In the fifteenth century the world was still fairly empty. Even at the end of the century its total population was less than 500 million. It is estimated that about ten per cent of the globe's land surface at the time was directly used by humans. The total amount of land used as cropland at the time is estimated at about one per cent of the globe's land surface. Living space for wildlife was still abundant. At the end of our period the world's population had doubled. More people meant more exploitation of resources and thus more pressure on land and wildlife. To give just one very telling figure: the area of cropland in the world increased from 180 million hectares in 1400 to 540 million hectares in 1850, almost all of it in regions with centralised states. But intensification of exploitation took place not just in the relatively densely populated regions of the world that are central to our atlas. It also occurred in the many new ‘frontier’ regions that were created in those four and a half centuries. A description of material life during this era would certainly be incomplete if it did not pay ample attention to such major changes in existing resource-portfolios.

What matters most in societies where agriculture plays a fundamental role in the economy is how much of the total extent of land is or can be used for agriculture. Figuring that out obviously means measuring arable. In North-western Europe, however, in addition to arable, a very substantial percentage of land was used as pasture and meadow. Such land, to which one may add parts of the extensive waste lands, in the context of Western European agriculture was also productive and should be considered as part of what we will call ‘agricultural land’. To the extent that such land was used for feeding animals, which played a fundamental role in Western agriculture, but also as a very important, separate source of income, it had hardly any equivalent in East Asia. In that sense at least, in China and Japan arable and agricultural land were almost identical. In those countries pastures and meadows occupied only a fraction of the land.