Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

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.