Historians are still grappling with questions of identity as these applied to pre-industrial societies.
By rephrasing the problem of deforestation more exactly as a lack of timber of a particular quality, it becomes possible to reflect on pre-industrial society's multiple uses for wood.
While some paint an idyllic picture of pre-industrial or early industrial society, the reality for the masses of working people was anything but idyllic.
Much of Africa and the Middle East remains locked in pre-industrial agricultural societies with weak institutions and authoritarian rulers.
This point was probably reached much sooner in pre-industrial communal societies with shorter life spans than our own, where children are regarded as dependent well into their teenage years.
For the pre-industrial period and the industrial revolution, records of either the number of hours worked per day or days per year are scarce and scattered.
Those who believe that modern societies are almost every bit as religious as pre-industrial ones show a similarly broad range of religious positions.
If militarism for Spencer and Hintze was a manifestation of pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies, for Marxists all pre-socialist systems were basically militaristic.
In classical Marxist thought slavery is a mode of production that characterizes primitive communities, feudalism, and pre-industrial agrarian societies.
Yet information war theory posits that even a pre-industrial or agrarian society does have vulnerabilities.
Central to its ideology was a nostalgic idealization of pre-industrial society.
In pre-industrial society, women were valued - and valued themselves - for their irreplaceable contributions to the functioning of the home.
In pre-industrial Britain, printed wallpaper was unavailable to most households, so colour and pattern effects were created through painted floors, ceilings and furniture and stencilled walls.
The supply of food, at a reasonable price, was crucial to social and political order in all pre-industrial societies.
In 1868 Japan was a pre-industrial society; less than 40 years later it was a world power.