uh the last lecture was a let's say a work in progress uh one where I was struggling sort of for every sentence because I didn't quite know where it was going and uh that is going to be balanced today by a work of some certitude uh and the two are related because the puzzlements I have over what occurs in the uh in the early medieval period in in Europe uh are related to the to a sense I have that after certain point things get tracked in a fairly coherent direction that is um uh sort of accommodates all of the peculiarities and uncertainties and yet exactly how you go from the uh the uh enormous variety and inconsistency uh heterogeneity uh and indeed out an peculiarity of early Medieval Europe uh into something that appears to be more uh more coherent is not clear to me except uh for the fact that it seems to have a fundamental relationship to an increase in population now increases in population or decreases in population uh are a obviously an important variable in history and there's probably no variable that is as mysterious when historians talk about demographic history they usually are able to demonstrate that there is a change in the uh uh in the food production sector of the economy such that there either is a greater uh acreage of land put to crops or a greater production per acre in the uh calories generated in other words the fundamental question that gets asked is um uh how are the people fed and uh and that always seems fine you you say okay you introduce potatoes or some other high calorie crop and now you can have more people or for that matter you invent wheat and barley farming now you can have more people but can have more people is different from from causing there to be more people uh I don't think that anybody has ever uh engendered children having some thought to H I guess we have just about enough oatmeal for one more so you know maybe me and the MS will you know try and squeeze one out it it you know it doesn't happen that way and so the things that are often uh described as uh causes uh are often uh uh equally susceptible being simply analyzed as uh concomitants if you're going to have more people you have to have more food uh and circumstances uh may change uh technically in terms of the crops or the process of growing food or something that make more food possible but why do populations grow uh this is um oddly uh uncommon as a historical question perhaps because there's no obvious way to to address it you know why um why are the populations of Europe and particularly Eastern Europe uh falling why are people not having children children at the rate they did uh you know 50 years ago uh you know when we talk about something like that in contemporary terms people talk about the oh for example uh how do you expend your wealth available uh the wealth available to a household you know does education cost more therefore you'll have fewer children do you want to spend more money on the um on leading a good life rather than uh having a bountiful family um uh I don't think anybody knows uh there are some some measurable indicators that have to do with age of marriage uh when age of marriage goes up uh population of this this discourages population increase uh because the uh seemingly because shortens the the time period for engendering children on the other hand age of marriage is not the same for men and women uh since a man's period of engendering children can be much longer than a woman and particularly in a polygamous Society uh can uh you know a man in of robust ears shall I say uh can be having children by his you know anth wife who's a you know a young thing uh you know age of marriage isn't always absolutely clear either when you have a a region like Europe that has a substantial proportion of the population that is celibate at least claims celibacy um you know why doesn't that act as a as a check on population increase uh more evidently the argument is made from time to time that the decline of the Mongols whom we will get to and on but not today uh has to do with the spread of uh of uh a type of Buddhism into m molia that led to a large portion of the male population living in monasteries and therefore the Mongols lost the demographic uh dynamism that had uh LED them to become the conquerors of Eurasia uh that is not certain uh it's a it's a hypothesis you also have puzzles in demography in looking at what your indices are other words um there's been a debate over the early Islamic period uh uh Andrew Watson wrote a book called the Agricultural Revolution in early Islam in which he argued that a whole uh you know a whole Cornucopia of new crops became uh grown in the medieval Muslim world and these crops uh Mo you know were accompanied by evidence of a strong population growth the problem is that the uh the crops were not staple food crops you know true there was an expansion of eggplant how much ratat can you can you manage if you're trying raising a bunch of kids um you know colocasia spreads uh when did we last have a yummy meal of colocasia uh citrus fruits yes Sugar Sugar spreads in early Islam um uh rice but rice is rather Limited in the uh in the geography of the Arid Zone and the number of places it can be grown the one crop that appears to be uh massively successful is the one I've already talked about which is cotton which is not a food crop which in fact takes acreage out of production so the question of there being a major change in the agricultural landscape that Andrew Watson raised that is sound the question of it generating a growth in population is more conjectural now the evidence for that that he would induce would be uh the growth of large cities but that is a questionable measure because there is a you know it has to do with the with the distribution of Labor between rural and urban uh uh Enterprises uh you can have a uh a country in which um uh 95% of the population uh lives in farming Villages or country in which 80% of the population lives in farming Villages and that 15% difference are people who've moved to the city and the two countries are sustaining their population uh just fine with no growth growth in the overall numbers so my response to Watson has been that I think there was a that the urbanization of the Middle East was a product of a differential M of a migration