Mass production
Specialisation
The growth of agricultural specialisation for the increasing mass markets of towns was gradual. In early modern Europe it existed alongside and overlaid the agricultural subsistence base. The preindustrial agricultural specialists concerned with the production of beef, mutton and lamb, kept a few acres for poultry and pigs to feed their own families and servants. To partake of the rewards from a mass market economy the emphasis changed; a major concern was now to produce a marketable commodity, and growing food for immediate and personal subsistence was only a minor concern. Land began to be used to achieve maximum output, more livestock and crops were tended by fewer people and in general productivy began to rise. The developed consumers' economy of constructive groups comprising symbiotic urban and rural sectors is closely dependent on the stability provided by organized political systems.
One of the distinctive features of producers' economies is that they are organized to effect a transfer of goods from one producer to another in unfinished form, as well as to govern transfers between producers and consumers. A firm now acquires goods, subjects them to partial preparation, and passes them on to other firms. Exchange enters into the regulation of the productive process itself, and there is a circulation not merely of finished goods, but of all the factors of production-land, labour, capital; and a single product is created in a number of different productive stages which take place successively in different locations, and are carried out by different firms. Production is serialized as well as specialized; and for each stage of production, the necessary materials and means are often assembled separately through exchange mechanisms.
The organization of production under a producers' economy differs from that under a consumers' economy. In the handicraft production associated with a consumers' economy, the technical basis of working organization is the complete product. Each enterprise commands all the tools, materials, and skills required to produce a given kind of article or a number of similar articles. Raw materials are turned, within the shop, into the final product. Leatherworkers in such enterprises may acquire raw hides which they clean, tan, dye, cut, fashion, and decorate to bring forth boots, garments, or saddles ready for use. They often sell them in the shop.
The factory enterprises of producers' economies are typically organized not to turn out a complete product ready for the consumer, but to perform only a part of the operations that produce it—the "job." A single factory may produce only the bolts that belong to a particular automobile assembly, or may only assemble pieces, already made elsewhere, into a toy. In many large enterprises, work is allocated among a number of different shops, each of which executes one or a few of the many operations that go to create the complex final product. An automobile factory, for instance, is a compound of many such shops, and in addition relies upon small independent plants to furnish certain of the parts it assembles.
Production is broken down into a series of many separate jobs, and the whole process is spread out among many agencies over some distance. Different equipment and facilities are assembled at various points; all are connected by transport lines; and each is served by its own labour force. Skillful organization of the movement of materials through the proper sequence replaces skilled handiwork as the crucial element in production. Workers are readily trained, moved, discharged, or hired, and men take and leave jobs with little concern; no social traditions exclude all but a few groups from employment at a particular job, as is true with the crafts system. Equipment is not made on the spot, but purchased from special enterprises which design and produce it according to need. In some countries, the processes used in production are restricted to whatever enterprise can acquire legal rights over them, but eventually they become common property. Equipment and processes frequently change, personnel turns over rapidly, and even the nature of the product is constantly developing.
Since exchange makes available to producers services and goods that are created by other producers expressly for their use, a supply of specialized means of production, inanimate energy, component parts, and materials becomes accessible to any enterprise, regardless of its size. The large aggregate demand for productive goods and services supports the growth of a large producers' goods industry and of public utilities. A relatively high proportion of the factories and other manufacturing plants is devoted to the production (more technically, the conversion) of energy to operate other plants, to the production of materials—like pig-iron, sulphuric acid, and lumber—that are basic to other industries, and to the building of production equipment—like machine tools and chemical plants. A relatively small number of the manufacturing plants in operation under a producers' economy actually turn out only finished consumers' goods.
The spatial order associated with factory production reflects the great diversity of agencies concerned not only in production, but in the service of other production, and recently also in the service of urban populations employed in these activities. In the fully commercialized producers' economy, the unparalleled volume of exchange upon which production rests, the intricate division of tasks in manufacture, and the variety of services, all require an altogether unprecedented development of artificial facilities.
Impact
The first impact of mechanisation was seen in agriculture when machines were invented to replace manual labour of hoeing, sowing and reaping. Eventually, the spread of mechanisation based upon the internal combustion engine resulted in the pneumatic tyre replacing the wooden wheel, and saddlers and blacksmiths have been replaced by the agricultural engineers based in modern premises with special equipment and tools.
Cooperation and interdependence between neighbouring farmers and craftsmen was an essential element in the tapestry of country life. The advent of corn binders did much to fragment the cohesion of close-knit rural communities, by dispensing with the need for co- operative activities by groups of neighbours at haymaking and shearing.
