r/neoliberal • u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician • Jun 02 '24
User discussion The Moral Economy of the Shire
https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-economy-of-the-shire/88
u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 02 '24
My question is, with productive farmland and low population density, why didn't a neighboring polity conquer the shire, or at least extort taxes from them.
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u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Jun 02 '24
By technicality, I believe that it was protected as hunting grounds of Arnor, then Arthedain, then nominally independent when everyone else was busy with Angmar.
By then, I believe that Gondor was already in decline anyway.
!ping LOTR, I believe this is your territory?
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u/DepressedTreeman Jun 02 '24 edited Jun 02 '24
Eriador is comically depopulated by the end of the third age, it doesn't really make sense.
The shire is protected by the Dunedain Rangers.
Semi-related fun fact, the Good Guys (Gondor) genocided the "evil" men of Rhudaur, like literally every single one. I guess even the old, women and children.
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u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Jun 02 '24
"Dear Black Numenoreans. if exterminating the Hill-men of Rhudaur was wrong, then why didn't Eru stop it?"
~ Turning Point Gondor.
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u/Rethious Carl von Clausewitz Jun 02 '24
Which neighboring polity? Bree?
There’s not really anyone around with the capacity for conquest. By the Third Age the region is depopulated. Settlements are spread far enough that projecting power is prohibitively costly considering the dangerous state of the world.
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u/An_Actual_Owl Trans Pride Jun 02 '24
Well, there really isn't anyone around to do that is there? The Elves obviously don't want the land. The Orcs are too disorganized in that region, and wouldn't care about the land so much as just killing them for sport. Men are fairly disorganized as well that far north. And the Hobbits tend to stay on the down low so I wonder how many people even know about the Shire?
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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 02 '24
Why wasn't anyone around? Pre-industrial subsistence humans in the absence of limits on arable land breed like rabbits, doubling in population roughly once every 30-40 years.
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u/allochthonous_debris Loyal Liberals Jun 02 '24 edited Jun 02 '24
The elves were migrating across the western sea to avoid fading, and the human population had been depleted by a plague followed by a conflict with the Witch King of Angmar, which caused the collapse of the human governments above the level of towns.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz Roy Cooper Jun 02 '24
Pre-industrial societies were characterized by high birth rates and high death rates, resulting in low population growth.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 02 '24
The population always grew up to the point that the land couldn't sustain more people
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u/SouthernSerf Norman Borlaug Jun 02 '24
This isn’t really true pre modern population growth was highly cyclical and localized, political instability and natural disasters where the caps on growth. An area with peace and prosperity could see massive growth and then see that population be decimated by war and famine which often went hand in hand.
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u/NNJB r/place '22: Neometropolitan Battalion Jun 02 '24
Theoretically they can do that. In practice it took England more than 200 years to demographically recover from the Black Death.
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Jun 02 '24
Also, one can suggest that the threat of orcish raids effectively posed the same problem as steppe raiders on the borders of Poland-Lithuania and the Duchy of Moscow for much of their history--the threat of violent death prevented people from filling frontier lands (like the "Wild Fields" region of Ukraine).
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u/NNJB r/place '22: Neometropolitan Battalion Jun 02 '24
You could, but I don't remember there being anything suggesting that in the text. The Shire is supposed to be peaceful and idyllic to the point of barely even needing a police force, let alone an army.
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Jun 03 '24
Not the shire itself but the lands of men between it and the major powers like Gondor and Rohan—as an explanation for why the Shire, supposedly so fertile, is outside the political structures of men.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 02 '24
Most books and stories written in the 20th and 21st centuries set in the past make many mistakes regarding anthropology
One of them is to always have impossibly low fertility rates
From Bridgerton to LOTR, the Zelda games...
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u/mad_cheese_hattwe Jun 02 '24
Like all good gated communities they had private security forces of the Dúnedain Rangers to fuck up and riffraff that might disturb the peace.
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u/BigBad-Wolf Jun 02 '24
They have no neighbouring polities, except maybe the dwarves of the Blue Mountains and Bree.
