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All three foci of high culture depended on the condition of agriculture. The basis of temple and court was agrarian in that their wealth and power presupposed chiefly arrangements concerning agricultural production. The market depended on agriculture less directly than did temple or court, for the traders brought goods from afar subject to other hazards than that of the local weather, and (provided there were sufficient stored savings) sold their goods in lean years as in fat. Yet, in the long run, the merchants too depended on the state of agriculture and their profits presupposed the peasants' surplus. Even when, as in Syria, mercantile city-states arose which depended primarily on distant trading by sea and land, their trade depended so intimately on the agrarian societies about them that both morally and materially they too lived ultimately from the peasants. Even the pastoralists, including the desert nomads, who depended on the agriculturists for much of their food and goods, were part of the same social complex. Accordingly, the type of social order which was introduced into the agricultural regions (and the areas dependent on them) with the rise of cities may be called agrarian-based or (to be more comprehensive) agrarianate citied society. (I say 'citied', not 'urban', because the society included the peasants, who were not urban though their life reflected the presence of cities.)

We shall use the phrases 'agrarianate' society or culture to refer not just to the agrarian sector and the agrarian institutions immediately based on it, but to the whole level of cultural complexity in which agrarian relations were characteristically crucial, which prevailed in citied societies between the first advent of citied life and the technicalizing transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term 'agrarianate', in contrast to 'agrarian', then, will refer not only to the agrarian society itself but to all the forms of society even indirectly dependent on it —including that of mercantile cities and of pastoral tribesmen. The crucial point was that the society had reached a level of complexity associated with urban dominance —in this sense, it was 'urbanized'— but the urban dominance was itself based, directly or indirectly, primarily on agrarian resources which were developed on the level of manual power: based on them not in the sense that all must eat but that (since most production was agricultural) the income of crucial classes was derived from their relation to the land.