In the pre-industrial societies, the economy was far from being based on providing information and services. The economy was largely based on two things, agriculture and trade.
The agriculture was the basis and the dominant sector in the pre-industrial economy. The more agricultural products a nation had, the more it had to trade, thus becoming wealthy. This can easily be seen in the colonies that the European countries had in the pre-industrial period, where every inch of the land that was suitable for agriculture was used, and latter those products were shipped and traded in order to become wealthier.
