How Do I Use My Peasants for Really Big Projects?
Imagine a pre-industrial civilization with a major construction project, something on the scale of the Suez Canal or the Palace of Versailles. What percentage of the population could actually work on the 'crash' project, considering that someone has to supply the workers and that moving those supplies to a central location will be a large task by itself? And how long would guys with shovels need to dig a canal or to raise an embankment dam on the scale of the Hoover Dam?
I'm assuming an absolute monarch (think Louis XIV) with enough firepower to handle peasant revolts, but soldiers cannot fight famine or inflation . . .
This is a far less theoretical question that it might seem. Massive, resource-consuming projects are among the great wonders of the ancient world. Just think of the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids. The emperor of China and the Egyptian pharaoh were monarchs to make Louis XIV look like a bit of a softie. Likewise, the Romans managed considerable large works in relatively short periods of time. Hadrian's Wall is the best known, but they also constructed two other walls across northern England and much longer, if much smaller and simpler, defensive structures along parts of their eastern European borders. So how did they manage it?
Labor
As a practical matter, a large proportion of the population had to be involved in the day-to-day work of survival. Just what proportion of society that is varies wildly with technology and local environmental conditions, but before the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, at least three people out of four were busy raising crops, and that number could go above nineteen out of every twenty (pre-state societies probably had even more people involved full-time in subsistence, but seeing as they don't, by definition, have rulers capable of directing such labor, we'll ignore them). At first glance, it would seem that those people simply can't be moved off of their regular work and put onto something else for any significant length of time. If they are, people begin to starve. On the other hand, even peasants did have some down-time, and there was clearly enough spare labor kicking around in ancient societies to build palaces, lay out roads, dig canals, and so on. Indeed, looking at more mundane tasks, many harvests required more than 100% of available labor (something like 110% for two to three weeks), so all of that work had to come from somewhere, if only from working punishingly long hours.
So, then, just how much flexibility is there among the unwashed masses? This varies between societies, of course, but not all of that peasant time is spent on pure subsistence activities. The peasants are feeding the whole of society, which is a task which can't be rescheduled well, but they're also supporting their masters at a far higher standard of living than their own, which is where there's room to maneuver. In extreme cases, a third of a peasant's productive labor might go towards supporting a landlord, local aristocrat, or government, though it was probably far less in most societies.
With a strong enough central government, a sizable chunk of that labor might be spent on big public works projects. There's lots of precedent for taxes paid in labor, so to some extent it's easily convertible. The Romans required some people to help maintain walls, roads, and other bits of civil engineering as part of discharging their tax burden, and Europe's feudal and manorial systems were, at least initially, more about service and labor rather than goods and monetary taxes. Indeed, it might be easier for peasants to dig holes or carry heavy loads than to pay other kinds of taxes. They already have strong backs, and this way they don't have to worry about whether or not grain prices will be sufficient to turn their agricultural produce into the required number of silver pennies or the chickens they're keeping to take up to the lord of the manor will be eaten by foxes.
The downside is that whatever gets spent on the big project doesn't get spent on making statues of the current ruler, paying off his gambling debts, feeding his dozens of pure white chargers, and procuring him milk-and-honey baths and fresh virgins every week. Again, there's vast variability here. Just how much of the productivity of the lower classes is drawn off by the Powers That Be and hence about what they'd be able to redirect to any given purpose, and how much they'd be able to divert to purposes other than maintaining the bare minimum of government functions (a bureaucracy, courts, armies, etc.) can be very different from society to society. As nearly pure speculation, we'll put the ceiling at about a quarter of the government's income, though it's probably rather less in most cases. In many societies, large-scale projects, such as fielding large armies for extended wars, were financed by debt rather than cutting back expenses.
