Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago. Until then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting-and-gathering bands.

that the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.

there is massive evidence of determined resistance by mobile peoples everywhere to permanent settlement, even under relatively favorable circumstances. Pastoralists and hunting-and-gathering populations have fought against permanent settlement, associating it, often correctly, with disease and state control.

We owe our relatively large brain and relatively small gut (compared with other mammals, including primates), it is claimed, to the external predigestive help that cooking provides.

Diseases with which we are now familiar—measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other community acquired infections—appeared for the first time in the early states. It seems almost certain that a great many of the earliest states collapsed as a result of epidemics analogous to the Antonine plague and the plague of Justinian in the first millennium CE or the Black Death of the fourteenth century in Europe. Then there was another plague: the state plague of taxes in the form of grain, labor, and conscription over and above onerous agricultural work. How, in such circumstances, did the early state manage to assemble, hold, and augment its subject population? Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery.

If we were evaluating crops from the perspective of the premodern “tax man,” the major grains (above all, irrigated rice) would be among the most preferred, and roots and tubers among the least preferred.

Contrary to some earlier assumptions, the state did not invent irrigation as a way of concentrating population, let alone crop domestication; both were the achievements of prestate peoples.

The early state strives to create a legible, measured, and fairly uniform landscape of taxable grain crops and to hold on this land a large population available for corvée labor, conscription, and, of course, grain production. For dozens of reasons, ecological, epidemiological, and political, the state often fails to achieve this aim, but this is, as it were, the steady glint in its eye.

That is, “stateness,” in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgment of more or less. A polity with a king, specialized administrative staff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, and tax collection and distribution is certainly a “state” in the strong sense of the term. Such states come into existence in the last centuries of the fourth millennium BCE and seem to be well attested at the latest by the strong Ur III territorial polity in southern Mesopotamia around 2,100.

While fixed settlements and domesticated grains can be found earlier elsewhere (for example, in Jericho, the Levant, and the “hilly flanks” east of the alluvium), they did not give rise to states. Mesopotamian state forms, in turn, influenced subsequent state-making practices in Egypt, in northern Mesopotamia, and even in the Indus Valley. For this reason, and aided by surviving clay cuneiform tablets and the prodigious scholarship on the area, I concentrate on Mesopotamian states.

If the formation of the earliest states were shown to be largely a coercive enterprise, the vision of the state, one dear to the heart of such social-contract theorists as Hobbes and Locke, as a magnet of civil peace, social order, and freedom from fear, drawing people in by its charisma, would have to be reexamined.

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.

Fire largely accounts for our reproductive success as the world’s most successful “invasive.”7 Much like certain trees, plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding. If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. Even overlooking entirely the fire-dependent crafts that developed later—potter, blacksmith, baker, brick maker, glassmaker, metalworker, gold- and silversmith, brewer, charcoal maker, food smoker, plaster maker—it is no exaggeration to say that we are utterly dependent on fire. It has in a real sense domesticated us. One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight.8

sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little or no cereal cultivation. What is also absolutely clear is that domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears—far longer than previously imagined. On the basis of the latest evidence, the gap between these two key domestications and the first agrarian economies based on them is now reckoned to stretch for 4,000 years.10 Clearly our ancestors did not rush headlong into the Neolithic revolution or into the arms of the earliest states.

Those who crafted the older narrative were radically mistaken in yet another respect. Taking as their point of departure the exceptionally arid conditions that have prevailed in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in recent history, they reasonably enough projected this aridity back to the dawn of agriculture. Confined in limited oases and river valleys, a growing population was assumed to have been obliged to intensify its subsistence practices in order to extract more from limited arable land. The only viable intensification strategy was irrigation, for which there was archaeological evidence. Irrigation alone could guarantee the abundant harvests where rainfall was so woefully inadequate. In turn, such a huge project of landscape modification required the mobilization of labor to dig and maintain the canals, which implied the existence of a public authority capable of assembling and disciplining that labor force. Irrigation works made for a dense agro-pastoral economy that, they assumed, fostered state formation as a condition of its existence.