to cities uh from a uh from an agricultural Countryside that led to a reduction in the amount of Labor available in the countryside and ultimately to a certain fragility uh in the agricultural regime so for example when you find uh East African slaves who are brought in to Southern Iraq to uh to reclaim land uh by uh in uh areas that were heavily uh um salinated they would shovel off the uh the sine top soil to get to uh nons salty soil underneath um you say well why did you bring in African slaves for that why not use the local labor and uh if you have a growing population in Baghdad um it's interesting that the number of villages on the outskirts of Baghdad reduces and appears to be a more of a differential in migration so in other words you you have both the question of cause and the question of evidence uh now the person who has probably done more than anyone else to make the argument for a huge population increase in medieval Europe is uh Josiah Russell uh of last generation a an eminent demographic historian uh wrote a uh dense and unappetising monograph called late ancient and medieval populations and his specialty really and that work was tax records and government revenues uh these are uh much more abundant for Europe than they are for most other parts of the world uh and uh and they also involve ambiguities for example very often a tax rate would be assessed on the Hearth with the Hearth being understood to be a family home but how big was the family uh you if you're going to have a standard multiplier what is a multiplier you use and there been people who would use a multiplier of eight and people would use a multiplier of three and A2 and the somebody using a multiplier of eight will say well you have um parents and uh several children uh and maybe a grown child living in the family and the uh person pushing the lower number would say that doesn't take care of old old people living alone it doesn't take care of of uh new uh newly uh uh minted married couples who have not yet had children and you have to average all this out it's a um it it's a puzzle the reason you often find strong variation in the uh in estimates for the population of premodern cities in particular is the uh disagreement among Scholars on what constitutes a proper um a proper uh multiplier when you go from number of hearths uh or number of uh houses uh the house density actually uh sometimes can be estimated quite well from either if it's a deserted site archaeologically sometimes about aerial photog graphy where you can actually count the number of of uh foundations uh showing up uh on not aerial photograph from an abandoned Village or town uh for old cities that still have more or less intact medieval quarters you can actually go in and count the number of houses so not infrequently um I should say not infrequently from time to time you're able to come up with a fairly hard count of of the number of of uh places where families lived but the multiplier Still Remains um uh very difficult um but what Russell did by looking at a very broad array of tax data from all over uh Europe uh he was able to show how the number of hearths change over time with without having to commit himself to the question of uh what a hearth was and when he found consistencies uh showing that there was a very substantial increase in population uh the his arguments became quite uh quite convincing to most historians and so the standard idea now is that sometime from let's say 1000 onward uh there is a very sharp rise in the population of Europe uh possibly starting before 1000 but you know we're using uh a very broad brush here because we simply don't have enough uh data to have a more pantalis approach uh the estimate is that between uh 1000 and the eve of the black death in the 1340s that the population of Europe doubled and that the population of Western Europe uh that is to say um Western Europe excluding Spain because the Muslim territories usually get left out of this calculus uh the population of Western Europe uh during that period seems to have roughly tripled uh work that has been done by David Hurley on the uh the countryside of Florence at the time of the Renaissance uh indicated that um uh the r that land prices went up indicating a higher uh yield uh Financial yield for what they produced these are rural land prices uh but that the overall production of the contado of the uh Countryside around Florence uh only produced enough food to feed the City of Florence for uh 5 months of the year and the rest of food had to be imported again broad brush estimates but what is suggesting is that the population Rise um uh can also be accompanied by a differential between rural and urban so it isn't a matter that uh that gross population change uh automatically leads to bigger cities or that population shrinkage automatically leads to small small cities or that rural urban migration or the or the contrary uh you know uh lead in other directions you can have both at the same time uh Russell wrote a book on medieval areas and their cities in which he divided uh uh Europe in particular and he also did this for the Middle East for the Islamic world uh into zones somewhat arbitrarily defined um by his sort of subjective sense of what constituted a geographic region and he produced interesting evidence indicating that the um that you could rank the 10 largest uh uh communities in any Zone other words that you would say okay well Paris will let us say is the largest city in northern France and then let us say that you know uh then he would rank them down you know to loose is the second one or something and and he would say now let's look at the aggregate population of the 10 largest locations and compare that to the total population that we estimate from tax revenues for the region and see what the ratio is and he called this an urbanization index and what he found was that in medieval Europe uh the urbanization index that is to say the PO the aggregate population of the 10 largest settled areas in a region compared with the uh the the total population of the region uh might would be on the order of uh 8 to 10% other words we're dealing with uh uh 90% of the population living outside of cities uh in farming towns Villages and uh individual farmsteads for uh some areas uh the