This is not as uncommon as you might expect. We usually think about this time period as a kind of "civilization rush," but cases like this where societies apparently avoided hierarchical social...
If all the other villages have evidence of a hierarchy, they would have very possibly been making a deliberate decision to not have such a hierarchy.
This is not as uncommon as you might expect. We usually think about this time period as a kind of "civilization rush," but cases like this where societies apparently avoided hierarchical social arrangements (or even agriculture) are not at all isolated. I don't know of any so-called "egalitarian" societies with this sort of advanced hydrology, but there are many well-know cases of advanced engineering (and the exchange of that knowledge) in even forager societies---especially in the form of monuments, landmarks, etc. This is a pretty exciting discovery, and it makes me wonder if there have been any artifacts recovered that may reveal something about this community's ritual culture (which may suggest something about their values and how they chose to differentiate themselves from their hierarchical neighbors).
What's especially interesting to me about this is that CCP propaganda likes to push the myth that China has been united by "the State" through a continuous civilization over 5000 years, but this settlement could cast doubt on how far back that myth could have even been semi-accurate.
I am curious what you mean by that. I wonder how you see this fitting in (or not) with the supposed 5000 year timeline of Chinese civilization. There have obviously been a lot of diverse societies living in China for even longer than that, but the challenge is matching them up unambiguously to the semi-legendary "histories" written in ancient times. All East Asian countries have similar claims about their origins. It is kind of funny, because in Korea, our "official" origin story low-key suggests that our mythical founding father was slightly older than (and therefore a senior to) the mythical sage kings of China! :b
Just that the narrative is bullshit--this society was not hierarchical even though it was a thousand years into this supposed civilization where the State was always working to improve everyone's...
I am curious what you mean by that.
Just that the narrative is bullshit--this society was not hierarchical even though it was a thousand years into this supposed civilization where the State was always working to improve everyone's lives especially through hydrological engineering, yet this society existed apart from any hierarchy and still had superior hydrological engineering than its hierarchical neighbors. China has a lot of cool history so it's disappointing to see it be twisted to suit an authoritarian agenda.
Also I love that juxtaposition with the Korean myth; it reminds me of squabbling brothers.
I think I see what you mean, but I don't know that this site is necessarily relevant to the 5k year claim (it could be, but on the surface it doesn't seem to disprove anything). It is pretty well...
I think I see what you mean, but I don't know that this site is necessarily relevant to the 5k year claim (it could be, but on the surface it doesn't seem to disprove anything). It is pretty well understood that there were very diverse societies inhabiting "China" at this time, and even the ancient histories mention them (a consistent theme is the civilization of "barbarians"). The 5k claim has to do with these ancient histories that talk about prehistoric civilizations whose identity have yet to be identified archaeologically.
Does the CCP actually claim that there has been a...continuous "state" stretching back 5000 years? If so, that is very clearly untrue, even without prehistoric evidence. I don't know the extent of the CCP's claims, but I have heard some bizarre things.
On a related note, there are some people here in Korea who believe in a continuous ethnic identity stretching back even farther than that. Once I attended a conference where some of these ideas were floated, and I was quite shocked to hear that some people believe indigenous Americans are ethnically Korean. This is all nonsense, but it demonstranes how strongly people feel about ethnic identity in this part of the world; which is no surprise that a supremely authoritative state would be interested in factually establishing the archaic origin of its society. It's definitely not the most interesting story to tell, as places like this dig site show!
Straight from the horse's mouthpiece: http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2018-05/29/content_51528874.htm Of course they don't suggest that there has been one government for all of modern-day...
The project has proved with physical evidence that Chinese civilization exhibited a multifaceted unity, said Guan Qiang, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. "It was inclusive, and its succession has never stopped."
Previously, some overseas scholars expressed doubts about the length of Chinese civilization due "to a lack of physical evidence."
Of course they don't suggest that there has been one government for all of modern-day China for over 5000 years, but they do claim it's been one continuous civilization with direct successors in the way that Charles is the king of the same entity as William the Conqueror.
From that article: I was wondering what their obsession is with proving that there was some kind of continuous "state" (broadly construed), and it seems that they want to establish China as...
From that article:
"It hardly would have been possible for a tribe or a league of tribes to mobilize so many people," Wang said. "That indicated a time of early-stage states with wide influence."
