First, the traditional society. A traditional society is one whose structure is developed within
limited production functions, based on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-
Newtonian attitudes towards the physical world. Newton is here used as a symbol for that
watershed in history when men came widely to believe that the external world was subject to a
few knowable laws, and was systematically capable of productive manipulation.
The conception of the traditional society is, however, in no sense static; and it would not exclude
increases in output. Acreage could be expanded; some ad hoc technical innovations, often highly
productive innovations, could be introduced in trade, industry and agriculture; productivity could
rise with, for example, the improvement of irrigation works or the discovery and diffusion of a
new crop. But the central fact about the traditional society was that a ceiling existed on the level of
attainable output per head. This ceiling resulted from the fact that the potentialities which flow
from modern science and technology were either not available or not regularly and systematically
applied.
Both in the longer past and in recent times the story of traditional societies was thus a story of
endless change. The area and volume of trade within them and between them fluctuated, for
example, with the degree of political and social turbulence, the efficiency of central rule, the
upkeep of the roads. Population--and, within limits, the level of life--rose and fell not only with
the sequence of the harvests, but with the incidence of war and of plague. Varying degrees of
manufacture developed; but, as in agriculture, the level of productivity was limited by the
inaccessibility of modern science, its applications, and its frame of mind.
Generally speaking, these societies, because of the limitation on productivity, had to devote a very
high proportion of their resources to agriculture; and flowing from the agricultural system there
was an hierarchical social structure, with relatively narrow scope--but some scope--for vertical
mobility. Family and clan connexions played a large role in social organization. The value system
of these societies was generally geared to what might be called a long-run fatalism; that is, the
assumption that the range of possibilities open to one's grandchildren would be just about what it
had been for one's grandparents. But this long-run fatalism by no means excluded the short-run