. China, unlike India, has a large area that is suitable for pasturing traction animals and that cannot be used for growing food crops. In China only 11 percent of the total land area is under cultivation, while in India almost 50 percent of the total area is cropland. According to Buck, the northern spring wheat region of China contains “considerable public grazing land where low rainfall and broken topography make cultivation difficult.” By contrast, less than 2 percent of the total cropland area of the Central Gangetic Plain is permanent pasture or grazing land. Thus in India the breeding of the basic traction animal had to take place in zones that were already tightly packed with human beings—zones lacking nonarable lands suitable for forage. The traction animal, therefore, had to be fed primarily on waste products such as those available to a village scavenger. In other words, the traction animal and the scavenger had to be one and the same species. And it had to be cattle, because neither horses, donkeys, nor mules could perform satisfactorily in the blistering heat and aridity of the monsoon climate, while water buffalo were useless to farmers who lacked irrigation.

  Perhaps the best way to view the treatment of animals in India as opposed to China is in terms of different phases of a single great convergent process of intensification. Neither China nor India could afford large-scale exploitation of animals primarily for flesh or dairy products because of the immense human population densities and the severe caloric losses entailed in animal husbandry carried out on arable lands. In pre-Communist China the rural population lived on a diet that derived 97.7 percent of its calorie ration from farm plant foods and only 2.3 percent from animal products—mainly pork. The species used primarily as draft animals were seldom eaten in rural China, any more than they were eaten in India. Why, then, wasn’t beef prohibited by a religious taboo?

  In fact, there was such a taboo in some regions. No less an authority than Mao Tse-tung made the following observations when he was in Hunan:

  Draught-oxen are a treasure to the peasants. As it is practically a religious tenet that “Those who slaughter cattle in this life will themselves become cattle in the next,” draught oxen must never be killed. Before coming to power, the peasants had no way of stopping the slaughter of cattle except the religious taboo.

  And T. H. Shen writes:

  The butchering of cattle for beef is against Chinese tradition. It is only near the large cities that any cattle are butchered to furnish meat, and then it is done when they are no longer needed on the farms.

  While both China and India have suffered the effects of millennia of intensification, the process seems to have been carried to the greater extreme in India. Chinese agriculture is more efficient than Indian agriculture primarily because of the greater area cultivated under irrigation—40 percent of Chinese croplands versus 23 percent of Indian croplands. Average yields per acre of rice are therefore twice as high in China as in India. Given the viability of the pig, donkey, mule, and horse in China, and the topographical and climatic factors of production, intensification did not reach levels necessitating a total ban on the slaughter of animals for meat. Instead of milking their traction animals, the Chinese slaughtered their pigs. They settled for a little less animal protein in the form of meat than they could have gotten in the form of milk—had they used the cow rather than the pig in the scavenger niche.

  Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces. The very same material process that promoted the spread of empty-handed religions in the West, the end of animal sacrifice and redistributive feasts, and the interdiction of the flesh of such domestic species as the pig, horse, and donkey led India inexorably in the direction of religions that condemned the eating of all animal flesh. This did not happen because the spirituality of India surpassed the spirituality of other regions; rather, in India the intensification of production, the depletion of natural resources, and the rise in the density of population were pushed further beyond the limits of growth than anywhere else in the preindustrial world except for the Valley of Mexico.

  13

  The Hydraulic Trap

  In the 4,000 years between the appearance of the first states and the beginning of the Christian era, world population rose from about 87 million to 225 million. Almost four-fifths of the new total lived under the dominion of the Roman, Chinese Han, and Indian Gupta empires. This world total conceals the fact that the density of population in the core area did not continue to rise without check during that 4,000-year period. The demographic history of the early empires does not support the crude Malthusian notion that human population growth is an ever-present historical trend. Stationary populations were as much the rule in ancient empires as they were during the paleolithic era. There was a limit to how many people and animals could be packed into the great river valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. After the stage of functional vegetarianism had been reached, population density remained constant or even declined. Of cours
e, outside the core areas population continued to increase as larger empires and more secondary states came into existence. But one by one the core regions seem to have reached their ecological limit of growth.