I was wondering what their obsession is with proving that there was some kind of continuous "state" (broadly construed), and it seems that they want to establish China as "senior" to mesopotamia. Being the oldest civilization would be tremendously validating for them. Other people in this thread have mentioned the book by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow which gives a pretty clear picture of why the quoted statement above is fallacious and also why the premise of this search is probably ill-founded.
I am also curious how the numerous papers published on this, which would presumably provide unequivocal evidence if they have in fact proven this, have flown under my radar :b I have some digging to do, I guess haha!
Sounds like this was basically a neolithic hippie commune? If all the other villages have evidence of a hierarchy, they would have very possibly been making a deliberate decision to not have such...
Sounds like this was basically a neolithic hippie commune? If all the other villages have evidence of a hierarchy, they would have very possibly been making a deliberate decision to not have such a hierarchy. As a non-historian, I would suspect there had been such a hierarchy for many millennia--if not millions of years--at that point, but I'm sure historians know in-depth what kind of hierarchies were in place in that location and era.
What's especially interesting to me about this is that CCP propaganda likes to push the myth that China has been united by "the State" through a continuous civilization over 5000 years, but this settlement could cast doubt on how far back that myth could have even been semi-accurate. Of course China has gone through many tumultuous changes through the millennia, just as every other part of the world has.
I'm currently in the middle of reading "The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They argue very strongly (and with a ton of evidence) that the...
They argue very strongly (and with a ton of evidence) that the prevailing mainstream view that archeology goes from bands of hunter/gatherers to hierarchical permanent dwellings alongside agricultural technology is simply wrong.
(Not sure I buy into all of their arguments, some things are pushed pretty far, but the main gist is very interesting, which to no-one's wonder a lot of established archaeologists are less than happy about)
They argue that a lot of groups consciously avoided hierarchical structures over centuries and millennia.
To take just one example, the "mega-site" or "mega-settlement" Nebelivka in Ukraine had maybe 15.000 people living at the same time from somewhere around 5000 B.C.E to a millennium and a half later. No evidence of hierarchy.
It's extremely telling that historians generally don't even call this a city because that'd mean this whole hunter/gatherer --> agricultural city dichotomy is bunk (which it very clearly seems to be).
This is one of countless examples of these sorts of communities in different eras, geographies, organizations and with different results. In terms of all sorts of characteristics. Old societies were probably very different from each other.
I'm not a historian and I haven't read that book, but that sounds similar to other pop-history books that are trying to sell copies by telling you that everything you've learned is wrong rather...
I'm not a historian and I haven't read that book, but that sounds similar to other pop-history books that are trying to sell copies by telling you that everything you've learned is wrong rather than by investigating the whole story--what you wrote especially reminds me of Guns, Germs, and Steel. And the "this is what historians don't want you to know!" part reminds me of "one weird trick that doctors don't want you to know!" I can't be certain in any way, but I smell bullshit.
Looking up reviews and posts on /r/AskHistorians, for example, it sounds like opinions are fairly mixed, but overall quite positive with the caveat that the Davids overstep and draw conclusions that just aren't really logically sound or necessarily valid based on the evidence we have. I am seeing that apparently the authors even admit to cherry picking to support anarchist/decentralized ideas, so I would not present what the books states as fact, but rather theory.
I'm also seeing that Graeber is the Bullshit Jobs guy, so I'm now even more skeptical of his conclusions.
I agree. Yes, these two historians have all their skin in the game. But so do all the establishment historians who've built careers and personal scholarship on foundations that don't hold up to...
I agree.
Yes, these two historians have all their skin in the game. But so do all the establishment historians who've built careers and personal scholarship on foundations that don't hold up to modern scrutiny.
So far I haven't encountered the supposed anarchist tendencies in the book. There'd have to be a pretty tremendous leap from "they organized themselves along different values than we do today, and in many different ways" to "in ancient times, folks were what we in modern times call Anarchists."
That screams of typical strawman argumentation in social sciences: pushing arguments further then their original proponents do, then bashing them down as too extreme.
(again, if the book goes off the deep end in the second half, this may well not be the case).
