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Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World Paperback – August 11, 2015

by Patricia Crone (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 63 ratings
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Eminent historian Patricia Crone defines the common features of a wide range of pre-industrial societies, from locations as seemingly disparate as the Mongol Empire and pre-Columbian America, to cultures as diverse as the Ming Dynasty and seventeenth-century France. In a lucid exploration of the characteristics shared by these societies, the author examines such key elements as economic organization, politics, culture, and the role of religion. An essential introductory text for all students of history, Pre-Industrial Societies provides readers with all the necessary tools for gaining a substantial understanding of life in pre-modern times. In addition, as a perceptive insight into a lost world, italso acts as a starting point for anyone interested in the present possibilities and future challenges faced by our own global society.
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  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Oneworld Publications
  4. Publication date
    August 11, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    5.3 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1780747411
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1780747415
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patricia Crone was Mellon Professor of Islamic History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oneworld Publications; Second edition (August 11, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1780747411
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1780747415
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 63 ratings

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Patricia Crone

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4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
63 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely readable.
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2024
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Caveats, i have it on Kindle and have only begun it, but, for now, I was surprised by how easily it traveled from print into my mind.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2019
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Great little book - scholarly, lively and comprehensive. It fills an important void in providing general context for pre-modern history, which most lay readers or students of history manage to glean only in bits and pieces.
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Roger Sweeny
5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Work, A little Revised
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2019
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The 2015 (3rd) edition has a few small changes and additions. It also cleans up the boatload of typos introduced in the 2003 (2nd) edition, which another reviewer complained about. [The funniest was where “city states” became “city’s tastes” (p. 167 2/e). More serious was a duplicated line and dropped line on page 191 2/e. The second full paragraph should begin, “His power in heaven is mostly left unchallenged (though Marxists”.] There were a number of substantive changes from the first edition to the second, but well over 95% of the 2015 text is the same as the 1989 text.

Yes, I read the first and second editions, and skimmed the third. The book is worth rereading.

Crone was a powerful intellectual personality and this is a personal summing up (no footnotes!) of how the pre-industrial world worked, how it differs from the world we are accustomed to. By “pre-industrial” she means before industry but after hunting-gathering. People have settled down and are growing most of their food. The book is information dense, some times witty, a little sarcastic. Ranging across the globe, it is an amazing piece of work.

The first six chapters are about the pre-industrial world. Crone bases much of her analysis on the economic/technological constraints of pre-industrial life. Scarcity is at the base of everything.

The seventh is more generally about religion. Crone’s explanation is along the lines of functionalist sociology. Religion provides justification for the way society is set up. It also provides “oughts”–what is right and wrong. People cannot live without believing in good and bad; it gives their life meaning. More modern treatments would also point to humans’ “theory of mind”: the surety that other people have minds just like we do, with consciousness, desires, frustrations, etc. Much religious feeling involves extending a theory of mind to supernatural entities or to non-human objects in this world.

Speaking of which, near the end, I was annoyed by passages like, “Human societies aim at stability; all hope to find the social and political organization best suited ...” (p, 200 3/e) Societies are not conscious entities that aim or hope. Such “reification” misleads more than it illuminates.

Back in the 1980s, the sea that most intellectuals swam in was still some version of Rousseau and Freud: humans are built to be free of social ties, and now that we live in societies, we are forced to frustrate our true desires. Yet it is now clear that we evolved in social groups and are indeed “built” for some version thereof. (Crone does pull away from the tradition a bit, offering that humans’ genetic “instructions ... clearly make them gregarious”. She sums up, “In so far as human societies have a ‘base’, it is constituted by the interaction between natural environment, genetic equipment and symbolic culture” (p. 166 3/e), though she doesn’t inquire what that genetic equipment is.)

In the last two chapters, she attempts to bring things up to date. Her thesis: Everywhere in the world but Europe, pre-industrial societies had developed which would bend but not break. Economy, government, culture, and religion fit together with a dynamic stability. China is her great example. Increasing population, higher agricultural productivity, a substantial amount of manufacturing, even the great Malthusian famines of the 1850s only rattled the foundations of the system. But early industry broke Europe’s system.

Crone believed that outside Europe industrialization is impossible unless “the authorities ... assume dictatorial powers” to break the system themselves. (p. 213 3/e) We now have three more decades of experience which suggest that the reality is, um, more complex.

I was somewhat disappointed by this part. For one thing, there is a too narrow logic of modernity: In a modern society, she says, nothing is beyond questioning. Researchers must be able to investigate anything they want. There must be no ascriptive status. Race and sex, among other things, must not matter. The twenty first century isn’t starting out that way (and some of her additions seem to indicate the beginning of a rethinking).

For another thing, it seemed more about why Europe COULD industrialize than why it DID (and, of course, until WW I, a good deal of Europe wasn’t industrialized). Since 1989, there has been a tremendous amount of work on why there was an industrial revolution. Jack Goldstone’s Why Europe? was his answer in 2007. Diedre McCloskey’s 2016 Bourgeois Equality is a long argument that widespread prosperity was impossible until it became honorable to engage in (honest) manufacturing and trade. Ian Morris’ 2011 Why the West Rules–For Now is an attempt to tie together the last 6,000 years or so. Recent research even suggests that the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage helped by reducing “tribalism”.
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groggy in Seattle
4.0 out of 5 stars thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2010
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I have to disagree with the two reviewers. I found the book very useful.

When we think about the past, whether about our national heritage or about the historical past, we usually project onto it our contemporary assumptions about how things work. These assumptions spring from our experience of modernity--vast wealth; vast technological capabilities to shape our world; vast and pervasive power of the state; ample food supply being taken for granted, at least in the first world; 2% of the population involved in food production instead of upwards of 80%; an integrated culture such that farmers in remote corners of the country are watching the same movies and TV shows and listening to the same music as people in Manhattan; integrated economy, such that farms are no longer self supporting even in the realm of food production, but rather produce a single crop for market and buy their food at the grocery store like everyone else; social homogenization across vast spaces such that Californians, Floridians, and Mainers all think of themselves as Americans rather than identifying with the local culture.

When we try to imagine the world view and life world of people as close to us in time as Washington and Jefferson--let alone Alexander the Great, Muhammad, or Charlemagne--we have to think all of this away. This is very difficult because modernity seems as natural to us as the air we breathe. Crone's book is a very useful extended thought experiment that makes it possible to do just this. It is a bit polemical at times--but that is just Crone.
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Leonard J. Krol
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2018
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One of the best books ever written. Pre industrial society was different in many ways, and this book explains why that is.
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R. Albin
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful; 4.5 Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2013
This book deserves wider readership. Written by a distinguished historian of Islamic history, this concise and thoughtful book is an interesting effort at summarizing and describing the basic features of pre-industrial societies. This book is written for a general audience, essentially at the level of advanced undergraduates. Crone covers the basic features of pre-industrial economies, social organization, state-level organization, culture, religion, and politics. Drawing on a broad swathe of historical information, primarily from Eurasian history, Crone nicely describes the pre-industrial world. Key features are the poorly marketized agrarian economies of scarcity constrained by limited agricultural productivity and organic power sources, hierarchial organization of society based on inherited privilege and corporate privilege, religion as social cement, and communal as opposed to individualistic world views. This is a very broad but convincing and conceptually useful overview.

Crone concludes with 2 quite interesting chapters on the distinctiveness of European societies and what constitutes modernity. The role of interstate competition and fundamental conflicts between the Classical and Christian intellectual traditions are emphasized in the discussion of why Europe generated industrialization. While Crone doesn't mention this, the latter idea was suggested decades ago by the British historian GN Clark. Her discussion of the features of the modern world is similarly insightful. Crone is a good writer with a talent for telling phrases. There is a good suggested reading list.
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Top reviews from other countries

Lucca Canizela De Camargo
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb
Reviewed in Brazil on May 22, 2022
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Very informative book!
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drill
5.0 out of 5 stars Fast delivery product as advertised.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 26, 2018
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What I wanted quick delivery of the product I ordered. Well done.
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Hayze
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2017
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I enjoyed this book, I think it's well written and easily accessible to a layman like myself.
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JohnCarr
4.0 out of 5 stars Most People for Most of History
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2017
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I bought this book to read one chapter but found all of it to be worth the read.
Like Gaul, it is divided into three parts.
The first two-thirds deal with the subject matter of the title. It doesn’t, nor does it claim to, deal with all pre-industrial societies it deals with societies that were ‘pre-industrial of the civilized kind’, in other words the kinds of societies that the majority of people have lived in since before recorded history and up to about two centuries ago. (SJWs – whom I would urge to read this in order to gain some understanding of the planet they live on – be warned, this book includes words like ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’). Basically if your society (the Inca excepted) didn’t have writing you’re not included in this survey.
As an introduction the author asks the readers to imagine themselves as part of a group of castaways on a desert island and how we would construct a working society. The more of us there are, the more complex the society will be. She then points out that this thought experiment can only bring us so far in imagining the origins of societies as it leaves out the vital component of religion.
The main text is taken up with chapters on ‘Socio-Economic Organization’, ‘The State’, ‘Politics’, ‘Culture’ (in 15th century Korea King Seijong tried to democratise learning by introducing an alphabet in place of the thousands of Chinese characters but his best efforts were defeated by scholars opposed to ‘vulgar letters’), ‘Society and the Individual’ (in 15th century Siam everybody below the king was awarded ‘dignity marks’ ranging from 5 for a slave to 100,00 for the heir apparent, the king’s dignity being infinite), and ‘Religion’.
The last third of the book is taken up with two chapters, one on ‘The Oddity of Europe’ and the other on ‘Modernity’.
The first of these, is, based on recommendations of authors I admire, why I bought this book to read. Here she addresses the question of the rise of the West and whether the West was merely the first or a freak. She thinks it was a freak and ascribes its rise to, inter alia, the weakness of its state system (unlike Chinese emperors Western rulers had to bargain with subjects and popes), the composite nature of its culture (here she makes interesting comparisons with Japan) and the opportunities Europe’s wealth and European population control provided.
There are areas where I felt more could have been written.
For instance she touches on the difference between shame and guilt but could – and to my mind should – have written more on this topic particularly as it gives an insight into one of the causes of friction arising out of mass migration from shame-based third world countries to guilt-based Western ones. There are reasons for honour killings.
In the chapter on Europe a little over a page is given over to scientific thought. This is far too little as the Scientific Revolution preceded the Industrial one and, as Ed Wilson pointed out, “Science isn't easy; that's why it took so long to get started, and then mostly in one place, western Europe.”
In her coverage of scientific thought she starts well and makes the very interesting point that South-East Asia had a mixture of the Buddhist religion and a Hindu high culture mixed with assorted native legacies without producing science or the rise of a bourgeoisie (The West being a composite of barbarian invaders, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman high culture, which did produce both). But the rest of the section fizzles out with one long paragraph about Classical deductive thought and Protestant inductive reasoning.
I also get the impression that, in dealing with ‘The Oddity of Europe’, the author goes out of her way to downplay the conscious contribution of Europeans e.g. that medieval Latin Christendom gave birth to the university. Similarly I think the role of individual Catholic churchmen is downplayed e.g. the influence of Thomas Aquinas is overlooked.
Nor does she properly address the importance of the fact that Latin West made far more use of the legacy of the legacy of Golden Age Greece than either the Greek speaking East or – in the long run – the Islamic world.
The closing chapter on modernity is also worth reading and helps explain why some societies find it easier than others to adapt to the modern world.
Unlike a lot of social science writing this one is written in plain – if bland – English that a layperson like me can follow easily. It contains a useful Further Reading list.
This review is based on the third edition, produced shortly before the author’s death.
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