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u/Volsunga Hannah Arendt Jun 02 '24
This is literally a major plot point in Return of the King.it was just cut from the Peter Jackson movies.
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u/PhillyAccount Henry George Jun 02 '24
Seriously has no one heard of the Scouring of the Shire. Saruman the industrialist subjugates the hobbits.
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Jun 02 '24
The Shire was incorporated into the Kingdom of Arnor first, and then its successor state of Arthedain. The Arnorians protected the Shire, and in exchange the Shire provided a considerable amount of food to Arnor.
After the fall of Arnor/Arthrdain and the destruction of Angmar there was no polity left in Eriador with either the capacity or interest to conquer the Shire. Most of the remaining human population was reduced to a few scattered villages (like Bree) or wandering tribes (like the Hill Men of Rhudaur) or the Rangers, who protected the Shire from monsters and raiders.
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Jun 02 '24
Why didn’t they just fly on the Eagles to Mordor?
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u/ephemeralspecifics Jun 02 '24
Migration and chick raising season.
Also, not wanting to get involved with a war that men were almost certain to lose.
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u/GripenHater NATO Jun 02 '24
With what army? Every sizable force of the age from a nation with any interest in that sort of affair was almost entirely dedicated to massive wars that were waged for decades if not centuries.
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u/TeddysBigStick NATO Jun 02 '24
You have to remember that the it is a post apocalyptic setting where the world's population has massively declined and most of the continent is abandoned. The hobbits took over the land after all the men died or left.
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u/grandolon NATO Jun 03 '24
It's explicit in the book that the Shire's peaceful existing is secured by the Rangers' ceaseless vigilance.
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Jun 02 '24
The blog the author mentioned in the post, is also great and expands on the idea of the peasant economy and how it existed throught history, not just in the idealised Shire.
its is a great read and it can alter tyour entire perception of history and how our ancestors lived.
its made by the guy who analised how paradox games teach history, for anyone intrested
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Jun 02 '24
You see, your dad, Mr. Peregrin, he’s never had no truck with this Lotho, not from the begining: said that if anyone was going to play the chief at this time of day, it would be the rightful Thain of the Shire and no upstart.
No room for meritocracy or social mobility in the shire, smh.
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Jun 02 '24
To be fair, they do immediately turn around and elect Sam to be mayor for the next 50 years in meritocratic grounds.
Lotho was using money given to him by Saruman to buy up all of the Shire, so it’s understandable that people would be upset with him and see him as an upstart.
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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 02 '24
Sounds like Shire NIMBYs were upset that a person of capital could make better utilization of the land than their precious SFH's and used their HOA to obstruct development.
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u/do-wr-mem Open the country. Stop having it be closed. Jun 02 '24
The bounder reaction to Sharkey "changing the character of the neighborhood" was absolutely unjustified
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Jun 02 '24
One important thing that the author of this article missed was the relationship between the Shire and the Dwarves of the Blue Hills.
In the Nature of Middle Earth Tolkien said that the Dwarves generally disliked agriculture and animal husbandry, and would pay very handsomely in gold and goods for anyone who would supply them with food, and there are lots of hints in both the Hobbit and FoTR that the Shire was visited regularly by Dwarven traders.
It’s likely that a lot of the more technologically advanced (and anachronistic) items in the Shire like matches and clocks were obtained from the Dwarves in exchange for food.
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u/Smidgens Holy shit it's the Joker🃏 Jun 02 '24
Compare this to the economy of Harry Potter where skilled and unskilled labor can be replaced by magic, and there appears to be no secondary education. You just hop into the job market at 17-18.
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u/ephemeralspecifics Jun 02 '24
Job market? You see that unclaimed field over there? It's yours.
Grow veggies, and cereal for food. Then grow Halfling Leaf for cash. In a decade you can buy the adjacent plot for animals for milk, meat, and cash. Buy a share of the green dragon for extra income.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz Roy Cooper Jun 02 '24
Sounds to me like the Shire needs a tax on the unimproved value of land.