percentage could go up into into the 20s and in particular this worked for uh for Tuscany um in the Renaissance uh and for Flanders where you know gent and EP and uh like that became important industrial production centers uh but he argued that in those areas you had um SE ports that made it possible to support the population by importation of food so uh Russell really shaped a lot of the thinking about this and he argued that you have an increase in population and you have an increase in urbanization that the urbanization increase is focused in areas that become the centers for trade and Manufacturing and as a corlar uh cultural uh Innovation uh both in arts and letters uh in uh Renaissance Italy and in the northern Renaissance in uh in the low countries with all of this trickling rather more slowly into a a urbanized areas like France and Britain all right so historians have generally accepted there's a population increase now what is the population increase uh mean well it means that you have an incre you have to have an increase in food the increase in food does not necessarily precede the population increase it accompanies it it facilitates it uh you can identify y factors that are part of it but um uh it's hard to say that it's a cause the particular um aspect of the food increase and and this I I I should say has been studied by numerous historians uh Lynn White's uh famous work on uh social change and technology and social change in medieval Europe uh George Dub's book on um agricultural life and Medieval Europe I European medievalists just done wonderful wonderful work and exploited um uh a very substantial body of sources in very imaginative and valuable ways doesn't mean they always ask the questions that you would ask if you were not a European medievalist so I don't know why the population increases but I I'm what I'm interested in is the consequence of the increase there is an increase in the demand for food um therefore we find increased acreage of land under production uh particularly associated with certain uh monastic uh foundations that uh believe strongly in bringing new land under cultivation uh there's an increase in the use of crop rotation and manuring that will produce produ will raise productivity uh there is uh some Innovation on the technical side in the design of plows making it possible to plow heavy wet land efficiently uh as opposed to uh earlier plows so called scratch plows that were mainly uh geared toward scratching a Furrow in comparatively dry soil so that increased the acreage of land under production uh not a whole lot of innovation in terms of of what crops were grown uh now I mentioned last time that this time period of 1000 to 1300 coincides with the medieval warm period And this is where you get into the question of causation if the technological changes and the farming uh uh you know the the number of acres under cultivation are uh things that keep step with population increase is it possible that the uh Improvement of the of the climate is the causitive factor is that why uh the population grew um from my point of view as someone who's interested in the in the reciprocal of this that is to say uh popula uh climate deterioration in the Northern Middle East and a decline in population I think that's a really Nifty idea Europe gets warm and Europeans start to swarm uh Middle East gets cold and all these uh Noble Arabs and Persians become scarcer on the ground it's a nice sort of parallel but it's very hard to to prove that particularly when you look forward in time to the little ice age during which European population positively exploded where it was getting colder um or now when the popul when the the climate May well be getting warmer I haven't read the latest blogs on the fraud of climate change uh and maybe somebody has proven that climate change is indeed a conspiracy but um but the but all the scientific data seem to point to the fact that it's getting warmer at a time when people are having fewer and fewer children um so you know it's tempting to look at climate change as as your as your trigger um it may be easier to look at it a trigger as a trigger for population decline than population increase but it all has to be controlled by what exactly does climate change do um crops are flexible the mix of crops uh is flexible uh maybe you simply change from one crop to another um to adapt to changing climates um let's say you take a a crop for which like wheat and barley uh winter wheat and barley my know favorite Middle Eastern uh example uh you know you you plant in November uh the plant sprouts in uh in early spring and it grows and before it gets absolutely Torrid out uh your harvesting um that seems to to work fine except that the germination efficiency for winter creat and wheat and barley is uh affected by the soil temperature at the time of germination so that if the soil is warmer uh a larger uh percentage of the seeds actually Sprout and produce new plants if the soil is frozen or chilly then the germination is inefficient and your you have fewer plants and the yield in Grain goes down so here you have something that is very sensitive uh to uh to change in temperature now if you had a soil thermometer you might be able to determine something about this but of course you didn't have soil therm omers what you did have was an enormous uh accumulated uh body of knowledge about growing crops and that knowledge was very often keyed to uh uh astronomical phenomena like uh you know uh Moon uh you know constellations things like that so peasants would say oh now we look at the skies and we say now is the time when we always do X and if the climate changes maybe X should have been done 2 weeks later or 2 weeks earlier but peasants aren't stupid they adapt and so uh it's hard to be sure what the effect of of this is um when you have climate improving in Europe we see crops high yield crops like wheat supposed to Ry uh growing farther north in Europe because the growing season has gotten long enough to support let us say wheat growing in Estonia um but does that mean that you have drought in the South that might compensate for it without a a kind of a close Reckoning of what crops are being grown and the particulars as to how those crops uh you know are affected by changes in temperature