Origin of Property and the Formation of the Village Community

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The historian investigating primitive forms of economic life is usually obliged to be content with documents which give only a very incomplete idea of the economic structure of past centuries. Written by men who knew nothing of the problems which interest us to-day, and preserved only in fragments, they can never present a clear picture of what economic life has been in the past. Consequently it has been necessary to attempt to supplement these defective documentary sources by others which might throw some light upon the problems. More and more attention has been drawn to the study of peoples who are to-day living in stages which we have left behind.