Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The attention to “husbanding” the subject population, including women, as a form of wealth, like livestock, in which fertility and high rates of reproduction were encouraged, is apparent.

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.

The term “barbarian,” we know, was originally applied by the Greeks to all non–Greek speakers—captured slaves as well as quite “civilized” neighbors such as the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Phoenicians. “Ba-ba” was meant to be a parody of the sound of non-Greek speech. In one form or another the term was reinvented by all early states to distinguish themselves from those outside the state. It is fitting, therefore, that my seventh and last chapter is devoted to the “barbarians” who were simply the vast population not subject to state control.

The Chinese used the terms “raw” and “cooked” to distinguish between barbarians. Among groups with the same language, culture, and kinship systems, the “cooked” or more “evolved” segment comprised those whose households had been registered and who were, however nominally, ruled by Chinese magistrates. They were said to “have entered the map.”

Perhaps the main commodity traded to the early states was the slave—typically from among the barbarians. The ancient states replenished their population by wars of capture and by buying slaves on a large scale from barbarians who specialized in the trade. In addition, it was a rare early state that did not engage barbarian mercenaries for its defense.

The genetic and physiological effects of at least half a million years of cooking have been enormous. Compared with our primate cousins, we have a gut less than half the size and far smaller teeth, and we spend far fewer calories chewing and digesting. The gains in nutritional efficiency, Richard Wrangham claims, largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect, judging by other mammals.6 In the archaeological record the surge in brain size coincides with hearths and the remains of meals. Morphological changes of this magnitude have been known to occur in other animals in as little as twenty thousand years following a dramatic shift in diet and ecological niche.

The problem for the would-be farmer was that the natural selection pressure for wild plants promotes characteristics that are designed to defeat the farmer. Thus wild grainheads are typically small and shatter easily, thereby seeding themselves. They mature unevenly; their seeds can remain long dormant but still germinate; they have many appendages, awns, glumes, and thick seed coats, all of which discourage grazers and birds. All these features are selected for in the wild and selected against by the farmer. It is diagnostic that the major weeds that plague wheat and barley—one can think of them as hitchhiking, feral commensals—have precisely these characteristics. They like the tilled field but escape the harvester and grazer alike. Oats apparently began their agricultural career as a weed (an obligate pest mimicking the crop) in the tilled field and eventually became a secondary crop.

More diagnostic than the overall reduction in brain size are the areas of the brain that seem to be disproportionately affected. In the case of dogs, sheep, and pigs, the part of the brain most affected is the limbic system (hippocampus, hypothalamus, pituitary, and amygdala), which is responsible for activating hormones and nervous-system reactions to threats and external stimuli. The shrinkage of the limbic system is associated with raising the threshold that would trigger aggression, flight, and fear. In turn, this helps explain the diagnostic characteristics of virtually all domesticated species: namely the general reduction in emotional reactivity. Such emotional dampening can be seen as a condition for life in the crowded domus and under human supervision, where the instant reaction to predator and prey are no longer powerful pressures of natural selection. With physical protection and nutrition more secure, the domesticated animal can be less intently alert to its immediate surroundings than its cousins in the wild.

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.”25 If this is a too bleak view of a breakthrough credited with making civilization possible, let us at least say that it represented a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world, a contraction of diet, a contraction of space, and perhaps a contraction, as well, in the breadth of ritual life.

One of the hallmarks of early statecraft in agrarian kingdoms was to hold the population in place and prevent any unauthorized movement. Physical mobility and dispersal are the bane of the tax man.

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 it. Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor—corvée labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery—was a surplus brought into being.

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.

Finally, war helped to a great discovery—that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved; in return for his life he might be made to work. This discovery has been compared in importance to that of the taming of animals. . . . By early historic times slavery was a foundation of ancient industry and a potent instrument in the accumulation of capital. —V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself

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.

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 one form, a group of warlords might hatch a plan to invade another small realm, with both eyes fixed on the loot in, say, gold, silver, livestock, and prisoners to be seized. It was a “joint-stock company,” the business of which was plunder.

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? After all, Aristotle was serious. What if we were to examine slavery, agrarian war captives, helots, 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? The project, of course, was never quite realized, but to see things from this angle is not entirely far-fetched. Alexis de Tocqueville reached for this analogy when he considered Europe’s growing world hegemony: “We should almost say that the European is to the other races what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys.”

