Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

Grain, because it has higher value per unit volume and weight than almost any other foodstuff, and because it stores comparatively well, was an ideal tax and subsistence crop. It could be left unhusked until it was needed. It was ideal for distributing to laborers and slaves, for requiring as tribute, for provisioning soldiers and garrisons, for relieving a food shortage or famine, or for feeding a city while resisting a siege. It is hard to imagine the early state without grain as a basis for its sinew and muscle.

Where grain, and therefore agrarian taxes, stopped, there too did the state’s power begin to degrade. The power of the early Chinese states was confined to the arable drainage basins of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. Beyond this ecological and political heartland of fixed-field and irrigated rice farming lay the hard-to-tax, mobile pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and shifting cultivators.

The territory of the Roman Empire, for all its imperial ambitions, did not extend much beyond the grain line.

The grain states were restricted to a narrow ecological niche that favored intensive agriculture. Beyond their horizon were a variety of what might be called nonappropriable subsistence practices, the most important of which were hunting and gathering, maritime fishing and collecting, horticulture, shifting cultivation, and specialized pastoralism.

Looked at from the perspective of a state tax collector, such forms of subsistence were fiscally sterile; they could not repay the cost of controlling them. Hunters and gatherers and maritime foragers were so dispersed and mobile, and their “takings” so diverse and perishable, that tracking them, let alone taxing them, was well-nigh impossible.

The Ottoman Empire, founded by pastoralists, found it exceptionally difficult to tax herders. They tried taxing them at the one moment of the year when they stopped to attend to lambing and shearing, but even this was logistically difficult.

To Romans, for example, a key defining characteristic of barbarians was that they ate dairy products and meat and not, as Romans did, grain. To the Mesopotamians, the “barbarian” Amorites were beyond the pale because they purportedly “know not grain . . . eat uncooked meat and do not bury their dead.”

And, as if to further confirm the association, when such a city-state collapsed and its walls were permanently breached, permanent cultivation was also likely to disappear from the area.

Grasping the fact that the state saw its land and subjects through record keeping, the peasantry implicitly assumed that blinding the state might end their woes. As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector.”

powerful case for linking state administration and writing is that it seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature, mythology, praise hymns, kings lists and genealogies, chronicles, and religious texts.33 The magnificent Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dates from Ur’s Third Dynasty (circa 2,100 BCE), a full millennium after cuneiform had been first used for state and commercial purposes.

The Qin, rather like Ur III, was a systematizing, order-obsessed regime that laid out a rather comprehensive vision of the total mobilization of its resources. On paper, at least, it was even more ambitious. Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.

cadastral

literacy shrinks greatly if it does not disappear altogether. This should not be surprising inasmuch as in the earliest states, scriptural literacy was confined to a very thin veneer of the population, most of whom were officials. From roughly 1,200 to 800 BCE, Greek city-states disintegrated in an era known as the Dark Age.

that writing was elsewhere resisted because of its indelible association with the state and taxes, just as ploughing was long resisted because of its indelible association with drudgery.

. . . In every instance the periphery initially rejected the adoption of complexity even after direct exposure to it . . . and, in doing so, avoided the cage of the state for another half millennium.

THE excess of epigraphs above is meant to signal the degree to which concern over the acquisition and control of population was at the very center of early statecraft.

The state remained as focused on the number and productivity of its “domesticated” subjects as a shepherd might husband his flock or a farmer tend his crops.

The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.

The reducciones or concentrated settlements (often forced) of native peoples around a center from which Spanish power radiated were seen as part of a civilizing project, but they also served the nontrivial purpose of serving and feeding the conquistadores. Christian mission stations—of whatever denomination—among dispersed populations begin in the same fashion, assembling a productive population around the station, from which conversion efforts radiated.

The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A. V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.

The important point for our purpose is that a peasantry—assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs—will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce

Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor, as we shall see, but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier.

Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working class of the right to be independent cultivators”—foragers, hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, pastoralists.

Short of stemming the flow, most archaic states sought to replace their losses by various means, including wars to capture slaves, purchases of slaves from slave takers, and forced resettlement of whole communities near the grain core.

Warfare in the Mesopotamian alluvium beginning in the late Uruk Period (3,500–3,100 BCE) and for the next two millennia was likewise not about the conquest of territory but rather about the assembling of populations at the state’s grain core.

Slavery was not invented by the state. Various forms of enslavement, individual and communal, were widely practiced among nonstate peoples. For pre-Columbian Latin America, Fernando Santos-Granaros has abundantly documented the many forms of communal servitude practiced, many of which persisted along with colonial

As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.

