A most interesting and informative post. I had no idea about what you say in your 1st paragraph, but it does seem to make sense. Any reference / link ?
Wikipedia says, without any numbers, "Until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of the human population labored in agriculture. Pre-industrial agriculture was typically subsistence agriculture in which farmers raised most of their crops for their own consumption instead of for trade. A remarkable shift in agricultural practices has occurred over the past century in response to new technologies, and the development of world markets."
Subsistence agriculture, by definition, requires most of the population to grow food,
because they're growing their own food with (at most) a tiny surplus to sell or trade.
Further down, the article gives us a sense of proportion: "In 2007, one third of the world's workers were employed in agriculture. The services sector has overtaken agriculture as the economic sector employing the most people worldwide. Despite the size of its workforce, agricultural production accounts for less than five percent of the gross world product (an aggregate of all gross domestic products)."
Agriculture has been industrialized. Other economic sectors have surpassed it in the value it produces. Yet it still employs 33% of the population. I'll keep looking for historical statistics, but my assertion is hardly remarkable, that before the Industrial Revolution
almost everybody had to grow food to keep the population alive.
In the Middle Ages you would have been a yeoman: an ostensibly free person but one who owed 2/3 of your output to the Lord of the Manor: "One for my Master, one for my Dame, and one for the little girl who lives down the lane." -- What's changed ? Now it's one for the mortgagee / landlord, one for the state, etc.
You're right. The nursery rhyme "Baa Baa Black Sheep" has probably been revised several times since the era of yeomanry, keeping abreast of evolving economics but hanging onto medieval social structure. In those days the farmers certainly did not get to keep one-third of their production as disposable income. Even the Lord of the Manor didn't have that large a profit margin! Sorry I didn't catch that.
However, the song is about a man who owns an extremely rare black sheep, long before modern dyes made fabrics in every color and combination possible. That was exceptional, so perhaps he was allowed to keep a larger portion of the profits from that one sheep. Otherwise he'd have no incentive to devote any of his time and labor to an attempt to establish a bloodline of black sheep. As a dog breeder I can imagine how hard that would be.