  According to Kingsley Davis, the population of India as a whole had leveled off by 300 B.C. and did not begin to expand until the eighteenth century. Karl Butzer estimates that in Egypt the population of the Nile Valley quadrupled between 4000 B.C. and 2500 B.C., the apex of the period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom. Then it remained virtually stationary for over a thousand years. In 1250 B.C. it rose to a new peak, which was only about 1.6 times the mark set in the Old Kingdom, and just before the beginning of the Greco-Roman period it fell back once more to the Old Kingdom level. Under Roman rule it peaked again at a point slightly more than twice that of the Old Kingdom, but by the end of the Roman Empire in 500 B.C. it had fallen below the figure for 3,000 years earlier. Our best information comes from China, where census data covering a span of over 2,000 years can be consulted. Hans Bielenstein’s authoritative study shows that for the period A.D. 2 to A.D. 742 China’s overall population remained close to 50 million, with a maximum of 58 million and a minimum of 48 million. More significantly, there were marked declines in the original core areas of the Han Dynasty. The Great Plain of the Yellow River, for example, had a population of 35 million in A.D. 2. This fell to 25 million in A.D. 140, rose to 31 million in 609 and fell again to 23 million in 742. Discounting increments brought about by the conquests of new territories, China’s rate of population growth remained close to zero for the better part of two millennia. (After 1450 the introduction of new varieties of rice, sweet potatoes, and American Indian maize made it possible for Chinese agricultural methods to support much denser populations than in earlier periods.)

  Century after century the standard of living in China, northern India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt hovered slightly above or below what might be called the threshold of pauperization. When population density in a particular region climbed too high, standards of living dipped below the threshold. This led to wars, famines, and population decline. With lower densities, the standard of living would rise more to a point slightly above the long-term average.

  Western observers have always been astonished by the static or “stationary” nature of these ancient dynastic systems. Pharaohs and emperors came and went decade after decade; dynasties rose and fell; the life of the coolies, ryots, and fellahin, however, went on as always, just a notch above barest subsistence. The ancient empires were warrens full of illiterate peasants toiling from morning to night only to earn protein-deficient vegetarian diets. They were little better off than their oxen and were no less subject to the commands of superior beings who knew how to keep records and who alone had the right to manufacture and use weapons of war and coercion. The fact that societies providing such meager rewards endured thousands of years—longer than any other system of statehood in the history of the world—stands as a grim reminder that there is nothing inherent in human affairs to ensure material and moral progress.

  Each ancient empire developed its own integrated pattern of social life. From cookery to art styles, each was a universe unto itself. And yet for all their differences, ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt possessed fundamentally similar systems of political economy. Each had a highly centralized class of bureaucrats and hereditary despotic overlords who claimed heavenly mandates or were said to be gods in themselves. Excellent networks of government-maintained roadways, rivers, and canals linked every hamlet and village to provincial and national administrative centers. Each village had at least one important person who served as a link between the village and the central administration. Political lines of force ran in one direction only: from top to bottom. While peasants might sometimes own their land, as in China, the bureaucracy tended to regard private property as a gift of the state. Production priorities were set by state tax policies and by regular call-ups of village men and women for work on state-sponsored construction projects. The “state was stronger than society.” Its right to collect taxes, confiscate materials, and conscript labor was virtually unlimited. It carried out systematic censuses village by village to determine the available labor power and the tax revenue base. It deployed antlike armies of workers wheresoever the lords of the realm decreed and undertook the construction of tombs, pyramids, defense works, and palaces whose dimensions are stupendous even by modern industrial standards. In Egypt seasonal employment of as many as 100,000 able-bodied men was needed to carry out the monumental projects of the Old Kingdom, a labor force of 84,000 men employed eighty days a year worked for twenty years to construct the Great Pyramid of Cheops. In China construction on the Great Wall required a million workers at a time; another million toiled on the Grand Canal; over two million each month were put to work in the construction of the Sui Dynasty’s Eastern capital and imperial palace during the reign of Emperor Yang (A.D. 604—617).

