Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The state and early civilizations were often seen as attractive magnets, drawing people in by virtue of their luxury, culture, and opportunities. In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding.

Permanent settlement, agriculture, and pastoralism, appearing about 12,000 years ago,

circa 10,000 BCE were a puny two million to four million worldwide,

If, then, we locate the era of definitive state hegemony as beginning about 1600 CE, the state can be said to dominate only the last two-tenths of one percent of our species’ political life.

Greece’s four-century-long “Dark Age,” when literacy was apparently lost, is nearly a blank page compared with the vast literature on the plays and philosophy of the Classical Age. This is entirely understandable if the purpose of a history is to examine the cultural achievements that we revere, but it overlooks the brittleness and fragility of state forms.

late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps.

My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentrations of human subjects.

If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dig up the tubers one by one, and then it has a cartload of little value and great weight if transported.

The obstacle in this case is that most legumes are indeterminate crops that can be picked as long as they grow; they do not have a determinate harvest, something the tax man requires.

One is reminded in this context of Owen Lattimore’s admonition that the great walls of China were built as much to keep Chinese taxpayers in as to keep the barbarians out.

Variable as it is over time and hard as it is to quantify, bondage appears to have been a condition of the ancient state’s survival. Early states surely did not invent the institution of slavery, but they did codify and organize it as a state project.

China’s Qin Dynasty, famous for its many innovations of strong governance, lasted a mere fifteen years. The agro-ecology favorable to state making is relatively stationary, while the states that occasionally appear in these locations blink on and off like erratic traffic lights.

WHAT fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in South Africa.1 At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it.

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According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.

liking. Evolutionary biologists term such activity, combining location, repositioning of resources, and physical safety, niche construction: think “beaver.”

Neanderthal colonization of northern Europe is a case in point; it would have been inconceivable without fire for warmth, hunting, and cooking.

other animals in as little as twenty thousand years following a dramatic shift in diet and ecological niche.

increased as much as seven degrees Celsius within a single decade.

Not in dispute, however, is that between 8,000 and 6,000 BCE, all the so-called “founder crops”—the cereals and legumes: lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax (for cloth)—are being planted, though generally on a modest scale.

As we shall see, the earliest large fixed settlements sprang up in wetlands, not arid settings; they relied overwhelmingly on wetland resources, not grain, for their subsistence; and they had no need of irrigation in the generally understood sense of the term.

The waters of the Persian Gulf, under those earlier conditions, lapped at the door of ancient Ur, now quite far inland, and tidal salt water extended northward as far as Nasiriya and Amara.

Even if the search for a decisive moment in the domestication of the earliest grains is a pointless endeavor, there is no doubt at all that by 5,000 BCE there were hundreds of villages in the Fertile Crescent cultivating fully domesticated grains as their main staple.

the “backs-to-the-wall” theory of plough agriculture associated with the great Danish economist Ester Boserup.

If, as noted earlier, they were practicing flood-retreat agriculture, then the central premise of the Boserupian argument of cultivation requiring great toil may well be invalid. Finally, there appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the disappearance of either game animals or forage. The backs-to-the-wall theory of agriculture is in tatters (at least for the Middle East), but it has not been replaced by a satisfactory alternative explanation for the spread of cultivation.

At the top of the heap were the so-called commensals: sparrows, mice, rats, crows, and (quasi-invited) dogs, pigs, and cats for which this new Ark was a veritable feedlot. Each of these commensals in turn brought along its own train of microparasites—fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites—as well as their predators; the dogs and cats were there in large part for the mice, rats, and sparrows. Not a single critter emerged from its sojourn at the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp unaffected.

The now famous Russian experiment in the taming of silver foxes is a striking example. By selecting the least aggressive (most tame) from among 130 silver foxes and breeding them to one another repeatedly, the experimenters produced, in only ten generations, 18 percent of progeny that exhibited extremely tame behavior—whining, wagging their tails, and responding favorably to petting and handling as a domestic dog might.

After twenty generations of such breeding, the percentage of extremely tame foxes nearly doubled to 35 percent.11 The behavioral transformation was accompanied by physical changes such as lop ears, piebaldness, and a raised tail that some see as linked genetically to the decrease in adrenaline production.

