Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

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.