There is abundant evidence for deforestation in the classical world from the Athenian quest for naval timber in Macedonia and the shortage of timber in the Roman Republic.14

Despite the potential mercenary rewards of warfare for the victors, there was of course the danger of death and captivity to consider. One imagines that many subjects of the peer polities did whatever they could to avoid conscription, including flight from the state. A state that appeared to be losing its war would find its manpower leaking away. (One thinks of the massive desertions of poor whites from the Confederacy in the last stages of the U.S. Civil War in 1864.) Thucydides writes of the Athenian coalition unraveling as the campaign against Syracuse was failing: “With the enemy on equal terms with us, our slaves were beginning to desert. As for the foreigners in our service, those who were conscripted are going back to their cities as quickly as they can.”22 As manpower was the lifeblood of these states, a decisive defeat could well presage the collapse of the state itself.23

Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments?30 One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require. There are fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits. There are splendid and instructive documentaries on archaic Greece, Old Kingdom Egypt, and mid–third millennium Uruk, but one will search in vain for a portrayal of the obscure periods that followed them: the “Dark Age” of Greece, the “First Intermediate Period” of Egypt, and the decline of Uruk under the Akkadian Empire. Yet there is a strong case to be made that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.

In the Ming Dynasty the term “cooked,” referring to assimilating barbarians, meant, in practice, those who had settled, had been registered on the tax rolls, and who were in principle governed by Han magistrates—in short, those who were said to have “entered the map.” A group that was identical in language and culture would often be divided into “raw” and “cooked” fractions entirely on the basis of whether they were outside or inside state administration. For the Chinese as for the Roman, the barbarians and tribes began precisely where taxes and sovereignty stopped. Let’s understand, then, that henceforth, when I use the term “barbarian,” it is merely an ironic shorthand for “nonstate peoples.”

The period between the first appearance of states and their hegemony over nonstate peoples represented, I believe, something of a “golden age of barbarians.” What I mean is that it was in many ways “better” to be a barbarian because there were states—so long as those states were not too strong. States were juicy sites for plunder and tribute. Just as the state required a sedentary grain-growing population for its predations, so did this concentration of settled people, with their grain, livestock, manpower, and goods, serve as a site of extraction for more mobile predators. When the predator’s mobility was enhanced by camels, horses, stirrups, or swift boats of shallow draft, the range and effectiveness of their raids was greatly extended.

In the first millennium BCE there was a veritable explosion in seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean that exponentially increased the volume and value of trade. The greater part of the “barbarian economy” in this context was devoted to supplying lowland markets with raw materials and goods they required, much of which was in turn destined for reexport to other ports. A good part of what barbarians supplied was livestock in the most expansive sense of the term: cattle, sheep, and above all slaves. In return they received textiles, grain, iron- and copperware, pottery, and artisan luxury items, much of it too from “international” trade.

Plunder of and trade with the state, then, made economic life on the state’s margins more viable and lucrative than it could otherwise have been. But plunder and trade were not simply alternative modes of appropriation; as we shall see, they were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft.

“Barbarians” are certainly not a culture or a lack thereof. Neither are they a “stage” of historical or evolutionary progress in which the highest stage is life in the state as taxpayer, in line with the historical discourse of incorporation shared by the Romans and Chinese. For Caesar incorporation meant moving from tribal (friendly or hostile) to “provincial” and perhaps eventually to Roman. For the Han it meant progressing from “raw” (hostile) to “cooked” (friendly) and perhaps eventually to Han.

Among the Romans, the contrast between their diet of grain and the Gallic diet of meat and dairy products was a key marker of their claim to civilized status.

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.”

Lattimore, as a student of frontiers in general, quotes a scholar of the late Western Roman Empire who noted the same pattern there too, as “the pitiless collection of taxes and the helplessness of citizens before wealthy law-breakers” drove Roman citizens to seek the protection of Attila’s Huns.17 “In other words,” Lattimore adds, “there were times when the law and order of the barbarians was superior to those of civilization.”18

The attraction of the Goths in the sixth century CE was at least as great as that of the Huns had been earlier. Totila (king of the Ostrogoths, 541–552 CE) not only accepted slaves and coloni into the Gothic army, but even turned them against their senatorial masters by promising them freedom and ownership of land. “In so doing he permitted and provided an excuse for something the Roman lower classes had been willing to do since the 3rd century”: “to become Goths out of despair over their economic situation.”19

Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation. As the state was weakened and under threat, the temptation was to press harder on the core to make good the losses which then risked further defections in a vicious cycle. A scenario of this kind, it appears, was partly to blame for the collapse of the Cretan and Mycenaean centralized palatial state (circa 1,100 BCE).

The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture,” cited in my introduction, is significant. It gestures, I think, in the direction of an important truth about the parasitic quality of raiding. The granaries of a sedentary community may represent two or more years of agrarian toil that raiders can appropriate in a flash. Penned or corralled livestock are, in the same sense, living granaries that can be confiscated. 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.