Piling on, part 2: the Agrarian-Industrial transition

Agrarian Societies

It is fairly accepted notion the idea that any area has a certain carrying capacity of human life, depending on the nature of the human inhabitants. A region that is home to hunter gatherers can only support a few people. If it is good for agriculture, the same area might instead support many thousands. However, the degree of carrying capacity can vary with changes in the climate, land quality, migratory patterns, and other such things. Some places were always good for human habitation, regardless; France seems to have been home to significant human populations both in pre-history and the Modern age. On the other hand, some regions of the world were once home to great civilizations, and are now bereft of any significant human habitation once-so-ever, are, for example the southern coast of Arabia (eastern Yemen and western Oman), or in the upper Amazon valley.

Human beings react to changes in their circumstances, whether hunter or farmer, by moving to "greener pastures." However, as human history amply demonstrates, there are usually other people in the way who need be destroyed to make room for the newcomers, like the Canaanites. Now, sometimes the invaders win, and sometimes they don't, but the relationship of the land to the survival of the society is clear. If you don't have it, you cease to exist. If you are an ambitious chief and want to become greater and stronger, or even just more secure, you need more of it. There are of course improvements in agriculture possible, and these can help bolster population densities maybe for a time, sometimes longer, bringing you wealth and strength. But ultimately, strong agrarian civilizations were a combination of both density and expanse.

Such was the relationship between human beings and the Earth for almost their entire existence. When Canada federated as "the Dominion" in 1867, this relationship of people to land had begun to change. The Industrial Age meant that for the first time in human history, a state could exploit intensity of land use over the quantity of land in use. Hence, a behemoth like China or Russia could be embarrassed in turn by the "dwarf pirates" of Japan. The greatest world power of the time, Britain, transitioned from a land and sea power to an industrial one, and many nations of the world attempted to follow suit.

The underlying premise of industrialization is the notion of "value-added." If you have the resources, you process them and turn them into things of value. The famous "economy of scale" will come in turn - you can produce more of these goods in less time and for a lower price, allowing you to make more profit, expand your business, expand its reach, which in turn increases your profits. The money can be invested into technology - which leads to further gains.

However, growing, dirty and deadly cities need inflows of population. In Great Britain, these new industrial cities could be served by the abundant villages of the countryside, which were entering their own "small town death." Inhabitants of these villages could either emigrate to new lands to try to continue their way of life, as they were replaced at home by more efficient machines, or stay close to home and help make the machines. Very few English seemed to make the move across the seas at this point; more migrants seem to have come from the worse off, and often deported populations of Ireland and Scotland. The villages could continue to support population, who farmed with more intensity, or mined with more efficiency, or did other essential tasks aided by new technology. However, the growing population of cities like London or Liverpool could no longer be supported by resources from within their border. Canadian grain and Argentine beef helped keep these people alive.

While Britain emerged as the world's first industrial giant, its new technologies, specifically the steam train and the steam ship, pushed the frontiers back and allowed humanity to expand to the edge of arable land. Investments in irrigation and new technologies allowed the agricultural frontier to push beyond even the previous frontier of settlement, but often impermanently. Russians could now grow cotton along the Aral Sea, at least until their irrigation scheme destroyed the Aral Sea. More locally, Canadians with mechanical tractors could farm the virgin soils of western Canada that had proved impervious to human ploughs and even horses.

The previous arithmetic relationship of land to human habitation still remained true, though. More land could be farmed, which fed more people, but the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was a century away. Only so many people could be fed, even with mechanical farm equipment and more robust strains of crops, like Canada's cold-resistant Marquis Wheat.

As Canada was one of the last places one Earth with an expanding agricultural frontier, it should come as no surprise that we are among the last of the developed nations to be experiencing this "death of the small town." Indeed, literally no country has grown as much in size as Canada since its creation (in fact, all the European empires, even Russia, have geographically shrank while their populations grew; and arguably, so too the United States). In Canada this expansion allowed for more towns, new towns, to service new areas and the exploitation of new resources. Rail and steamship allowed for the surplus of these resources to feed the mouths and industries of people worldwide, making Canada, for the first time, a valuable target for investment. We began to catch up with our wealthier new world counterparts, like the USA and Argentina.

However, the limits of Canada's small-town farming and resource economy could be seen. Canadians could not become as wealthy as the Americans. Canadian towns couldn't just spread forever. Some towns were already abandoned as their local resources were exhausted, and some farmlands, too. Canada's small industries, concentrated as they were in the centre and south of the country, could not attract or employ all the Canadians unemployed or attracted by opportunities to the south. We continued to lose people to our greatest rival.

So Canada's leaders were presented with the question: were we forever to be just hewers of wood and drawers of water? The consequences of such a fate were clear to Canada's leaders: our population would continue to grow slowly, while more Canadians would move to the growing cities of the USA. Could we use our own resources for ourselves? Could we provide our own people with enough work, good paying work, to keep them at home and make Canada stronger? Could Canada really make its mark as a rival and competitor to the great powers of world? Or were we doomed to either poverty, irrelevance, annexation, or all of the above?

In the third part, I will try to explain why Canada's frontier is collapsing into the big cities.

Thanks for reading.