Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

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