Rachel Laudan

In my earlier post I suggested that traditionally farming was men’s work and post-harvest processing women’s work. That may be the general pattern.  There are lots of exceptions though. Women do a whole lot of farming, including the staples in many societies.  Men do a lot of post-harvest processing, threshing of grains, for example.  In [...]

Heike Vibrans asks a number of good questions about my earlier post on the human energy required to grind maize the traditional Mexican way before the appearance of mills beginning in the 1920s  but still not in remote villages in the 1990s. Five hours sound too much. You don’t need an almost an hour to [...]

Note. If you’ve been to this page before, I’ve now (pm 5 december) edited the figures. Many thanks Larry.   I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels. In passing, he gives these figures for the [...]