Andor precipitation uh you're still relying a lot on guesswork to to see these things but I'm willing to Guess that the PO that the climate Improvement in Europe uh was conducive to the population was conducive to not cause was conducive to because that's slippery um uh was conducive to the increase in population and so when you see for example Vikings roaming all over the place uh you think oh uh these uh brigin you know going around stealing things whereas you should be thinking look at all those sweds uh there are so many sweds you know where' they all come from well it was getting good in Sweden and so people went robbing um it sometimes is used as an index so that the Crusades are sometimes seen as being caused in part by a surplus of younger sons of the nobility who could not inherit land and therefore went off to seek their Fortune uh by um going to the Middle East and hoping to uh to end up with a grant of land in Syria or Lebanon or uh or Palestine uh which many of them did so sometimes the political Arena seems to uh be um uh you know an area that signals uh population increase or population decline as I say there were no Iranians who showed up to fight the Crusaders and the later Mongols are pretty uh anemic um horde all right um this isn't what I wanted to talk about um what I want to talk about is water wheels uh if you are growing more grain because you have more people uh let us assume that the people are consuming a constant amount of grain now how do you consume grain there are two fundamental ways of consuming grain you can boil it to make it soft and that's basically grel or oatmeal uh or something like that or you can grind it and bake it and that's bread it is likely that the per capita consumption of bread grew uh at a at the time of the population growth and that the need for for Milling grain which you don't have to do to boil the grains the need to Mill the grain into flour increased at a higher rate than the population when you read the history of um of uh cooking for Europe one of the things that is very clear that in the medieval period though not in the late Roman period but the medieval period the plate that you had was a piece of bread be a round uh flap of bread baked fairly hard about maybe an inch thick or something and the you would use it as a plate and then eventually you'd eat the plate um as opposed to the Roman period when you're more likely to have uh a stew with uh cooked grain with you know some onion a little lamb maybe if you're lucky you know some basil something nice and uh and you put it in a bowl and you and you drink it or eat eat with a spoon uh let's say the coming of the fork is uh is one of the interesting things because there are you know there are no Forks in the 10th Century uh Forks are an early Renaissance thing in Italy and uh prior to that time you ate with a spoon uh or with your fingers uh or um uh with the knife that you carried everybody carried a knife all the time uh as their basic eating Implement uh it has been argued and I'm not sure it's true been argued that that the rise of a modern table knife is directly associated with the court of Louis the 14th because he prohibited the Nobles from killing each other uh on you know at at and around Versailles so he didn't want people with sharp knives and so they started to put knives at the place with a dull end on them so that people would not say haha my butter knife I'm going to stab you it you know it uh may or may not be true a lot of interesting new work on the history of of of cooking has been coming out in recent years it's one of the hot areas of research primarily dealing with with Europe uh the one book for example on uh traditional foods of Indonesia is almost unreadable um because it deals with products you've never heard of but uh I digress um back to the issue of of grinding grain uh the rate at which the num which Mill water water Mills increases appears to be substantially greater than the rate at which the population increases now um I'm going to read a a little bit from a book that deals with water wheels by um uh Francis and Joseph geese book called a cathedral Forge and water wheel technology and invention in the Middle Ages they say the 10th and following centuries witnessed steady progress in Reclamation of unproductive unproductive areas via drainage irrigation and land clearance northern and western Europe once sparsely inhabited filled in the rapidly multiplying written records Supply a wealth of statistics of which the most telling is the figure given in in doday book the survey prepared in England in 1086 at the order of William the Conqueror a century earlier I would say in 986 uh fewer than Mills are recorded in the country that's England Doomsday Book lists 5,624 uh which is a low number since the book is incomplete Continental records tell the similar story in the OB District in France 14 Mills operated in the 11th century 60 in the 12th and nearly 200 in the 13th in piard 40 Ms in 1080 grew to 245 by 1175 in other words we're dealing here with an order of magnitude growth that is way greater than the doubling or the tripling of the population indicated by demographic historians um now the important part of this is that these are water Mills uh if you go back to the year 300 when the emperor Dian uh published a uh an edict uh fixing uh wages and more importantly prices throughout the Roman Empire you can find out how much it cost in the uh you know in the 4th Century to uh to buy or build a mill because these are are set prices a hand Mill cost 250 dinari um a handm mill at that time consisted of a a base stone and a stone that fit on top of it that was your rotating Stone and there was a central uh pivot for it and in the rotating Stone you would have a socket a h a socket in which you could put a handle and you would turn the Handle by hand put the Grain in between the stones and that's the way you do it uh this is different from a qun a qun is what in Mexico is called a matate where you have a stone and you have a stone roller that you that that was an ancient system by the Roman period uh the rotary hand Mill seems to have replaced to qun generally there's an intermediate stage of the so-called homeric Grill uh Mill that was a uh a motion like this back and forth rather than