WETLANDS AND SEDENTISM The prevailing view that “making the desert bloom” by irrigated agriculture was the foundation of the first substantial sedentary communities, however, turns out to be mistaken in nearly every particular. 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. Insofar as any human landscaping was necessary in this setting, it was far more likely to be drainage than irrigation. The classical view that ancient Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong. We owe the most comprehensive and documented revisionist case along these lines to Jennifer Pournelle’s pathbreaking study of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium during the seventh and sixth millennia BCE.

For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a crucial part of their yearly animal protein supply came from a week or so of intense round-the-clock efforts to take as much migrating prey as practicable. Depending on the setting, the migrating prey in question can comprise large mammals (caribou, gazelle), water fowl (ducks, geese), other migrating birds at their resting or roosting sites, or migrating fish (salmon, eels, alewives, herring, shad, smelt). In many cases the factor limiting the “protein harvest” was not the scarcity of prey but the scarcity of labor to process it before it spoiled.

MINDING THE GAP The breathtaking four-millennia gap between the first appearance of domesticated grains and animals and the coalescing of agro-pastoral societies we have associated with early civilization commands our attention. The anomaly of such a stretch of history, when all the building blocks for a classic agrarian society are in place but fail to coalesce, begs an explanation.

“Stable and highly sustainable subsistence economies based on a mix of free-living, managed, and fully domesticated resources seems to have persisted for 4,000 years or more before the crystallization of agricultural economies based primarily on domestic crops and livestock in the Middle East.”

If Homo sapiens is judged the most successful and numerous invasive species in history, this dubious achievement has been due to the allied battalions of domesticated plants and livestock it has taken with it to virtually every corner of the globe.

“Domiciled” sheep, for example, are generally smaller than their wild ancestors; they bear telltale signs of domesticate life: bone pathologies typical of crowding and a narrow diet with distinctive deficiencies. The bones of “domiciled” Homo sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also distinctive: they are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of nutritional distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all in women of reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains.

We, as a species, are inclined to see ourselves as the “agent” in narratives of domestication. “We” domesticated wheat, rice, the sheep, the pig, the goat. 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.

One might well object to this line of reasoning by observing that, in the final analysis, Pollan eats his potato and the Nuer eat (trade, barter, and tan the skin of) their cattle. The final disposition is not in doubt. But this overlooks the fact that while it lives, the potato and the cow are the objects of a demanding and solicitous routine that caters to their well-being and safety.

As an explanation for the broad-spectrum revolution, demographic pressure on carrying capacity seems in many locations to be in conflict with the available evidence. The “revolution” occurs in settings where there seems to be little population pressure on resources. It may also be the case that the wetter and warmer conditions after 9,600 BCE promoted a much greater abundance of plant life, as in the Mesopotamian alluvium, that could be easily gathered, though this would not explain the observed nutritional deficiencies in the archaeological record. There is no doubting the reality of the broad-spectrum revolution, but the jury is still out when it comes to understanding either its causes or its consequences.

Planting techniques were long known and occasionally used; wild plants were routinely gathered and their seeds stored; all the tools for grain processing were at hand, and even a captive animal or two might be held in reserve. Nevertheless, planting and livestock rearing as dominant subsistence practices were avoided for as long as possible because of the work they required. And most of the work arose from the need to defend a simplified, artificial landscape from the resurgence of nature excluded from it: other plants (weeds), birds, grazing animals, rodents, insects, and the rust and fungal infections that threatened a monocropped field. The tilled agricultural field was not only labor intensive; it was fragile and vulnerable.

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. Supposing even a population growth rate just barely over replacement levels (for example, 0.015 percent) the total population would have still more than doubled over these five millennia. One likely explanation for this paradox of apparent human progress in subsistence techniques together with long period of demographic stagnation is that, epidemiologically, this was perhaps the most lethal period in human history.