Established history is extremely teleological and presents an extremely neat narrative as though thousands of years of history were predetermined, unimportant. The retelling removes the agency from all the people who lived for these thousands of years since supposedly agriculture is a necessary stage of greater development that supplants hunter/gathering, and then that necessarily results in hierarchical societies where resource inequality becomes the norm.
That unreasonable narrative deserves push-back.
There's been a tremendous amount of archeological work the last decades; Why haven't historical narratives changed at all? Without all the subsequent evidence, how in the world could the historians of the second half of the 1800s get it all just right?
Well, you used the word "teleological," so I have to assume you know more about this than I do. From what I saw, I don't believe the book so much goes off the deep end as the authors just had a...
Well, you used the word "teleological," so I have to assume you know more about this than I do. From what I saw, I don't believe the book so much goes off the deep end as the authors just had a narrative and found evidence to support that narrative. I never read anything that said their facts were wrong. It was just their synthesis which may have been overzealous.
Also, I find it interesting that you would say you haven't encountered the anarchist tendencies when your first comment was about the communal nature and deliberate lack of hierarchy in many ancient societies...that's pretty much the definition of anarchism.
I don't necessarily thinks it's fair to knock them for having a narrative. Pretty much every piece of literature has a narrative/bias, even if the author doesn't realize it. The countless books...
I don't necessarily thinks it's fair to knock them for having a narrative. Pretty much every piece of literature has a narrative/bias, even if the author doesn't realize it.
The countless books and articles supporting a hierarchical view of humanity certainly have a narrative as well, but they're accepted as fact.
I think the main point of The Dawn of Everything is to show that humans are inherently creative, and we've been experimenting with political organization since we became human, and maybe even before that. The two David's are trying to show how pre-history wasn't a linear progression towards nation states, but something much more interesting. That's what I took away from the book.
I wasn't knocking them for having a narrative; I was saying that they came up with the narrative before they did the research so they were fitting things to the narrative they had already built....
I wasn't knocking them for having a narrative; I was saying that they came up with the narrative before they did the research so they were fitting things to the narrative they had already built. To be clear, I have not read it. This is just what I got from some historians' reviews.
Anarchism seeks to abolish a state or to have a stateless society. These societies have arranged themselves along different values, but still with what seem to be pretty strong societal norms and...
Anarchism seeks to abolish a state or to have a stateless society.
These societies have arranged themselves along different values, but still with what seem to be pretty strong societal norms and ways of enforcing those norms. That happens without hierarchical rulers.
Put slightly differently, anarchism is skeptical of coercion. These historical civilizations can have strong, coercive structures, without rulers or social hierarchy.
I have nothing to add here, but I just wanted to say thanks to both of these replies. Balanced, thoughtful, respectful and informative. The topic is one where it’s likely we’ll never know for...
I have nothing to add here, but I just wanted to say thanks to both of these replies. Balanced, thoughtful, respectful and informative.
The topic is one where it’s likely we’ll never know for certain, and people are complicated. Maybe the social structure was entirely familial? Or clans banned together peacefully? Who knows. I just enjoyed this exchange and it reminded me to keep an eye out for that pop-trend where sales are generated by the simple controversy of going against the accepted academic knowledge base.
I'm reading this book: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow and I highly recommend it, but one of the points they make is that in the past, not everyone was in a tiny...
I'm reading this book:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
and I highly recommend it, but one of the points they make is that in the past, not everyone was in a tiny egalitarian tribes and then chiefdoms/monarchies when they discovered agriculture and long-term building. There was an entire spectrum of ways people organized themselves, many egalitarian even at scale. We imagine there was a cognitive progression in our ancestors that led to hierarchical structure and industrialization, but it turns out this was rather baseless, and as soon as we could process information like humans some tens of thousands of years ago, we were already pushing the boundaries of political organization instead of invariably forming tribes with hereditary leaders like many believe.
Put simply, you're right. They likely chose not to have a hierarchy, and that wasn't a rare thing.
I hope we continue to see archeological evidence of 'atypical' communities, like no hierarchy or matriarchal. I feel like we're just starting to understand how filtering discoveries through a...
I hope we continue to see archeological evidence of 'atypical' communities, like no hierarchy or matriarchal. I feel like we're just starting to understand how filtering discoveries through a colonizing, patriarchal, abrahamic lens has totally warped our sense of the past.