around nevertheless the rotary hand Mill seems to have cost 250 dinari according to Dian if you had a mill operated by a donkey that cost you an extra thousand dinari so a donkey Mill was 12250 dinari uh now a donkey Mill uh obviously has to be bigger than a than a hand Mill uh often it would at Le let me say the the the versions that we see at Pompei and that are described in the in the golden ass of appolus uh indicate something something like that where you have your your lower Stu Stone uh is you a kind of a cone and then you have a cap on top of it that is your upper Stone and the cap has an arm that uh and and the arms attached to a donkey and the donkey goes around and around uh you drop in your grain from the top in a hole it goes down it's ground between the two stones uh as the top Stone rotates on the bottom Stone and it comes out uh you know on the edges uh that kind of Mill uh cost $1,250 uh 12250 dinari now that's not including the cost of the animal that's the installation price of the mill then you have a HSE Mill uh Hors Mill is not but different it's 1500 dinari so it's only an additional 250 dinari uh because the Roman horse wasn't all that much bigger than the Roman donkey uh this is before the era of uh large draft horses and war horses so you're building essentially the same kind of structure only scaling it up somewhat for the uh for the horse uh then you have the water mill the water mill cost 2,000 dinari in other words it's uh almost 10 times as much as a hand Mill and that is a water mill that uh either was uh something that dipped down into a flowing stream and it was pushed by the current uh or or it was a horizontal thing where the current pushed it around uh horizontally uh we know that horizontal Mills were common in the Eastern uh Roman Empire because they were uh they became the commonplace Mills of Byzantium more than the vertical Mills the vertical Mills appear to have been more in the Western Empire I don't know why on the data are not adequate to make it very clear uh whether that is a a generally acceptable difference here you have a uh a pivot and the the the veins come out from the side of the wheel so the wheel goes around this way and then that will turn a mil wheel up here uh with with the on top of it you put the Grain in here it goes between the the the wheel is simply driving uh driving the millstone it isn't itself the mill the millstone so that's for horizontal Mill where you where the the horizontal motion of the rotation of the mill matches the horizontal rotation of the millstone for a Vertical Mill like this you have to have a um a gear that will change the rotation uh from a vertical to a horizontal rotation uh it's not a very complicated gearing assembly um it is uh one that gives you a little more control over the power because the gear ratio becomes than a u a variable whereas the horizontal Mill tends to Simply depend on the flow of the water uh the more sophisticated Mills of the later that come to be built in the period I'm talking about uh will have a a a trough above them uh water will flow through the trough and come down and push the mill around from the top so this is what you had in Roman times it's called an undershot Mill and this is what you have in the late medieval period that gets built in such profusion and this is an overshot Mill the advantage is that this depends entirely upon the the U the strength of the current whereas this operates through gravity it's the weight of the water as it comes down uh however this requires that you have a fixed source of of water and that's a mil Pond and then you have to Dam a stream in order to keep the mil Pond full because the the the quantity of water in the mil Pond will determine the rate of flow of the water that's coming through the trough that's turning the wheel that lived in the house that Jack built it's um uh crystal clear in other people's drawings uh Al last not in mind all right so we find that Mills were well known in the Roman period uh and of the four types described in G dioclesian edict three of them were operated by muscle power a human donkey or horse um in the discussion of mills in the uh great period of increase in Mills the sources in Europe make virtually no mention of uh of any Mill operated by animals there's seemingly either no growth in horse operated or oxen or donkey operated Mills um or they uh fall below the uh the threshold of historical visibility for some reason but what we're doing is that we're increasing the Milling of grain at a phenomenal rate but we're not using animal energy now that's fine uh the kinetic energy of falling water or the uh or of water flowing in a stream is a kind of a free good and you might say well why use muscle power when water power is free you know why use gasoline when solar and wind are free uh well you're used to it a certain way and so you keep doing it that way even though it doesn't make much sense uh but there were problems for example a lot of Europe you know has you know freezes you know when it freezes uh you can't operate your Mill and in some freezes uh because of the expansion of the water the freezing damages the mill um you also have droughts where uh you have have problems of sustaining uh the power of the water so surviving Mills in Europe down in the early modern period commonly had alternative harnessing systems so that you could substitute animals for the water wheel unhook the water wheel and simply harness an animal to a a beam that would stick out from the side and use it instead but basically the great increase in Milling of of grain uh was not using animals uh a number of explanations have been raised for this why were there so many mills it's argued that monasteries and uh feudal Lords uh built Mills and took a fee for using the Mills that they prohibited the use of hand Mills and coerced their peasants into using you know uh John company's Mill and uh that it was a money-making thing that undoubtedly is true uh and we have indications from documents showing uh efforts to curtail the use of of uh of hand Mills but what isn't at all clear is why animal Mills weren't used because animal power had been available had been the primary source of uh of uh primary motive Force for hundreds of years and because the heritage of the Roman Empire uh was that animal Mills were were common now the the answer to this I would argue and here we get to the CR Crux of what I want to talk about is that animal animal Mills weren't used because when the population increases if you are living in a geographical situation where animals consume uh crops that are grown to produce their fodder then humans and animals are competing for acreage and for calorie production in other words uh your population increases uh presumably with an upward increase in the uh price that Growers can get for their crop if they're in a market situation uh but do they really want to grow oats for the horses and oxen instead of wheat for the for the humans now this doesn't mean that animal fodder wasn't grown it's just that animal fodder was used to uh to to supply food for military horses to supply food for riding horses to supply food for oxen that were used for plowing land in other words there was a a high continuous demand for animal fod but to increase that Demand by uh greatly increasing the use of animals to operate Mills would have made no sense economically they simply cost too much uh now the the interesting concominant here is that the investment cost the capital cost of a water mill which you've already seen was 2,000 dinar or um almost double that of a donkey Mill uh in uh in the year 300 that Capital cost steadily goes up with Innovations for example if you have an overshot Mill it operates more efficiently but you have not only the wheel and the and the gearing and the attached millstones but you have the um uh the slle that brings the water you have the uh the Mill Pond you have the damning that you probably need in order to keep the mil Pond filled uh because you're in Europe where it rains all the time you have a Mill House it's a whole thing is inside a structure um it's a very expensive operation this is why these Mills are mostly associated with monasteries and uh and feudal Lords um it if you went back to Roman times you could have said it would be a lot cheaper to build um 500 donkey Mills than uh then to build you know uh 30 large Stone elaborate um Mills of using water or a little bit later windmills so but the investment was worth it you for some reason people were willing to invest money and that investment coincides with the increase in the [Music] population all right um now let's I want to look at the Islamic side of things there is no increase in water Mills uh in the Muslim [Music] world the Muslim World inherited the same technological toolkit from the Romans that Europe did that is to say every type of meal that the Romans knew was known uh in the Muslim world uh the need for grinding grain was probably higher in the Middle East per capita where bread had long been a staple and where grul and porridge were less uh were less common as means of uh making grain edible uh uh but the population goes up the population goes down and there's nothing special happens in the area of Milling Milling in the 10th Century or in the 6th Century or in the 19th century appears to have been pretty much the same process you have a millstone uh on top of a stationary Stone you have a beam coming out from the side of the millstone you harness an animal to the beam and you make the animal go round and round and round and round uh until it drops and then you buy another animal uh it is a distributed uh activity rather than a concentrated activity uh the power of the millstone is not really sufficient to uh to take all of the grain for um many many many uh users uh it doesn't have the same power as a Watermill uh also people would rather bring their grain to be ground uh to a nearby locality than a distant one so you find um Mills uh all over the place uh you can still find them I mean you go to the Middle East now and in rural areas and you'll find animal operative Mills uh not uncommonly depending on on where you go uh now the technology was not the problem uh the Middle East did have windmills and it did have water Mills and most of the of the derivative uses of Mills of water Mills that ultimately lead to Major industrial changes in Europe originate with water Mills in the Middle East that's say trip Hammers and uh Bellows operators and uh fulling males I'll get to that in a little bit uh these were seem to have started out um in the Middle East and then to have been developed uh in Europe so what I'm talking about here is one of these things I mentioned very early in the course the idea of a transition from one energy profile to another you're going from a energy profile in which the the uh the use of State that stationary labor as opposed to transport stationary labor goes from being animal uh sourced to being water or wind sourced that is a huge uh change uh the reason for this change uh I've talked about from the European side now let's look at it from the Middle Eastern side a study that was done uh I think in '97 by an economist at University of Pennsylvania um looked at the cost of operating um a uh camel cart or a pat camel in Pakistan uh the author had noted that if you went to Karachi or certain other place in Pakistan that on the streets you found uh in the midst of all the traffic you found uh heavy loads being pulled in carts drawn by a single camel usually with a with a truck rear axle you can see the hole where the differential would go uh rubber tires I mean uh a modern vehicle but pulled by a camel and so the question he said was how why is the camel able to compete with a Suzuki uh you know minimal truck for carrying heavy loads and so he worked out um the budget for a camel driver he talked to camel drivers he had several Associates from Pakistan working with him they surveyed uh providers of animal energy both pack camels and laboring camels and uh you know cart pullers and uh and he produces a uh sort of a budget sheet which shows you know uh let's say um uh 250 um or say maybe uh you know 250 laboring days for the animal cost of fodder zero then so many uh you know non-laboring days cost of fodder zero then he had cost of medicines which was very modest uh then the amortization that to say how much money you had to put aside each year in order to have enough money to buy your next camel when this one died of course that would be highly variable if you happen to have