Finally, there's the question of where things are going to happen in relation to the workers in question. Obviously, having to move large numbers of workers and the goods and supplies they'll need is expensive. Very expensive, as it happens. Going straight overland, the cost of supplying a settlement, including a temporary workers' camp, becomes prohibitive after 80 to 100 miles. River transport, which is available in most locations, effectively cuts transportation distances by three to five times, and ocean transport by a similar factor above that. (Though stated in terms of a particular game system, "Building the Low-Tech Landscape Part 2: Overlords and Cities"" provides some idea of the magnitude of transport costs.)
All of this leaves us with a rough formula:
Total labor × Tax rate × Discretionary proportion × Transportation premium
For example, given a kingdom of a million people, 15 percent of whose labor is taken in some for as taxes, 20 percent of which can be redirected to discretionary spending, for work which is to be done effectively at home (for example, a series of local watchtowers or commemorative temples), in the course of a single year, you're looking at 30,000 man-years.
Timing
We should also consider when all of this is going to happen. In most regions, most people are solidly booked two to three months in the spring and again in the fall in order to harvest the previous season's crops and plant for the next. Plowing and planting could conceivably be compressed a bit but no more than a few percentage points, while harvesting usually can't be compressed at all, which means that spring and fall are, in most cases, a bad time for mass mobilizations.
In some societies, peasants do have a lot of down-time, which might, at first glance, appear suitable for co-option for large projects. The winter months in northern Europe were a time of enforced inactivity. Nothing was growing and the ground was often frozen, so there was a lot of tool maintenance, storytelling, and wishing that there was a bit more in the larder. So that's two to three months out of the year when there's some free labor kicking around, right? Certainly, it's when many early Medieval feudal warlords got their fighting in. Not only did they not have to be overseeing their lands, the harder ground was better for armies to travel on.
But is it a good time of year to for the peasants to be out digging canals and building massive palaces for you? Probably not, if you're in a temperate zone. The problem with digging projects is that the very conditions which make it easy to fight make it difficult to excavate: frozen ground is hard, and it's even worse if you're using low-tech tools. It's not a great time for construction, either. Limestone mortar sets badly in frigid conditions. Historically, construction on the Gothic cathedrals stopped during winter for that very reason. Large patches of exposed mortar were insulated with straw and dung to protect them from extreme temperature changes, and everybody went about their regular lives until the next spring.
Warmer climates don't have that problem, of course. The ground around, say, Cairo or Baghdad would never be frozen, opening up both summer and winter as working seasons, though some kinds of labor might be more difficult if monsoon rains are expected. Moreover, that doesn't make Egyptian or Mesopotamian winters pure free time for a ruler to exploit. The warmer climate means better working conditions all around, which means that people there are often doing just as much work as their distant northern cousins are in the summer.
Regardless of the specifics of the schedule, though, the implication is that there is a schedule. Labor is likely to be patchy, with large surges in the summer and winter. During planting and harvest times, a great deal of labor will have to be let go as enough people are sent back to their fields in order to keep everyone fed.
Applications
So assuming that a great deal of labor can be freed up for a grand project, what is the great leader going to do with all those workers? To extrapolate how long it would take a bunch of guys with primitive earth-moving equipment to carry out a massive civil engineering project, we'll look to some of the big projects of antiquity. Because we don't have much in the way of records, we must fall back on vague estimates. It has been speculated that the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza consumed something on the order of 300,000 man-years of labor over the course of 20 years of construction (that's actually towards the low end of modern estimates; other estimates go as far as two to three times higher, and historical estimates were higher still). It was originally a bit over 146 meters tall and 231 meters on each side, though it's smaller these days since the polished limestone siding has long since been looted. It comes in at about 2.6 million cubic meters of solid stone construction, or 8 2/3 cubic meters per man year, though less generous estimates would drop it down to about 4 cubic meters per man year.
The Great Wall of China (there were several; we'll use the Ming Dynasty one here) may have used 2,000,000 man-years, spread out over something like two centuries. The Great Wall stretches over a bit more than 6700 kilometers. For much of its length, it is made of a stone or brick facing with a rubble core. The height and width vary somewhat, but we'll assume a uniform 5 meters in either dimension, for at total of 167.5 million cubic meters of largely earthen construction, giving us 83.75 cubic meters of construction per man-year.