The first written sources also make it clear that early Mesopotamian populations understood the principle of “contagion” that spread epidemic disease. Where possible, they took steps to quarantine the first discernible cases, confining them to their quarters, letting no one out and no one in. They understood that long-distance travelers, traders, and soldiers were likely carriers of disease. Their practices of isolation and avoidance prefigured the quarantine procedures of the lazaretti of the Renaissance ports. An understanding of contagion was implicit not only in the avoidance of people who were infected but avoidance as well of their cups, dishes, clothes, and bed linen.

we humans share twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-two with rats and mice, thirty-five with horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six with sheep and goats, fifty with cattle, and sixty-five with our much-studied and oldest domesticate, the dog.9 Measles is suspected to have arisen from a rinderpest virus among sheep and goats, smallpox from camel domestication and a cowpox-bearing rodent ancestor, and influenza from the domestication of waterfowl some forty-five hundred years ago.

The archaeological site of Abu Hureyra, for example, in its hunter-gatherer phase, yielded remains from 192 different plants, of which 142 could be identified, and of which 118 are known to be consumed by contemporary hunter-gatherers.

[Nutritional] stress . . . does not seem to have become common and widespread until after the development of high degrees of sedentism, population density, and reliance on agriculture.

It is common enough in the contemporary Middle East for several crops in succession to be lost to insects, birds, or disease. In an experiment in northern Europe, a crop of modern barley, fertilized but not protected with modern herbicides or pesticides, was reduced by half: 20 percent due to crop disease, 12 percent to animals, and 18 percent to weeds.

Based on a narrow food web, Neolithic agriculture was far more productive, in a concentrated way, but also far more fragile than hunting and gathering or even shifting-cultivation, which combined mobility with a reliance on a diversity of foods. How, despite its fragility, the domus module of fixed-field agriculture became a hegemonic, agro-ecological and demographic bulldozer that transformed much of the world in its image is something of a miracle.

Nonsedentary populations typically limit their reproduction deliberately. The logistics of moving camp regularly make it burdensome, if not impossible, to have two infants who must be carried at the same time. As a result, the spacing of children of hunter-gatherers is on the order of four years, a spacing that is achieved by delayed weaning, abortifacients, and neglect or infanticide. Furthermore, some combination of strenuous exercise with a lean and protein-rich diet meant that puberty arrived later, ovulation was less regular, and menopause arrived earlier. Among sedentary agriculturalists, by contrast, the burden of a much shorter spacing of children as experienced by mobile foragers is much reduced and, as we shall see, the greater value of the children as a labor force in agriculture is enhanced. By virtue of sedentism, menarche is earlier; with a grain diet, infants can be weaned earlier on soft foods; and by virtue of a high-carbohydrate diet, ovulation is encouraged and a woman’s reproductive life is extended.

The Neolithic agro-complex was a necessary but not a sufficient basis for state formation; it made state formation possible but not certain. In Weberian terms, we are dealing here with something like “elective affinity” rather than cause and effect. Thus it was possible and not uncommon at the time to have sedentary farming populations on alluvial soils practicing irrigation without any state.4 But there was no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population.

I am tempted to say, “no water transport, no state”—only a slight exaggeration.14 We have already emphasized earlier how transportation by ship or small barge is exponentially more economical than shipment by donkey or 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.

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.”

One reason for the official distrust and stigmatization of the merchant class in China was the simple fact that its wealth, unlike that of the rice planter, was illegible, concealable, and fugitive. One might tax a market, or collect tolls on a road or river junction where goods and transactions were more transparent, but taxing merchants was a tax collector’s nightmare.