  Despite the development of philosophies and religions advocating justice and mercy, the rulers of these vast realms frequently had to rely on intimidation, force, and naked terror to maintain law and order. Total submissiveness was demanded of underlings, the supreme symbol of which was the obligation to prostrate oneself and grovel in the presence of the mighty. In China a commoner had to kowtow—fall forward, strike the ground with his head, and kiss the dust. In Hindu Indian commoners embraced the sovereign’s feet. In Pharaonic Egypt underlings crawled on their bellies. In all of these ancient empires there were ruthless systems for routing out and punishing disobedient persons. Spies kept the rulers informed about potential troublemakers. Punishments ranged from beatings to death by torture. In Egypt the tax collectors beat recalcitrant peasants and threw them, bound hand and foot, into the irrigation ditches; the foremen on all state projects carried clubs and whips. In ancient India the magistrates condemned disobedient subjects to eighteen different kinds of torture, including beatings on the soles of the feet, suspension upside down, and burning of finger joints: for mild offenses, they ordered a fresh variety eighteen days in a row; for severe offenses, they sentenced the condemned to receive all eighteen on the same day. In China the emperor punished those who expressed incautious opinions by having them castrated in a darkened cell.

  These ancient empires shared one other feature: each was what the great institutional historian Karl Wittfogel has called a “hydraulic society.” Each developed amid arid or semiarid plains and valleys fed by great rivers. Through dams, canals, flood control, and drainage projects, officials diverted water from these rivers and delivered it to the peasants’ fields. Water constituted the most important factor in production. When it was applied in regular and copious amounts, high yields per acre and per calorie of effort resulted.

  Among modern scholars, Wittfogel has done the most to clarify the relationship between hydraulic production and the emergence of unchanging agro-managerial despotisms. My own view of that relationship borrows heavily from Wittfogel’s but does not correspond precisely with his formulation. I hold that preindustrial hydraulic agriculture recurrently led to the evolution of extremely despotic agro-managerial bureaucracies because the expansion and intensification of hydraulic agriculture—itself a consequence of reproductive pressures—was uniquely dependent on massive construction projects which, in the absence of machines, could only be carried out by antlike armies of workers. The larger the river, the greater the food production potential of the region through which it flowed. But the larger the river, the greater the problems in making use of its potential. On the one hand, the state undertook the construction of extensive networks of diversionary and feeder canals, ditches, and sluice gates to ensure that there would be enough water at the right time; on the other hand, the state undertook the construction of dams, levees, and drainage ditches to avoid the damaging effects of too much water all at once. The scale of the activities in question literally demanded changing the face of the earth: moving mountains, reshaping riverbanks, digging ou
t whole new riverbeds. Recruiting, coordinating, directing, feeding, and housing the brigades of workers needed for these monumental undertakings could only have been carried out by cadres obedient to a few powerful leaders pursuing a single master plan. Hence the larger the hydraulic networks and facilities, the greater the overall productivity of the system, the greater the tendency of the agro-managerial hierarchy to become subordinate to one immensely powerful person at its top.

  The peculiar capacity of hydraulic societies to restore themselves despite frequent dynastic upheavals and recurrent conquests by barbarian invaders arises from the interplay between their political structures and their basic ecological adaptation. Though the concentration of total power in the supreme ruler and his family meant that all lines of political force ran in one direction only, the sheer size and complexity of the state apparatus gave high officials and lesser bureaucrats the opportunity to satisfy their own ambitions at the expense of the people under them. Despite the value placed by the wise ruler on moderation and justice, the bureaucracy tended to fatten itself at the expense of peasant welfare. Corruption tended to increase geometrically with the number of years a dynasty remained in power. Soon public works were neglected, the dikes began to leak, the canals filled up with silt, and production declined. Sheer incompetence, human error, and natural disasters added to the subversive forces at work. Recurrently, therefore, a reigning dynasty would find that it was no longer capable of protecting and providing for the peasant masses. Torn by dissension, it would become vulnerable to the “barbarians” outside the walls, to the armies of neighboring empires, or to its own rebellious people. The dynasty would then collapse. This happened again and again in the history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. But the new leaders—whether internal or external foes—had only one choice if they wanted to enjoy the wealth of empire: to repair the dikes, clean out the canals, rebuild the levees, and restore the hydraulic mode of production. A new cycle would then begin. Production would increase, the depauperized peasantry would lower its rate of infanticide and abortion, and population density would rise. But as density rose, productivity would decline, and corrupt officials would become more and more immoderate in their attempt to line their own pockets. Finally, as the peasants slipped back into pauperdom, the struggle for dynastic control would break out once again.