Weegy: Although some hunting societies produced occasional surpluses, it was with the shift from hunting to agriculture that people were able to provide a sufficient surplus for seed grain, food to cover the winter period, [ as well the cultivation of more enduring crops such as cotton and linen, and animal husbandry and wool,.
These surpluses were also used to trade. Trading changed the nature of the material surplus into its more abstract form of 'wealth'. The signficance of land , as the basis of wealth production, in agricultural societies also encouraged the most powerful to invent the concept of; ownership' and to claim that ownership of the land and its products for themselves. In turn this further enabled the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. Thus the material surplus became associated with the rise of a non labouring class.
This was a common, although often separate, pattern of development in many different geographical areas around the world.
This account is that of the Conflict Theorists in Sociology who associate the development of surplus value with the social relationships of exploitation, oppression and ideological control ]
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