Since learning that the ancient Inca practiced a version of socialism and Pompeii had all the dick artwork hidden by prudes, I am more than a little salty about our collective human history being edited.
I'd be extremely careful using a modern term describing political ideology (like socialism) and applying it to a distant path. Inca communities and tons of other civilizations organized ownership,...
I'd be extremely careful using a modern term describing political ideology (like socialism) and applying it to a distant path.
Inca communities and tons of other civilizations organized ownership, society and ideology differently. That doesn't mean it was motivated or organized in relation to the means of production although some of the systems distributed power and ownership to larger groups or communities.
(Here)[https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/was-the-inca-empire-a-socialist-paradise-the-curious-case-of-the-inca-economy-and-how-it-worked/] is what I'm talking about, for clarity- its...
(Here)[https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/was-the-inca-empire-a-socialist-paradise-the-curious-case-of-the-inca-economy-and-how-it-worked/] is what I'm talking about, for clarity- its definitely not modern socialism, of course, but it featured no free market and depended on labor for the state in exchange for necessities.
I don't know why my link formatting isn't working, I planned to include it in my first comment but I'm annoyed it looks so janky.
If you know of a more succinct & accurate way to describe it, I'm happy to learn.
Try swapping the order of bracket types. To construct a link in Markdown, the format is most often square brackets followed by parentheses. [Text to Display](https://the.link.itself) To keep...
I don't know why my link formatting isn't working
Try swapping the order of bracket types. To construct a link in Markdown, the format is most often square brackets followed by parentheses.
[Text to Display](https://the.link.itself)
To keep source looking neat, you can also do a pair of square brackets, and then a third one below the text, like so:
When there is a lot of [Text to Display][1],
doing things like this helps the body
look nice and neat.
[1]: https://the.link.itself
This is not as uncommon as you might expect. We usually think about this time period as a kind of "civilization rush," but cases like this where societies apparently avoided hierarchical social arrangements (or even agriculture) are not at all isolated. I don't know of any so-called "egalitarian" societies with this sort of advanced hydrology, but there are many well-know cases of advanced engineering (and the exchange of that knowledge) in even forager societies---especially in the form of monuments, landmarks, etc. This is a pretty exciting discovery, and it makes me wonder if there have been any artifacts recovered that may reveal something about this community's ritual culture (which may suggest something about their values and how they chose to differentiate themselves from their hierarchical neighbors).
I am curious what you mean by that. I wonder how you see this fitting in (or not) with the supposed 5000 year timeline of Chinese civilization. There have obviously been a lot of diverse societies living in China for even longer than that, but the challenge is matching them up unambiguously to the semi-legendary "histories" written in ancient times. All East Asian countries have similar claims about their origins. It is kind of funny, because in Korea, our "official" origin story low-key suggests that our mythical founding father was slightly older than (and therefore a senior to) the mythical sage kings of China! :b
Just that the narrative is bullshit--this society was not hierarchical even though it was a thousand years into this supposed civilization where the State was always working to improve everyone's lives especially through hydrological engineering, yet this society existed apart from any hierarchy and still had superior hydrological engineering than its hierarchical neighbors. China has a lot of cool history so it's disappointing to see it be twisted to suit an authoritarian agenda.
Also I love that juxtaposition with the Korean myth; it reminds me of squabbling brothers.
I think I see what you mean, but I don't know that this site is necessarily relevant to the 5k year claim (it could be, but on the surface it doesn't seem to disprove anything). It is pretty well understood that there were very diverse societies inhabiting "China" at this time, and even the ancient histories mention them (a consistent theme is the civilization of "barbarians"). The 5k claim has to do with these ancient histories that talk about prehistoric civilizations whose identity have yet to be identified archaeologically.
Does the CCP actually claim that there has been a...continuous "state" stretching back 5000 years? If so, that is very clearly untrue, even without prehistoric evidence. I don't know the extent of the CCP's claims, but I have heard some bizarre things.
On a related note, there are some people here in Korea who believe in a continuous ethnic identity stretching back even farther than that. Once I attended a conference where some of these ideas were floated, and I was quite shocked to hear that some people believe indigenous Americans are ethnically Korean. This is all nonsense, but it demonstranes how strongly people feel about ethnic identity in this part of the world; which is no surprise that a supremely authoritative state would be interested in factually establishing the archaic origin of its society. It's definitely not the most interesting story to tell, as places like this dig site show!
