4 ms·

I may be wrong but I'm guessing it's because in europe the peasants didn't own the land. The hub and spoke design of old world villages was beneficial to the la

• neaden 4y ago
  I think this is kind of true, but not fully. It's not that the peasants didn't own the land, though certainly many didn't, it's that they didn't farm contiguous rectangular fields like is common in America. In older farming there would be two or three fields for crop rotation, and then different parts of the field would be owned by different people. So you might have a bit over here, a bit over there, etc. You would grow different crops on different areas of the field, and then have a vegetable garden near your house. In America, relatively early on, instead we ended up with farmers who had a single contiguous piece of land where they primarily farmed a single crop.
  • monknomo 4y ago
    Seeing like a state covers this - it could be that in the interest of making ownership legible (while dispossessing the Native Americans), people could only buy contiguous land. In particular, I'm reminded of the piece on how the tsar and soviets both tried to get rid of the strip system that the peasants liked because it was easy to farm and manage from their level.