“Undoubtedly the most important, and lasting, contribution to intensified cropping in China was the design, construction, and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems. The antiquity of these schemes is best shown by the fact that nearly half of all projects operating by the year 1900 had been completed before the year 1500. The origins of perhaps the most famous one, Sichuan’s Dujiangyan, which still waters fields growing food for several tens of million people, go back to the third century BCE. … The construction and unceasing maintenance of such irrigation projects (as well as the building and dredging of lengthy ship canals) required long-range planning, the massive mobilization of labor, and major capital investment. None of these requirements could be met without an effective central authority. There was clearly a synergistic relationship between China’s impressive large-scale water projects and the rise, perfection, and perpetuation of the country’s hierarchical bureaucracies” (Smil 2020, pp. 93-4).
Investment is, by its definition, not production for consumption, since it is aimed at producing means of production and not consumer articles. The larger the investment, the less it is production for consumption and more it is production for exchange. Robert Lopez showed that although water mills were already used in antiquity, their relatively high cost meant that they did not spread in Europe until the Middle Ages, when slave labor was transformed into peasant labor. Greater freedom was a condition for greater efficiency. The deficit of slave labor forced the search for mechanical methods of grinding grain, while at the same time the lord of the manor forced the peasants to grind their grain in his mill. The shortage of rivers and streams to support waterwheels, in turn, led to the spread of windmills, which were not used in antiquity (Lopez 1976, pp. 43-4). An increase in meaning is an increase in mediation, the latter requires more freedom for the subjects, and more freedom requires a more complex socio-cultural order.
Property, debt and interest
Property arose as the disposal of the non-user in parallel with and in place of possession as the disposal of the immediate user. If the origin of possession is to be sought in the possessor’s own labor, then the origin of property is to be sought in political and economic norms. Property arises as political property when one group of people is able to subjugate another group, when one part of the population rises as a political force over another part. Property makes it possible to create elaborate means of production, to invest on a large scale, to maintain a sufficient duration of the production and circulation, to calculate and distribute risks. If possession is a feature of a low composition of meaning, then political property is a feature of an activity with a high composition. Political property is associated with the rise of chiefdoms and states. Irrigation systems, military installations, massive ancient and medieval architecture are its material evidence.
“Thus, in tribal hydraulic societies property is simple, but it is simple with a specific tendency toward the predominance of political, power-based, property. This tendency increases with the size of the community. It becomes decisive in simple hydraulic commonwealths that are no longer directed by a primitive (tribal) government, but by a state” (Wittfogel 1957, p. 238).