Straight from the horse's mouthpiece:
http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2018-05/29/content_51528874.htm
Of course they don't suggest that there has been one government for all of modern-day China for over 5000 years, but they do claim it's been one continuous civilization with direct successors in the way that Charles is the king of the same entity as William the Conqueror.
From that article:
I was wondering what their obsession is with proving that there was some kind of continuous "state" (broadly construed), and it seems that they want to establish China as "senior" to mesopotamia. Being the oldest civilization would be tremendously validating for them. Other people in this thread have mentioned the book by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow which gives a pretty clear picture of why the quoted statement above is fallacious and also why the premise of this search is probably ill-founded.
I am also curious how the numerous papers published on this, which would presumably provide unequivocal evidence if they have in fact proven this, have flown under my radar :b I have some digging to do, I guess haha!
Did you mean to reply to @updawg?
I did! That is very strange, because when I started typing theirs was the only comment.
Sounds like this was basically a neolithic hippie commune? If all the other villages have evidence of a hierarchy, they would have very possibly been making a deliberate decision to not have such a hierarchy. As a non-historian, I would suspect there had been such a hierarchy for many millennia--if not millions of years--at that point, but I'm sure historians know in-depth what kind of hierarchies were in place in that location and era.
What's especially interesting to me about this is that CCP propaganda likes to push the myth that China has been united by "the State" through a continuous civilization over 5000 years, but this settlement could cast doubt on how far back that myth could have even been semi-accurate. Of course China has gone through many tumultuous changes through the millennia, just as every other part of the world has.
I'm currently in the middle of reading "The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
They argue very strongly (and with a ton of evidence) that the prevailing mainstream view that archeology goes from bands of hunter/gatherers to hierarchical permanent dwellings alongside agricultural technology is simply wrong.
(Not sure I buy into all of their arguments, some things are pushed pretty far, but the main gist is very interesting, which to no-one's wonder a lot of established archaeologists are less than happy about)
They argue that a lot of groups consciously avoided hierarchical structures over centuries and millennia.
To take just one example, the "mega-site" or "mega-settlement" Nebelivka in Ukraine had maybe 15.000 people living at the same time from somewhere around 5000 B.C.E to a millennium and a half later. No evidence of hierarchy.
It's extremely telling that historians generally don't even call this a city because that'd mean this whole hunter/gatherer --> agricultural city dichotomy is bunk (which it very clearly seems to be).
This is one of countless examples of these sorts of communities in different eras, geographies, organizations and with different results. In terms of all sorts of characteristics. Old societies were probably very different from each other.
And I'm only 300 pages into the book.
I'm not a historian and I haven't read that book, but that sounds similar to other pop-history books that are trying to sell copies by telling you that everything you've learned is wrong rather than by investigating the whole story--what you wrote especially reminds me of Guns, Germs, and Steel. And the "this is what historians don't want you to know!" part reminds me of "one weird trick that doctors don't want you to know!" I can't be certain in any way, but I smell bullshit.
Looking up reviews and posts on /r/AskHistorians, for example, it sounds like opinions are fairly mixed, but overall quite positive with the caveat that the Davids overstep and draw conclusions that just aren't really logically sound or necessarily valid based on the evidence we have. I am seeing that apparently the authors even admit to cherry picking to support anarchist/decentralized ideas, so I would not present what the books states as fact, but rather theory.
I'm also seeing that Graeber is the Bullshit Jobs guy, so I'm now even more skeptical of his conclusions.
I agree.
Yes, these two historians have all their skin in the game. But so do all the establishment historians who've built careers and personal scholarship on foundations that don't hold up to modern scrutiny.
So far I haven't encountered the supposed anarchist tendencies in the book. There'd have to be a pretty tremendous leap from "they organized themselves along different values than we do today, and in many different ways" to "in ancient times, folks were what we in modern times call Anarchists."
That screams of typical strawman argumentation in social sciences: pushing arguments further then their original proponents do, then bashing them down as too extreme.
(again, if the book goes off the deep end in the second half, this may well not be the case).
Established history is extremely teleological and presents an extremely neat narrative as though thousands of years of history were predetermined, unimportant. The retelling removes the agency from all the people who lived for these thousands of years since supposedly agriculture is a necessary stage of greater development that supplants hunter/gathering, and then that necessarily results in hierarchical societies where resource inequality becomes the norm.