Movement of mass produced goods into the deep countryside from distant factories was facilitated by the transport revolution of the 19th century in the form of turnpike roads, canals, and more importantly railways, which came in mid-century are commonly used. Almost all of the operations of cultivation are performed by machines driven by motors or engines. The fields are like those of Western plough agriculture, and the crops the same, except that there is an increasing concentration on "industrial" crops like sugar beet, cotton, and oilseeds. Animals are raised for meat, milk, hides, and wool; and mechanical devices driven by inanimate power are often used in their care.
Automatic power machines are just beginning to be used in cultivation. They are employed on a limited scale in hydroponic systems to control the physical and chemical properties of a solution substituted for the soil. Automatic devices are also used to control atmospheres in greenhouses and laboratories. In these forms of cultivation there is neither garden nor field, but a tank or soil-bed. The plant is tended individually, at present, but perhaps this is only because this form of cultivation is still largely experimental and a luxury specialty. The crops grown are chosen for experimental purposes or for a high-priced market. Automatic cultivation is found in hundreds of laboratories and experimental greenhouses, in some military bases and pioneering stations in high latitudes, and in commercial hothouses that grow vegetables and flowers for market under glass.
The use of animals for traction is standard under agriculture proper. Where power agriculture has arisen, parallel developments have taken place in animal care, and modern dairy men, for example, in a highly industrialized country, tend to equip their farms with power-driven machines of many kinds. Except in true agriculture, however, the raising of animals is not closely integrated with cultivation. Large herds of animals were kept until very recent times by separate social, and even national, groups peripheral to the agricultural populations—wandering as pastoral nomads in lands unsuited to cultivation. The nomad always had some relationship with the agriculturist. Indeed, a great many pastoral groups were part-time farmers. The raising of animals remains a specialty in certain types of country under power agriculture, and the growing of crops in places becomes subservient to it.

Capital and nature
If we rank technical equipment and installations on a scale from simple implements through facilities, machines and power machines to automata, we may expect a commensurate increase at each step in the power of man in nature. The more advanced his technical means, the more a single individual can do to his surroundings; the wider his effect can extend itself in space; the deeper into the earth, and the higher into the heavens his power will reach. The powers of society also grow, in fact at a rate greater than the individual's; individuals working together in a systematic way produce a greatly magnified effect.
When humans possess implements only, they can hardly scratch the surface of the ground. If they are cultivators, however, they may actually modify their surroundings to favour food production. People having only implements are pitted little more than evenly against the beasts of the wild. Missiles are as important to them as are implements in the hunt; they avoid dangerous close contact with large predators, and can only reach more timid and less wary prey. Fire is their greatest ally, but they can scarcely control it. Having no facilities or machines, such folk cannot even produce very efficient tools, since they can only utilize materials which are already at hand, easily worked, and which already possess the appropriate physical qualities for tools. Men can do little clearing of the forests with rude stone axes, even when they are abetted by wild-running fires. Generally, where men still have only simple equipment, the forest still stands. Wild game can be driven with fire but probably cannot be exterminated with simple weapons, unless it is already on the wane through other causes. The exploitation of mineral materials is confined to carrying off what can be picked up from the surface or scraped out from shallow depth. Stones suitable for projectile points and the like, salt, pigments, and bright pebbles and shells are available.
When facilities are constructed men can store foodstuffs. They can accumulate large amounts of seeds, roots and other products, and seeds may sprout or some shoots may grow from these accumulations in the vicinity of dwellings or refuse heaps. Men drive game into prepared snares, corrals, and pits, sometimes using fire. They may line springs, enlarge pools and may build or dig aqueducts. Living sites are constructed having house platforms, palisades, squares and streets, refuse heaps, and so on, though these facilities remain fairly primitive in many cases. An even larger variety of facilities comes to be associated with cultivation.
Mine shafts can be sunk into the earth, and the subsurface is opened to exploitation. Certain peoples who do not practice cultivation but who can build facilities at this technical level produce many ingenious fishing and hunting devices. The folk who build elaborate facilities, whether cultivators or not, are capable of serious depletion of game and fish supplies; of intensive modification of living sites and their immediate surroundings; and of some use of subsoil minerals. They can sometimes effect great changes in native vegetations.
