Throughout pre-fossil fuel history, at least 95% of people primarily worked to produce food.But I began wondering if that's true. I checked my own library and the Web, and it looks like the number has been more like 75% in Europe, China, and other parts of the world that had cities (in other words, the places where most of humanity resided), since about 2000 BCE. The great historian Fernand Braudel points out that in Europe, roughly 25% of the people lived in towns of more than 2000 people by 1500. There were lots of smaller towns where a significant percentage did not farm, too, so I suspect that the worldwide average has been 75% for many centuries. 3 out of 4 makes a very different society from 19 out of 20. A lot of people weren't farmers.
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