That unreasonable narrative deserves push-back.
There's been a tremendous amount of archeological work the last decades; Why haven't historical narratives changed at all? Without all the subsequent evidence, how in the world could the historians of the second half of the 1800s get it all just right?
Well, you used the word "teleological," so I have to assume you know more about this than I do. From what I saw, I don't believe the book so much goes off the deep end as the authors just had a narrative and found evidence to support that narrative. I never read anything that said their facts were wrong. It was just their synthesis which may have been overzealous.
Also, I find it interesting that you would say you haven't encountered the anarchist tendencies when your first comment was about the communal nature and deliberate lack of hierarchy in many ancient societies...that's pretty much the definition of anarchism.
I don't necessarily thinks it's fair to knock them for having a narrative. Pretty much every piece of literature has a narrative/bias, even if the author doesn't realize it.
The countless books and articles supporting a hierarchical view of humanity certainly have a narrative as well, but they're accepted as fact.
I think the main point of The Dawn of Everything is to show that humans are inherently creative, and we've been experimenting with political organization since we became human, and maybe even before that. The two David's are trying to show how pre-history wasn't a linear progression towards nation states, but something much more interesting. That's what I took away from the book.
I wasn't knocking them for having a narrative; I was saying that they came up with the narrative before they did the research so they were fitting things to the narrative they had already built. To be clear, I have not read it. This is just what I got from some historians' reviews.
Anarchism seeks to abolish a state or to have a stateless society.
These societies have arranged themselves along different values, but still with what seem to be pretty strong societal norms and ways of enforcing those norms. That happens without hierarchical rulers.
Put slightly differently, anarchism is skeptical of coercion. These historical civilizations can have strong, coercive structures, without rulers or social hierarchy.
I have nothing to add here, but I just wanted to say thanks to both of these replies. Balanced, thoughtful, respectful and informative.
The topic is one where it’s likely we’ll never know for certain, and people are complicated. Maybe the social structure was entirely familial? Or clans banned together peacefully? Who knows. I just enjoyed this exchange and it reminded me to keep an eye out for that pop-trend where sales are generated by the simple controversy of going against the accepted academic knowledge base.
I'm reading this book:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
and I highly recommend it, but one of the points they make is that in the past, not everyone was in a tiny egalitarian tribes and then chiefdoms/monarchies when they discovered agriculture and long-term building. There was an entire spectrum of ways people organized themselves, many egalitarian even at scale. We imagine there was a cognitive progression in our ancestors that led to hierarchical structure and industrialization, but it turns out this was rather baseless, and as soon as we could process information like humans some tens of thousands of years ago, we were already pushing the boundaries of political organization instead of invariably forming tribes with hereditary leaders like many believe.
Put simply, you're right. They likely chose not to have a hierarchy, and that wasn't a rare thing.
I hope we continue to see archeological evidence of 'atypical' communities, like no hierarchy or matriarchal. I feel like we're just starting to understand how filtering discoveries through a colonizing, patriarchal, abrahamic lens has totally warped our sense of the past.
Since learning that the ancient Inca practiced a version of socialism and Pompeii had all the dick artwork hidden by prudes, I am more than a little salty about our collective human history being edited.
I'd be extremely careful using a modern term describing political ideology (like socialism) and applying it to a distant path.
Inca communities and tons of other civilizations organized ownership, society and ideology differently. That doesn't mean it was motivated or organized in relation to the means of production although some of the systems distributed power and ownership to larger groups or communities.
(Here)[https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/was-the-inca-empire-a-socialist-paradise-the-curious-case-of-the-inca-economy-and-how-it-worked/] is what I'm talking about, for clarity- its definitely not modern socialism, of course, but it featured no free market and depended on labor for the state in exchange for necessities.
I don't know why my link formatting isn't working, I planned to include it in my first comment but I'm annoyed it looks so janky.
If you know of a more succinct & accurate way to describe it, I'm happy to learn.
Try swapping the order of bracket types. To construct a link in Markdown, the format is most often square brackets followed by parentheses.
To keep source looking neat, you can also do a pair of square brackets, and then a third one below the text, like so:
Thank you!