But why is there not a chickpea or lentil state? After all, these are nutritious crops that can be grown intensively, and their harvest consists of small seeds that can be dried, keep well, and can as easily be divided and measured out in small quantities as rations as the cereal grains. Here the decisive advantage of the cereal grains is their determinate growth and hence virtually simultaneous ripening. The problem with most of the legumes, from a tax collector’s perspective, is that they produce fruit continuously over an extended period. They can be, and are, picked right along as they ripen—like beans or peas. If the tax collector arrives early, much of the crop will not yet have ripened, and if he arrives late, the taxpayer will probably have eaten, hidden, or sold much of the yield. One-stop shopping on the part of the tax collector works best for determinate-ripening crops. The cereal crops of the Old World were, in this sense, preadapted for state making. The New World—save for the mixed case of maize, which can be picked right along or left to mature and dry in the field—has few if any determinate, whole-field, simultaneously ripening crops, hence none of the harvest festival tradition that so dominates the Old World agricultural calendar.

coastline was a marriage made in heaven. Rome, for example, found it cheaper to ship grain (usually from Egypt) and wine across the Mediterranean than to ship it overland by cart more than one hundred miles.

In one way or another, nongrain peoples—that it to say most of the world—embodied forms of livelihood and social organization that defeated taxation: physical mobility, dispersal, variable group and community size, diverse and invisible subsistence goods, and few fixed-point resources.

But the matter is more complicated. Just as a farmer may have to defend his crops against human and nonhuman predators, so state elites have an overwhelming interest in safeguarding the sinews of their own power: a cultivating population and its grain stores, its privileges and wealth, and its political and ritual powers. As Owen Lattimore and others have observed for the Great Wall(s) of China: they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep the barbarians (nomads) outside.

So long as there are other subsistence options, as 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.

One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations. Above all, the well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center. It is not uncommon for the subjects of early states to leave both agriculture and urban centers to evade taxes, conscription, epidemics, and oppression. From one perspective they may be seen to have regressed to more rudimentary forms of subsistence, such as foraging or pastoralism. But from another, and I believe broader, perspective, they may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation. This is emphatically not to deny that life outside the state may often be characterized by predation and violence of other kinds, but rather to assert that we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and violence.

the direct political cause of state extinction: politicide! Crushing taxes in grain and labor, civil wars and wars of succession within the capital, intercity wars, oppressive measures of corporal punishment and arbitrary abuse may be called state effects, and they can singly or in combination bring about a state’s collapse. The leakage of population away from the grain core and a persistent pattern of “heading for the hills” and pastoralism at a time of trouble might have served, in a state with an overriding concern for manpower, as a homeostatic device. Presumably, informed that numbers of its subjects were absconding, the state might have taken positive measures to lessen their burdens and stem the leakage. The frequency of collapse, however, suggests that the signals either were not received or were ignored.

The dark age of Greece lasted roughly from 1,100 to 700 BCE. Many of the palatial centers were abandoned and often physically destroyed and burned; trade was vastly diminished, and writing in the Linear B script disappeared. The causes suggested are multiple and unverified: a Dorian invasion, invasion by mysterious “sea peoples” of the Mediterranean, drought, and perhaps disease. In terms of the culture it is seen as a dark age before the subsequent glories of Greece’s Classical Age. But the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad, as we have noted, date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them.

“barbarians” and “savages.” Though hardly precise Linnaean categories, “barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who might, under certain circumstances, be incorporated; “savages,” on the other hand, were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable as raw material for civilization, who might be ignored, killed, or enslaved. When Aristotle wrote of slaves as tools, one imagines that he had in mind “savages” and not all barbarians (for example, Persians).

Barry Cunliffe bravely ventures to propose that, in the Mediterranean at least, the barbarian disruption of the ancient state world lasted for more than a millennium until 200 BCE. Within this period he identifies particularly the century between 1,250 and 1,150 BCE as the time when “the whole edifice of centralized, bureaucratic, palace-based exchange fell apart.”5 The virtual abandonment of many state centers at this time is often attributed to the so-called sea people invaders, perhaps of Mycenaean and Philistine origin, about whom little is known.

“There was a linked chain of fortified northern frontiers of the ancient civilized world from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The earliest frontier walls appear to have been in the Iranian sector. The walled frontiers of the western Roman Empire in Britain and on the Rhine and Danube faced forest, upland, and meadow tribes, now pastoral nomads.”

Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine primitives” who stubbornly refused the domus, but ex–state subjects who had chosen, albeit often in desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length. This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism.”14 The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery.

It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot.