---
product_id: 18345629
title: "Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World"
brand: "patricia crone"
price: "$55.36"
currency: USD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/18345629-pre-industrial-societies-anatomy-of-the-pre-modern-world
store_origin: US
region: United States of America
---

# Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

**Brand:** patricia crone
**Price:** $55.36
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- **What is this?** Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World by patricia crone
- **How much does it cost?** $55.36 with free shipping
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Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    An Amazing Work, A little Revised
  

*by R***Y on Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2019*

The 2015 (3rd) edition has a few small changes and additions.  It also cleans up the boatload of typos introduced in the 2003 (2nd) edition, which another reviewer complained about.  [The funniest was where “city states” became “city’s tastes” (p. 167 2/e).  More serious was a duplicated line and dropped line on page 191 2/e.  The second full paragraph should begin, “His power in heaven is mostly left unchallenged (though Marxists”.]  There were a number of substantive changes from the first edition to the second, but well over 95% of the 2015 text is the same as the 1989 text.Yes, I read the first and second editions, and skimmed the third.  The book is worth rereading.Crone was a powerful intellectual personality and this is a personal summing up (no footnotes!) of how the pre-industrial world worked, how it differs from the world we are accustomed to. By “pre-industrial” she means before industry but after hunting-gathering.  People have settled down and are growing most of their food.  The book is information dense, some times witty, a little sarcastic.  Ranging across the globe, it is an amazing piece of work.The first six chapters are about the pre-industrial world.  Crone bases much of her analysis on the economic/technological constraints of pre-industrial life.  Scarcity is at the base of everything.The seventh is more generally about religion.  Crone’s explanation is along the lines of functionalist sociology.  Religion provides justification for the way society is set up.  It also provides “oughts”–what is right and wrong.  People cannot live without believing in good and bad; it gives their life meaning.  More modern treatments would also point to humans’ “theory of mind”: the surety that other people have minds just like we do, with consciousness, desires, frustrations, etc.  Much religious feeling involves extending a theory of mind to supernatural entities or to non-human objects in this world.Speaking of which, near the end, I was annoyed by passages like, “Human societies aim at stability; all hope to find the social and political organization best suited ...” (p, 200 3/e)  Societies are not conscious entities that aim or hope.  Such “reification” misleads more than it illuminates.Back in the 1980s, the sea that most intellectuals swam in was still some version of Rousseau and Freud: humans are built to be free of social ties, and now that we live in societies, we are forced to frustrate our true desires.  Yet it is now clear that we evolved in social groups and are indeed “built” for some version thereof.  (Crone does pull away from the tradition a bit, offering that humans’ genetic “instructions ... clearly make them gregarious”.  She sums up, “In so far as human societies have a ‘base’, it is constituted by the interaction between natural environment, genetic equipment and symbolic culture” (p. 166 3/e), though she doesn’t inquire what that genetic equipment is.)In the last two chapters, she attempts to bring things up to date.  Her thesis:  Everywhere in the world but Europe, pre-industrial societies had developed which would bend but not break.  Economy, government, culture, and religion fit together with a dynamic stability.  China is her great example.  Increasing population, higher agricultural productivity, a substantial amount of manufacturing, even the great Malthusian famines of the 1850s only rattled the foundations of the system.  But early industry broke Europe’s system.Crone believed that outside Europe industrialization is impossible unless “the authorities ... assume dictatorial powers” to break the system themselves.  (p. 213 3/e)  We now have three more decades of experience which suggest that the reality is, um, more complex.I was somewhat disappointed by this part.  For one thing, there is a too narrow logic of modernity:  In a modern society, she says, nothing is beyond questioning.  Researchers must be able to investigate anything they want.  There must be no ascriptive status.  Race and sex, among other things, must not matter.  The twenty first century isn’t starting out that way (and some of her additions seem to indicate the beginning of a rethinking).For another thing, it seemed more about why Europe COULD industrialize than why it DID (and, of course, until WW I, a good deal of Europe wasn’t industrialized).  Since 1989, there has been a tremendous amount of work on why there was an industrial revolution.  Jack Goldstone’s Why Europe? was his answer in 2007.  Diedre McCloskey’s 2016 Bourgeois Equality is a long argument that widespread prosperity was impossible until it became honorable to engage in (honest) manufacturing and trade.  Ian Morris’ 2011 Why the West Rules–For Now is an attempt to tie together the last 6,000 years or so.  Recent research even suggests that the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage helped by reducing “tribalism”.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A good quick survey of pre-modern societies, and the origins of modernity
  

*by O***0 on Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2017*

A good review of pre-industrial societies (especially emphasizing how they ALL differed from modern societies, even as they had their own great variety). Somewhat elementary and sometimes TOO elementary (the thought experiments about the evolution of politics and religion for example could be improved). About politics and states for example the Fukuyama book (The origins of political order) is far more detailed and deeply thought out. But this is a good quick read and she clearly has deeper knowledge that is simplified and "dumbed down" for this particular presentation.The last two chapters (discussing why Europe was different and whether all societies were headed for this specific modernity, only at different rates..she thinks not) are very interesting and were the ones I found most enlightening and thought provoking.Well worth a read.

### ⭐ 







  
  
    Great book, terrible edition
  

*by A***R on Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2018*

This is an extraordinary book, drawing on the author's vast erudition to provide a dramatic and highly readable explanation of the differences between and modern pre-industrial societies.  First published in 1989, it was re-issued in 2003 by Oneworld Publications, which unfortunately chose to reset the type, introducing innumerable errors.  The new edition has at least one typo per page, rendering Crone's text incomprehensible or at least hard to fathom.  It is definitely worth seeking out the original 1989 edition.

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*Last updated: 2026-03-18*