Peak Horse
The First Disruption started around 10,000 BC as Homo sapiens, likely somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, began building a world of agriculture, settlement and surplus. Rather than relying on the power of their own bodies, humans started to draw on domesticated animals, while increasingly complex forms of society permitted slavery, hierarchy and the emergence of early energy technologies. Beneath this promethean change, however, the critical disruptor was our new mastery over biological life, this arising from recent knowledge about how to breed for specific traits and reprogramme elements of the natural environment. In its own way, this was a revolution in information, although we wouldn’t know its underlying mechanisms until the mid-nineteenth century.
After the First Disruption physical work was increasingly performed by novel configurations of human labour, animals and the elements, and by the twelfth century the sight of the water and windmill was increasingly common across much of Europe. This was a world where motive force was overwhelmingly organic: oxen in the field, horses to travel, human motion for the spinning wheel, even a special breed of canine – the Turnspit dog – would turn meat while it roasted.
In a world absent of concentrated forms of energy, or significant mechanical power, change was slow, with political tumult or economic downturn often spelling technological reverse. Most Europeans would not drink water as clean as that found in Ancient Rome until the twentieth century, with no city achieving its scale and prominence until London in the early 1800s.
That was the case until the emergence of the Second Disruption, which presented itself not only as a new paradigm in labour and production, but also energy. Now fossil fuels – plentiful, powerful and reliable – would replace the brawn of human and beast, in a matter of decades transforming the world. Like any great transition, such change had its own victims and they extended far beyond the Turnspit dog. Furthermore, the line between crisis and opportunity was not always clear, and as features of the new world scraped against the certainties of the old, it was easy to confuse progress for decay.
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