Of course, these numbers are not directly comparable. First, we're dealing with two very different levels of technology: Bronze Age Egyptians vs. the Ming Dynasty, whose technology was comparable to that of Europe's Renaissance. The Chinese had superior furnaces to bake brick, efficient cranes to lift loads, and technologies the Egyptians hadn't even imagined yet, such as water-driven mills to help cut and polish stone and tools made of iron and steel. The Egyptians, for their part, would have been lucky to have had metal shovels.
Second, the materials involved and where they had to go are very different. The Egyptians had to cut stone to exacting specifications. Early Egyptologists expressed astonishment that relatively primitive people could do such fine work. Investigation of the stonework of other civilizations has indicated that there's nothing particularly remarkable about really fine stonework, but all that polishing is very labor-intensive. Then they had to send it several miles up-river to the construction site. Although some stone and brick was involved in the Great Wall (well under 10% of the wall is masonry), the Chinese for the most part simply had to shovel nearby dirt and gravel.
Third, the Chinese built across, going over a great many miles but not building much farther up than a two story building. The Egyptians built up. They had to shove everything they had to considerable heights and increasing labor considerably as they went. Even with pulley cranes (which they didn't have), that would have been a considerable effort, and since the Egyptians had to rely on elaborate systems of ramps spiraling around the Pyramid as it was being built (which would have taken considerable effort to build as well) and fight ground friction every step of the way, it was even harder.
Fourth, not all man-years are necessarily created equal. Legend holds that countless peasants pressed into building the Great Wall were worked to death. Conversely, the consensus of opinion these days is that the people who built the Pyramid did so more-or-less voluntarily, either as paid laborers or in lieu of paying conventional taxes and tribute. The Chinese figure may in some way indicate what you can achieve if you don't really care how much damage your work force sustains in the process.
That's for construction. Another thing mass mobilizations are good for is digging holes. On a good day, using typical low-tech tools, a laborer can dig out about a cubic meter of very loose dirt. That rate can drop considerably for hard and damp soil and plummet when confronted with rock, particularly for very low-tech civilizations without decent boring technology. It also decreases, though not as fast, for holes more than a meter deep. Because the soil must be lifted higher, it takes about three days to dig a hole two meters deep, six for three meters, and so on. Constructing a simple ditch-and-earthen-wall palisade, such as the Romans constructed along the Danube, can be done very quickly. A thousand men could put up a kilometer of shallow ditch backed by a low wall in a day. Digging canals is slower and takes more careful specialized labor where the new canal meets existing water courses, but can still go fairly quickly.
When it comes to, say, a Versailles, the amount of labor you can mobilize is much less important than the skilled labor you've got to hand and your connection to trade networks. A gallery of mirrors, elaborately painted ceilings, and polished doorknobs at every turn require lots of highly trained professionals, a lot of gold on hand (which your peasants are unlikely to generate for you in short order), or both. But if what you want are big piles of stone or holes in the ground, you can get a lot done.
Send The Marines
It's worth remembering that imperial governments already have a large body of coordinated labor available to them: standing armies. They rarely comprise more than 1% of the available work force, and often much less, but they're already being paid for. The Roman legions, for example, are responsible for a number of major works, including most border fortifications and a great many roads. A ruler is unlikely to spend that labor on vanity projects, such as his own Versailles, but given the importance of water transport, he may very well put them to work on a Suez-like canal.
Counting Calories
One other possible consideration, illustrated by the down-time northern peasants had during the winter, is required additional consumption. Built into that picture of enforced inactivity is the quiet assumption that, since they're less active, they're also consuming less. If they're dragged out of their comfy homes to build roads or palaces, they'll need more food than they're assumed to be consuming in order to do it. Some researchers have suggested that typical peasants, who have periods of inactivity actually consume about 20% less calories than someone who would be active year-round, so mobilizing large bodies of labor makes that body of labor, ipso facto, more expensive.
--Matt Riggsby
