I've just finished reading Pre-Industrial Societies by Patricia Crone. I thought it was interesting, but the end section on how industrialisation came to be in Europe left me a bit dissatisfied. I was wondering if anyone could recommend further reading/give an overview of current thinking (I'm aware that book is now ~30 years old).
A summary of what she claims is:
A variation on the Jared Diamond argument in saying that it was inevitable that it happened in Eurasia, due to geography. What remains is why Europe and not Asia.
The agriculture-friendly nature of the land in Europe made it favourable for people to remain as local peasants rather than reverting to a pastoral/nomadic life following the collapse of Rome in the west. This naturally evolved into feudalism as peasants turned to strongmen for protection in an essentially state-less society.
European feudalism was unique in that when 'the state' came back it was constituted of the feudal landowners rather being a thin military-administrative stratum on top of them. This had the effect of greatly limiting the powers of the state to levy taxes and conscript armies. Thus allowing for the creation of self-administrating (though nominally not independent) cities and merchants whose wealth was independent of landowners. In other pre-industrial societies this was not tolerated as it was potentially destabilizing to the political order (she gives the example of merchant wealth confiscation in the Islamic world).
The 'elite' in Europe didn't natively speak the language of high culture (Latin), that language's claims to being sacred are tenuous (the Vulgate is a translation), and the keepers of high culture (the Church) were independent of any state. This lead states to generate their own high culture in vernacular languages. States were heavily tied to territory due to their structure being of landowners rather than above landowners. This lead to proto-nation-states with their own culture, language, and territory, and ultimately to the Reformation.
This all leads to intense military competition between the landowning/state powers and economic competition between the city-dwelling/merchant powers leading to industrialisation. She also briefly touches on how a mixture of classical rationalism ("logic and theory is above crude observation") and Christian thought ("God can be observed in the workings of the universe") leads to the scientific revolution.
Basically I thought the chapter was interesting but half-baked and wondered if anyone knew of any sources that expand on these ideas (or refute them/present an alternative).
It's funny that people think historians are mad at Jared Diamond because he's popular, because they should be portraying Crone as the mad one; he really did take all her ideas and won a Pullitzer with them. One of the ideas he took was knowing exactly zero things about pre-Columbian America.
I can't speak on the entirety of this chapter, but I can address the second paragraph, which manages to stuff nearly every single popular misconception about the Americas into one page. In order for Crone to prove the "oddity" of Europe, she must explain how it is different from other places. This generally amounts to "here's a list of causes of the Rennaissance." Her coverage of other world regions, especially the Americas, is shallow and deeply outdated, even for the time it was written. How this crap made it into a revised edition is beyond me.
Let's look at some of her points piece by piece. Many of these have been addressed in questions before; I'll expand on some of those responses as necessary.
The indigenous civilizations of the New World [...] were erected on an incredibly slender foundation. For practical purposes all were stone-age cultures.
Throughout this paragraph, Crone relies heavily on an evolutionary model of societies that was dated even in 1989. As discussed in the thread and links I've provided here, the Stone-Bronze-Iron Age system is irrelevant to Americanists and only maintained by archaeologists as a dating system, not one that actually describes technology. As discussed by /u/RioAbajo here, the idea of historical progress latent in popular history is entirely inaccurate. Crone's language throughout this is dismissive and derogatory; the Americas are "primitive," "archaic," and "fragile." There's a feeling that these people should have done something different, but were prevented from doing so by these roadblocks.
Metals were only used for ornaments, or so at least in Mesoamerica; the Inca had begun to make use of bronze for military and productive purposes
This section of our FAQ addresses some of the many ways metals were used in Mesoamerica.
As for South America, this is a tremendous understatement. Beads made from a copper-gold alloy have been found in Peru in contexts dating to 1000 BC, and ice-core samples show increases in airborne metal pollution from smelting contemporary with the expansion of the Andes' earliest religious traditions (Chavin and Chiripa) around 700 BC. Arsenic and tin bronzes were used at least 1000 years before the Inca existed. In northern Peru, the Moche and Lambayeque people crafted bronze agricultural tools. In central Peru, the Wari made bronze weaving tools and ornaments. In Bolivia, the stones of Tiwanaku's temples were joined by pouring bronze into H-shaped incisions, which drew the stones closer at it cooled. This chapter by Heather Lechtman is a good intro.
the tropical lowlands of Mesoamerica from which the Olmces and Maya emerged were largely supported by shifting slash and burn agriculture, a primitive mode of production which, through suitable for the ecology in question, does not normally lend itself to the creation of complex societies
This is such a weird statement that really shows the weaknesses of Crone's argument. Whether or not this style of agriculture "normally" lends itself to complex societies, it clearly did in this case. "Normally" has nothing to do with it. It's like she's so desperate to prove these groups were primitive and "fragile" that she has to frame their successes as anomalies.
Anyways, the milpa system of agriculture practiced in Mesoamerica is still used in many places today. This great article by Chelsea Fisher shows how colonial mismanagement perpetuated the belief that milpa agriculture was inefficient/inferior. Adolfo Chankin and Tomasz B Falkowski have spent the past ten years studying the nutritional yields and ecological dynamics of single family plots planted by the Lacandon Maya in Chiapas; they prove that these farms and managed forests easily support large families and are resilient to weather impacts. And that's just modern, small scale farming, not the full production of Classic Maya cities at their peaks.
the Incas had no script at all, making do with knots as mnemonic aids
As summarized by myself here and /u/kelpie-cat here, khipu were a lot more than "knots as mnemonic aids." They were used for anything and everything that writing would be. Crone could have known this, if she bothered to look at basically any text on the Inca available at the time.
the sixteenth-century Spaniards who overran them
This portrayal is entirely incorrect. For more on that, check out /u/anthropology_nerd 's "Myths of Conquest" series and this AMA on Native American resistance.
One could go into more depth, but it's hardly worth it. Crone evidently did no research on the Americas for this book. It's painfully obvious that this is a depiction tailored to fit her "Why Europe?" narrative, and not one with any grasp of archaeology. You're right to think it's half-baked.