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Very happy to have been invited to contribute to the second issue of @WorksInProgMag. Most of my adult life I've been interested in what counts as progress in different walks of life and in how to make that assessment.
2/ Yet in the historical fields that are my specialty, concerns about progress have come to be seen as unsophisticated and unfashionable. So personal thanks to @salonium, @ns_whit, @bswud, @s8mb and the authors they have recruited for tackling progress head on.
3/ It might seem that my subject--the grinding of cereal grains--is some musty corner of ancient history of interest only to specialists. I want to argue just the opposite.
4/ Foods made from grains have been the primary fuel that has kept most of humanity, the human machine if you will, going for at least the last five thousand years, and an important fuel for as much as fifteen thousand before that.
5/ Improvements in complex, laborious and unglamorous business of turning raw grains into bread, pasta, beer, and so on have thus been central to human history.
6/ But what counts as progress? Improvements in labor productivity freed up women in particular.
7/ But if women could not find equally economically-important work, difficult in scattered rural societies of the past, they lost status as men took over more complex milling operations. In the twentieth century, the tradeoffs became more appealing to women.
8/ Moreover small changes in milling could bring about big changes in health and health. Hand milled corn and rice was preferred to machine milled and could prevent deficiency diseases such as beri beri and pellagra.
9/ Using water to power mills (the major alternative to humans for about 2000 years) was subject to competing food-related demands (irrigation water and river transport) and largely limited to streams that flowed fast all year.
All these factors played into decisions about what method of milling was best in particular circumstances. Teasing the consequences out is key to economic history and contemporary development efforts. Nuff said.