Southeast Asia all early states were slave states and slaving states; the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in insular Southeast Asia were, until the late nineteenth century, slaves. Old people among the so-called aboriginal people (orang asli) of the Malay Peninsula and hill peoples in northern Thailand can recall their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about much-dreaded slave raids.

Other evidence about slaves and prisoners of war indicates that they were not well treated. Many are shown in neck fetters or being physically subdued.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of brutal treatment is the general conclusion by scholars that the servile population did not reproduce itself. In lists of prisoners, it is striking how many are listed as dead—whether from the forced march back or from overwork and malnutrition is not clear.22 Why valuable manpower would be so carelessly destroyed is, I believe, less likely to be owing to a cultural contempt for war captives than to the fact that new prisoners of war were plentiful and relatively easy to acquire.

What we know of the brief Qin Dynasty and the early Han following it reinforce the impression that the earliest states are population machines seeking to maximize their manpower base by all possible means.29 Slavery was just one of those means. The Qin lived up fully to its reputation as an early effort at total and systematic rule. It had markets for slaves in the same way as it had markets for horses and cattle. In areas outside dynastic control, bandits seized whomever they could and sold them at slave markets or ransomed them.

the forced resettlement of the entire population—

The domesticated flock of sheep has many ewes and few rams, as that maximizes its reproductive potential. In the same sense, women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.

It would be no exaggeration at all to think of such work as an early gulag, featuring gang labor and high rates of mortality. Two aspects of this sector of slave labor deserve emphasis. First, mining, quarrying, and felling timber were absolutely central to the military and monumental needs of the state elites.

A sure sign of the manpower obsession of the early states, whether in the Fertile Crescent, Greece, or Southeast Asia, is how rarely their chronicles boast of having taken territory. One looks in vain for anything resembling the twentieth-century German call for lebensraum. Instead, the triumphal account of a successful campaign, after

Max Weber’s concept of “booty capitalism” seems applicable to a great many such wars, whether conducted against competing states or against nonstate peoples on its periphery. “Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit.

In Athens in the fifth century BCE, for example, there was a substantial class, more than 10 percent of the population, of metics, usually translated as “resident aliens.” They were free to live and trade in Athens and had the obligations of citizenship (taxes and conscription, for example) without its privileges. Among them were a substantial number of ex-slaves.

Finally, there are two forms of communal bondage that were widely practiced in many early states and that bear more than a family resemblance to slavery but are unlikely to appear in the textual record as what we think of as slavery. The first of these might be called mass deportation coupled with communal forced settlement. Our best descriptions of the practice come from the neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BCE), where it was employed on a massive scale.

States, we know, did not invent slavery and human bondage; they could be found in innumerable prestate societies. What states surely did invent, however, are large-scale societies based systematically on coerced, captive human labor.

What if we were, as a fruitful conjecture, to take seriously Aristotle’s claim that a slave is a tool for work and, as such, to be considered as a domestic animal as an ox might be?

and the like as state projects to domesticate a class of human servitors—by force—much as our Neolithic ancestors had domesticated sheep and cattle?

In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor.

in the light of the epidemiological challenges of early state centers, the importance of slave women’s reproduction to the demographic stability and growth of the state. The domestication of nonslave women in the early grain state may also be seen in the same light. A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general.

HE more one reads about the earliest states, the greater one’s astonishment at the feats of statecraft and improvisation that brought them into being in the first place. Their vulnerability and fragility were so manifest that it is their rare appearance and even rarer persistence that requires explanation.

The image conjured by early state building is that of the four- or five-tiered human pyramid attempted by schoolchildren. It usually collapses before it is completed. When, against the odds, it is built to the apex, the audience holds its breath as it sways and trembles, anticipating its inevitable collapse. If the tumblers are lucky, the last one, representing its peak, has a fleeting moment to pose in triumph for the spectators. To

Sedentism was, as we have noted earlier, not a once-and-for-all achievement. Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine), archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.

At the very least it means the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental court center. This is usually interpreted not merely as a redistribution of population but as a substantial, not to say catastrophic, loss of social complexity. If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages.

do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.

One of their key insights has been to see much that passes as collapse as, rather, a disassembly of larger but more fragile political units into their smaller and often more stable components. While “collapse” represents a reduction in social complexity, it is these smaller nuclei of power—a compact small settlement on the alluvium, for example—that are likely to persist far longer than the brief miracles of statecraft that lash them together into a substantial kingdom or empire.

From roughly 1,800 until 700 BCE—more than a millennium—settlements in Mesopotamia covered less than a quarter of their previous area, and urban settlements were only one-sixteenth as frequent as during the previous millennium.