But if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, one could argue that it is we who have been domesticated. Michael Pollan sees it this way in his sudden and memorable aperçu while gardening.20 As he is weeding and hoeing around his thriving potato plants, it dawns on him that he has, unwittingly, become the slave of the potato. Here he is, on his hands and knees, day after day, weeding, fertilizing, untangling, protecting, and in general reshaping the immediate environment to the utopian expectations of his potato plants. Looked at from this angle, who is doing whose bidding becomes almost a problem in metaphysics. If our domesticated plants cannot thrive without our help, it is equally true that our survival as a species has likewise become dependent on a handful of domesticated cultivars.

I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, “What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.”

The world’s population in 10,000 BCE, according to one careful estimate, was roughly 4 million. A full five thousand years later, in 5,000 BCE, it had risen only to 5 million. This hardly represents a population explosion, despite the civilizational achievements of the Neolithic revolution: sedentism and agriculture. Over the subsequent five thousand years, by contrast, world population would grow twentyfold, to more than 100 million. The five thousand–year Neolithic transition was thus something of a demographic bottleneck, reflecting a nearly static level of reproduction.

epidemiologically, this was perhaps the most lethal period in human history.

There are nonetheless good reasons for supposing that a great many of the sudden collapses of the earliest centers of population were due to devastating epidemic diseases.

Time and again there is evidence of a sudden and otherwise unexplained abandonment of previously well-populated sites.

periods. The Epic of Gilgamesh provides perhaps the most powerful evidence when its hero claims that his fame will outlive death as he depicts a scene of bodies felled, probably by pestilence, floating down the Euphrates. Mesopotamians, it seems, lived in the ever-threatening shadow of fatal epidemics.

They understood that long-distance travelers, traders, and soldiers were likely carriers of disease.

There is little doubt in my mind that a good many of the earlier and unchronicled abandonments of populous areas were due more to disease than to politics.

By the same token, of course, this means that none of these diseases could have existed before the populations of the Neolithic.

pathogens. The groups crossing the Bering Strait in several waves around 13,000 BCE came before most such diseases had arisen and, in any case, in groups far too small to sustain any of the crowding diseases.

The generation of new species-jumping zoonoses grew as populations of man and beasts swelled and contact over longer distances became more frequent. It continues today. Little wonder, then, that southeast China, specifically Guangdong, probably the largest, most crowded, and historically deepest concentration of Homo sapiens, pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, and wild animal markets in the world, has been a major world petri dish for the incubation of new strains of bird and swine flu.

Most of the added vulnerability to novel infections seems due to a relatively high and narrow carbohydrate diet without much in the way of wild foods and meat. It was likely to lack some essential vitamins and to be protein poor. Even the meat of the domesticates on which they might occasionally feast contained far fewer vital fatty acids than wild game.

The short answer, I believe, is sedentism itself. Despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-à-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out that sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction—enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.

For example, if one computes doubling times for different rates of reproduction, it turns out that an annual rate of 0.014 percent doubles population in five thousand years while a rate of 0.028 percent, still minuscule, doubles population in half that time (twenty-five hundred years), and, of course, doubles again to a total four times as great after five thousand years. Given enough time, the small reproductive advantage of farmers was overwhelming.

These earliest towns are, Jennifer Pournelle reminds us, “better imagined as islands embedded in a marshy plain, situated on the borders and in the heart of vast deltaic marshlands.”

By such standards there is no doubt that that the “state” of Uruk is firmly in place by 3,200 BCE. Nissen calls the period from 3,200 to 2,800 BCE the “era of high civilization” in the Near East, during which “Babylonia was, without doubt, the region that produced the most complex economic, political and social orders.”6 Not incidentally, the iconic founding act of establishing a Sumerian polity was the building of a city wall. A wall at Uruk was, in fact, built between 3,300 and 3,000 BCE, when Gilgamesh was thought by some to have reigned.

One convincing explanation for how this cultivating population might have been assembled as state subjects is climate change. Nissen shows that the period from at least 3,500 to 2,500 BCE was marked by a steep decline in sea level and a decline in the water volume in the Euphrates. Increasing aridity meant that the rivers shrank back to their main channels and the population increasingly huddled around the remaining watercourses, while soil salinization of water-deprived areas sharply reduced the amount of arable land.

Most of these goods had to move by water rather than overland. I am tempted to say, “no water transport, no state”—only a slight exaggeration.

cart. Illustrating the contrast is the striking fact that as late as 1800 (before the steamship or railroad) it was about as fast to go from Southampton, England, to the Cape of Good Hope by ship as it was to go by stagecoach from London to Edinburgh.

growing on a large scale.21 Why, however, should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record?

The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”