The greatest technological revolution ever – farming replacing foraging – was initially a step back for human productivity
THE great upheavals of our human past, the demise of slavery, for example, or the end of Communist rule in the Soviet Union, are the big game of historical explanation. A common strategy is to posit some external cause such as population growth, climate change, or a new technology, and then show its effect on institutions and culture. But because the dramatic changes in history are both rare and complex, attempting to account for them using standard scientific methods has proved difficult. Occasionally, though, history generously serves up a natural experiment.
The 17th-century Puritans who settled Providence Island off the coast of Nicaragua fled the political oppression of Britain to breathe the freer air of the New World. They were luckier than their fellow Puritans at Plymouth Bay, who subsisted as independent ...
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