Extractive economies require force and subjugation
One way to deal with this expanded population and need for land is to use your new found organizational skills to push more traditional polycroppers next door off their land (think Iraq) to increase your harvest. Large increases in population in one tribe would decrease equilibrium in societies where tribes that tended to compete on a small scale, were connected by the traditional bonds of marriage and language groups and commonly made alliances against larger tribes or rival groups to maintain relative peace. Certainly not all were peaceful the point is the more dependent on monocropping a tribe was, the more likely to be an aggressor. The introduction of monocropping would have started the first arms race, this one involving harvest increase and birthrates.
Again and again in societies in the Americas who broke out of the pattern of Polycropping and bet on monocropping met an inevitable end, increased wealth brought about greed and self destruction, slavery, war, famine. That pattern held fairly steady in spite of feudalism, monarchies and other repressive forms of government because of a lack of large scale technology and there was still a commons where an individual or group could go and start their own society based on their own values with relatively little interference of the state.
Indeed the famous legend of Squanto teaching the Pilgrims how to survive by polycropping beans, corn and squash allowed them to survive long enough and finally get enough immigration to overcome losses from disease to kill off the polycroppers and institute European monocropping practices. One of the biggest problems early European settlers had was those settlers who survived malaria kept running away to live with the natives who lived a much better quality of life than did the European settlers.
The extractive economy of the Europeans demanded a large directed and subjugated labor force. The fact that European diseases killed off most of the native American population the Europeans planned on using to extract the wealth from the new land forced them to import African slaves who had a natural immunity to malaria, finally allowing them to set up an extractive economy of scale that would work in the new world. In the north where malaria wasn't nearly the issue, a steady supply of desperate European immigrants satisfied the needs of factories.
With the advent of modern technology at the invention of the steam engine, monocropping capitalism was brought to factories for widget production operated by workers dispossessed of their tribal birthrights to the commons, their individual freedom and indeed of the earth itself. Monocropping had evolved from the consensus seeking polycropping sustainable harvest tribe that had existed for millions of years into the corporate nation state. One that used its control over the organization and direction of labor to monocrop and widget its way to wealth and force that labor through law and economic necessity to kill his rival tribesman to achieve control of the natural resources necessary to sustain market growth. That's what a capitalist refers to as a "free market".
Want to know what Occupy Wall Street is about, this is it the ancient struggle of the extractive directed monocropping driven, ever expanding economy against the last vestiges of the cooperative collective sustainable economy that might preserve the future of mankind and the quality of life on earth. With the human population of the planet population reaching seven billion this year, it has never been more evident that survival depends on change. Don't expect the capitalists to give up easily though, and don't be surprised if the reformers become revolutionaries before it ends. The fate of all of us depends on it.
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