Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

sense. It draws our attention to all those aspects of state making and state collapse that are either absent or leave only faint traces. Despite enormous progress in documenting climate change, demographic shifts, soil quality, and dietary habits, there are many aspects of the earliest states that one is unlikely to find chronicled in physical remains or in early texts because they are insidious, slow processes, perhaps symbolically threatening, and even unworthy of mention. For example, it appears that flight from the early state domains to the periphery was quite common, but, as it contradicts the narrative of the state as a civilizing benefactor of its subjects, it is relegated to obscure legal codes. I and others are virtually certain that disease was a major factor in the fragility of the early states. Its effects, however, are hard to document, since they were so sudden and so little understood, and because many epidemic diseases left no obvious bone signature. Similarly,