Peoples with machines are capable of proportionately greater effects, and correspondingly larger benefits therefrom. Not only the direct impact of their machines, but their widened needs for materials and their improved means of communication play a telling part in changing the environment. Some hunting peoples, as well as cultivators, use machines, and they have been very effective predators, able to feed themselves in a specialized way from selected herds of ungulates or from particular sea mammals. It was machine-using folk, too, who cleared the great woodlands of middle latitudes, which could not be breached with simple implements. As long as the power to drive machines must be furnished by animals or humans, however, the machine proper has probably not been an instrument of wholesale destruction of vegetation or mineral deposits. Machines used in cultivation do expose poorly protected soils to washing and gullying, and they do allow men to modify greatly the soil surface. The use of machines in hunting also greatly increases man's predatory pressure on animal life.
The capabilities conferred on man by power machines are prominently registered in nature. There is such a large literature of alarm on this topic that detailed comment is superfluous here. Man can dig miles deep into the earth, plunge to the depths of the sea, soar far into the heavens and aspire to reach the planets. With power machines men can chop mountains to pieces for ore, move hills, force rivers to run backwards, crack the atomic nucleus with a flash and a mushroom cloud, and attempt to create living matter in the laboratory. Nature is at the mercy of man, and man acts blindly at his own peril. Great risks and great rewards await him.
The role of the automaton is still to be revealed. It may act mightily for destruction, sucking up insatiably the wealth of nature, or it may make possible a calculated adjustment to the natural conditions impinging on man's life and work, which will reduce the hazard and the folly of uncontrolled exploitation of nature. Automatic calculators are already being used to inform mankind of the prudent course, and the automatic machines may someday manufacture goods (and services) in ways so much more efficient, economical, and sparing of natural resources that man's stewardship of earth may greatly improve as his power grows. The issue probably depends more upon the ways in which societies and economies are organized than upon material technique itself.
Although the consequences of man's technical activity for the conditions of his life in nature are the subject of our discussion, only a sketch of the impact of techniques upon environment has been possible here. We need to know how capital is fitted into man's environment and managed by his societies before we can tell more of its effects.
Urbanisation
The degree of technological development and therefore the level of artificiality of the human environment is at its highest in communities where immense urban settlement have taken root. These urban populations are supported by a continual supply of goods moving in a multitude of ways from an ever-expanding array of resource sites. The relative concentration of human beings in settlements is in fact a good index to artificiality. Another good indicator is the volume of natural resources used per unit area of settlement and the variety of goods and services locally on offer. Yet another is the relative dependence of individuals upon highly specialised productive roles of fellow citizens, and the fragmentation of their social relations into many small, discrete, and unconnected networks.
The environment through which the nomad gatherers make their rounds remains, although its vegetation may be altered radically, almost as vast and empty as nature made it. In farming country, the cultivated fields and gardens display the handiwork of man, but the environments that they provide for crops remain ruled more by nature than by man. The city and the road are altogether artificial features, though, and commercial urban people live and work within environments that they impose on nature.
The wanderers live "off the land," garnering a livelihood from wild plants and animals; and farmers live "on the land," feeding themselves from their crops and livestock; but urban specialists live under highly artificial circumstances, lack the means of producing crops for themselves, and thus rely on rural populations to supply their food in exchange for other goods and services. We have observed that specialized commercial production of the kind associated with cities is possible only when, in addition to the food-producing symbiosis, there is a further symbiosis of exchange within the society that allows some of its members to engage in pursuits other than cultivation.
Large differences in artificial spatial arrangements are related to differences in economic forms. In subsistence societies, which have no appreciable exchange, all the various stages of production are carried out by the members of one very small household group in a small area. The complex of artificial features associated with production is "telescoped," and its component elements are little differentiated. Resource sites are few; routes of circulation are short and hardly improved; manufacture is carried on around the dwelling, and specialized services are few in number. Many parallel systems of production exist with little reciprocal effect, and the complexity and size of any one of them are limited by the small numbers of workers and the slight degree of specialization of the household group.
Societies in which much exchange is practiced display a different character. There, routes of transport link the many sites of resource exploitation, manufacture, and service; and along these routes are specialized installations for various kinds of commercial production. The artificial complex serves a large area, and tends to be connected with other like complexes. The productive system commands the labour and highly specialized skills of a large number of workers. The uses made of particular places, the equipment and installations devoted to particular tasks, and the working roles of individuals are all well differentiated and specialized.
A system organized around only the single symbiosis of and urban food supply develops a multitude of unconnected, parallel economic units, each with its own complex of artificial productive features. The double symbiosis involving exchange in addition creates a single economic unit of wide scope, having one large and more or less unitary complex of highly specialized productive installations. The particular nature of this complex depends upon the degree of commercialization attained, i.e., the extent to which various commodities are subject to exchange between urban and rural markets.