Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject. That tribality is above all a relationship to the state is captured nicely by the Roman practice of reverting to the use of former tribal names to describe provincial populations that had broken away and rebelled against Rome. The fact that barbarians who menaced states and empires and therefore made it into the history books bear distinct names—Amorites, Scythians, Xiongnu, Mongols, Alamanni, Huns, Goths, Junghars—conveys an impression of cohesion and cultural identity that is usually wildly at odds with the facts.

Once in place the fictions were institutionalized by courts, tribute payments, lower native officials, land records, and public works, structuring that part of native life that involved contact with the state. A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.

And since the booty of a raid also typically included slaves to ransom, keep, or sell, they too represented a concentrated store of value and productivity—reared at considerable expense—that could be taken away in a day. From an even broader perspective, however, one might say that one parasite was displacing another, inasmuch as the raiders were confiscating and dispersing the accumulated assets of what had been, until then, a concentrated site of appropriation reserved exclusively for the state.