contacts with a breeding uh tribe where you might get your camel at a much cheaper rate um and then he would he he added up and say well so here's the profit and as long as you plugged zeros into the into the food uh thing uh animal labor became like wind or water it was for all intents and purposes free and the your fixed investment was was fairly minimal in other words the amortization cost for a Suzuki truck it might last more years or it might not uh but you're going to cost more to buy its replacement than you are to either replace the camel or get a new tire for your for your camel cart uh and he and his colleagues concluded that as long as fodder costs were zero that the camel could uh or the donkey uh or the mule what that your your laboring animal um could compete with mechanized uh transport or gasoline engines for uh for most uh Power purposes but of course on the scale of of the single animal so you couldn't scale up you couldn't get a a camel 10 size 10 times the size of your old camel or something um so it was clearly a small scale uh operation that suited uh rural areas or areas with um uh you know people who are more comfortable with that kind of technology and modern technology but basically what he said is that uh that the modern energy economy um produces great efficiency uh in this sort of situation only if you have to feed the animals so then that raise a question of why weren't they feeding the camels obviously they were feeding the camels it's just that to feed the camels they simply said go eat uh you know because in the Arid Zone There is almost unlimited acreage of plant producing land that cannot be used to grow food because there isn't enough rainfall so whether it is whether you are in Morocco or Iran or Northwest India or Kazakhstan or Mongolia all the way across the Arid zone of Eurasia afro Eurasia from the Atlantic to the borders of China you have uh the possibility and indeed the you know almost the inevitability of essentially free animal Labor uh from the point of view of the cost of of upkeep noted again and again and again in books about the Mongol conquest that the the European Knight had his his War Horse and his number two War Horse and a pack horse and his Squire had a horse and a pack horse so maybe he had three or four animals you would take to campaign of course the Mongols would bring along a string of you know 10 20 horses uh now the Mongol horses were not as strong as the European horses they got tired faster because they just ate grass they weren't fed oats they weren't fed High uh high energy um feeds that had to be grown but the Mongol could simply get off horse a and get on horse B then get off that one and get on horse the that was the common technique was that you swapped horses because you had basically an unlimited number of horses and they all supported themselves from natural forage and you simply switched from horse to horse so the Mongols had a this invincible uh Cavalry that was technically supported in very different fashion from the European now you could not wear armor of the same weight as the Europeans so the Europeans can concentrated on the on the heavily armored Knight on a large horse that required uh uh purpose grown fodder whereas the uh the Arid Zone people um used horses that were uh living uh off the economy they were more lightly armored but they had uh enormous mobility and the cost of their animals was uh was essentially free um at a later time this would also apply to the sahil area in Africa in h land uh where you had uh horses with a cotton uh padded armor uh and so forth for a while it happened in Somalia as well um horses don't do well that far south but as long as you can grow them on natural uh forage now for laboring in the Arid Zone as opposed to to um riding or Warfare you don't usually use a horse you use an ox or a camel or a donkey or a mule um but in any of these cases you're not paying for the food so here we have a huge um uh Divergence between Europe and the Arid Zone and that is that Europe is shifting from using animal power for stationary Labor uh you know and the Arid zone is continuing to use animal power the in Europe the nature of the technology and of the investment moves toward very large permanent uh stone-built installations uh in the Arid Zone you have a widely distributed locally uh controlled um uh situation that uh simply Services an immediate need and the investment cost is uh is is is almost negligible uh now this has consequences uh the consequence that is the one I want to to stress is that the Miller in Europe becomes the wealthiest person in the countryside other than the landowner other words the the the Lord is the one who is Rich and he may have put up the money for the mill but the European aristocracy despised work other than of course chopping at their neighbors with axes and Spears um they didn't like business they thought commerce was tacky they didn't engage in it but they were happy to have an industrious Miller to operate the mill on their property and the Millers became the wealthiest uh rural individuals who were uh non Noble uh now that I say rural because in the towns you have uh traders that become uh wealthy and they Traders may be wealthy or the Millers or you might have some crafts like uh like being a metal workers that produce more money but the thing about the Millers is that they're distributed throughout the society instead of just being in these cities that really aren't very numerous compared to the uh to the bulk of the population so the Millers become crucial now the action of a mill can be changed from rotary to linear um let's say you have a uh a wheel that's being turned by water and a shaft over here if you have a projecting uh cam on the shaft and let's say you have a great big Hammer um uh and a projection there as the wheel turns this projection forces this projection up and then as soon as it get past a certain point in the term uh the hammer drops back down so now you have an up and down action that is powered by the the water if the power of the water is strong enough this Hammer can be very heavy or you can have multiple hammers on the same uh on the same axis with uh with cogs that are lifting them and this is what's called a trip Hammer once you can do that then you can um uh have a paper mill where you have to pound cloth in order to mate it and make it uh into a pulp you can uh pound uh cottoner wool is called fing uh and a fing Mill Mill is essentially a hammer Mill of this sort you can pound uh iron uh the temperatures that blacksmiths were able to achieve back in 800 900 were not sufficient to actually melt uh iron ore they turned it into a redh hot you know uh malleable Mass uh called a bloom and in order to turn it into usable iron you pounded it uh because that uh forced the impurities out so a blacksmith spent a lot of his time with a hammer as you know eyes the image pounding uh on on on a bloom uh then once you got an an Ingot out of that then you could remelt that and make something out of it but the pounding was a very important part of metal working so you could have uh the crushing of ore or the pounding of of uh of metal in a bloomery could be done by water power uh you could have um uh sugar can crushed uh by water power all of these you could have a sawmill operated by water power uh instead of having to go up and down you have to go back and forth with a saw blade all these things could be done once you had water Mills so now you have Millers who become the uh the social basis for what ultimately evolves into the industrial revolution which is why early factories were called Mills you know you had a cotton mill or something like that well it's because it originates from from water Mills uh eventually uh Steam and internal combustion and electricity replace the water but up well into the 19 century water is your main uh your main source of of power and the mil are your key social group now the role of the Miller uh it gets talked about in European history but what doesn't get talked about is the comparison between the role of the Miller in Europe and the role of the Miller in the Arid Zone uh in to take uh a rather simple-minded way of looking at it perhaps if you look at family names in the United States today in from different languages German French Spanish Italian Russian Hungarian almost any European language and you look for two names the name that means Smith in that language uh and the name that means Miller in that language you'll find that they're of parallel importance sometimes one bigger sometimes the other but these are extremely common names and Smith and Miller in English are in the top 15 names in the entire country the Millers become uh the uh an entrepreneurial class if you look for the Arabic name for Miller uh you don't find it uh and yet the Arab name for Smith Hadad is very common among Arabic names in this country because the Millers never amounted to squat in the Arid Zone they were uh simply guys who had a fairly simple device they attached an animal to it and they would you know grind or saw or pound or press something with their Mill but the scale was so small and the profits uh were so modest and the investment was so modest that you did not have a social class emerging out of The Millers in Arabic uh the name for a Miller is a tahan um I think there are only three families in the United States that have the surname tahan and I think they're all saric Jews who are uh who uh probably brought it in from Spain where they were following the European uh uh standard uh so uh there is a you know going back to the question of are there certain things that you can that you can argue that are going to come out a certain way no matter what the variables are and one of them may be that if you uh if you go through an energy shift that creates a class that is uh wealthy industrious and entrepreneurial you are going to have a uh you know a Proto modernization that may develop as it does in Europe into an industrial revolution no matter how many monasteries you have no matter what the evolution is of the of the relations between Aristocrats and Kings No Matter What Wars are going on uh you're having a demographic slash climatic slash uh technological uh shift that is I would argue going to produce a a long-term economic change regardless pretty much of the uh uh of the very variables in other words it's not so much path dependent it would I would say probably have occurred elsewhere in the world under under the similar uh circumstances so this is why I'm contrasting what I'm talking about today with what I was talking about um on Tuesday where I was stressing the the weirdness and the variables this is something that appears to me fairly solid it also uh gives you a uh a sort of uh real world hands on explanation as to why Europe transforms and the Middle East does not it's not that the Middle East does it it's that the aid Zone does it it's the Middle East the North Africa uh Central Asia uh the Arid Zone was blessed at a certain period in history by having uh free food for animals and so they conquered everybody at a later point in history the free food for Animals came to be a barrier because it meant that shifting to water and wind which required such huge capital investment uh was unnecessary you had cheap animal power so in other words what I'm suggesting is that what occurred between 1000 and 1300 or so in Europe is an earlier example of what is going on today with cheap Petroleum in other words the the cost of of moving to solar and wind and nuclear compared with the incredibly low price of petroleum is turning what was once a blessing into a curse and there's the possibility and I would say the likelihood that whichever country makes the transition to the alternative energy sources first will steal a march on the rest of the world whether it's China or Brazil or wherever it is because once you have created a new uh institutional and economic structure associated with your new energy profile that particularly when that if that then becomes a globalized energy style now you have you've you've gotten a head start on everybody else on uh on the energy for the next generation and um uh of course here I'm obviously channeling Tom fredman um uh except I don't think Tom fredman has grasped the real meaning of what he's talking about um but I I'm convinced that I have something here and this is what I'm writing at this moment uh for uh for a chapter of a book and um hopefully it'll be done in the next few days and and once it's printed it will seem true [Music]