During the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and property owning, not everyone could, of course, actually own a farm so many people were labourers who worked on farms and later, as farming developed, in trades and small businesses that serviced the needs of farms.
Intermarriage between families who owned big farms ensured that property ownership was kept within a relatively small group, or what we would now call a class, of people. From competition arose bigger farms and therefore more status, more greed and more materialistic ways of looking at the world.
Other things that are important in farming are, of course, learning how to store food after harvesting, and then transporting food to people who will buy it.
With owning property came the need for and the rise of technology and the status of technologists i.e. people who could use knowledge to figure things out and fix things, as well as turning vegetables, grain, animals etc. into food that we can eat.
Of course such people were of some importance, but not as important as the land-owners, so they were a different class. There were also people who owned a lot less land, or who were tenants and paid rent to the big landowners. They were also a different class.
And class of course was (and, I suppose, still is) very important in the colonisation by highly technological countries of less technological countries and societies.
The lowest of the lower classes in the colonising countries usually had more authority than the upper classes of the colonised – though sometimes the upper classes of the coloniser gave the upper classes of the colonised a kind of pretend status to initially win over the population before they exploited them.
Just as an aside, on the subject of domination, is it not fascinating that within the colonising areas of the world that developed together, there are loads of examples of internal colonisation/domination by one country/people/ethnic group over another?
For example, in Europe, the Irish, Scots and Welsh were colonised by the English, as were the Armenians by the Turks, the Catalans and Basques by the Spaniards. (There were a lot of other examples in Europe).
I cannot speak for other colonised peoples, but we were always told that the English were able to dominate us because they had coal, iron ore, (and therefore steel) so they became industrialised whereas all we had was bogs and spuds and sean-nós singing!
But I’m not that sure.
Perhaps the English/Turkish/Spanish ruling classes had a much greater desire to dominate than the Irish/Armenian/Catalonian ruling classes. (And others – I’m just picking three as examples). And people who were colonised may have been less left brain and logical, than the ruling elite of the coloniser. [1]
(I don’t know this; it’s just that the coal, iron, steel, industrial development reason on its own seems a bit too convenient).
And talking about left and right brain – I intuit that while a high level of sophistication in left-brain development is necessary for technologically advanced societies where there are distinct classes divided into upper, middle, lower etc., a high level of right-brain sophistication is needed for classless, hunter-gatherer, or tribal societies where there is a lot of sharing of resources and self-organisation. [2].
More about this in Section Five, Practical Applications, particularly when I explore compassion and spirituality in the Chapter on Organisational Matters.
[1]. I have often wondered at the phenomenon (up to the modern day) of wealthy parents in former colonised countries sending their children to prestigious schools and universities in the countries of the former coloniser. Is this because the parents feel that they will learn the skills of left-brain domination – which they associate with their former colonial masters?
[2]. I remember reading once that most ancient Irish symbolism and imagery is based on the circle, whereas that of the English tends towards the square. Perhaps there is a link to right-brain – left-brain differences here. I can’t speak for other colonised countries though it might be an interesting study for someone!