Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

History at its best, in my view, is the most subversive discipline, inasmuch as it can tell us how things that we are likely to take for granted came to be.

“The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”

A foundational question underlying state formation is how we (Homo sapiens sapiens) came to live amid the unprecedented concentrations of domesticated plants, animals, and people that characterize states. From this wide-angle view, the state form is anything but natural or given. Homo sapiens appeared as a subspecies about 200,000 years ago and is found outside of Africa and the Levant no more than 60,000 years ago. The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago. Until then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting-and-gathering bands. Still more remarkable, for those interested in the state form, is the fact that the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism. This massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize the state form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established, states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units of political order.4

Any inquiry into state formation like this one risks, by definition, giving the state a place of privilege greater than it might otherwise merit in a more balanced account of human affairs. I wish to avoid this. The facts as I have come to understand them are that an evenhanded species history would give the state a far more modest role than it is normally accorded. That states would have come to dominate the archaeological and historical record is no mystery. For us—that is to say Homo sapiens—accustomed to thinking in units of one or a few lifetimes, the permanence of the state and its administered space seems an inescapable constant of our condition. Aside from the utter hegemony of the state form today, a great deal of archaeology and history throughout the world is state-sponsored and often amounts to a narcissistic exercise in self-portraiture. Compounding this institutional bias is the archaeological tradition, until quite recently, of excavation and analysis of major historical ruins. Thus if you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be “discovered” and to dominate the pages of ancient history. If, on the other hand, you built with wood, bamboo, or reeds, you were much less likely

to appear in the archaeological record. And if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record. Once written documents—say, hieroglyphics or cuneiform—appear in the historical record, the bias becomes even more pronounced. These are invariably state-centric texts: taxes, work units, tribute lists, royal genealogies, founding myths, laws. There are no contending voices, and efforts to read such texts against the grain are both heroic and exceptionally difficult.10 The larger the state archives left behind, generally speaking, the more pages devoted to that historical kingdom and its self-portrait.

The term “domesticate” is normally understood as an active verb taking a direct object, as in “Homo sapiens domesticated rice . . . domesticated sheep,” and so on. This overlooks the active agency of domesticates. It is not so clear, for example, to what degree we domesticated the dog or the dog domesticated us.

Who cultivates whom?

It is almost a metaphysical question who is the servant of whom—at least until it comes time to eat.

Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making. The logic of assessable and accessible crops and people applies as well to smaller-scale efforts at control and legibility one finds in the Spanish redduciones in the New World, many missionary settlements, and that paragon of legibility, the monocrop plantation with the workforce in the barracks.

If the formation of the earliest states were shown to be largely a coercive enterprise, the vision of the state, one dear to the heart of such social-contract theorists as Hobbes and Locke, as a magnet of civil peace, social order, and freedom from fear, drawing people in by its charisma, would have to be reexamined.

Civilizations should never be confused with the states that they typically outlast, nor should we unreflectively prefer larger units of political order to smaller units.

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. I will continue to use the term “barbarian”—with tongue planted firmly in cheek—in part because I want to argue that the era of the earliest and fragile states was a time when it was good to be a barbarian. The length of this period varied from place to place depending on state strength and military technology; while it lasted it might be called the golden age of barbarians. The barbarian zone, as it were, is essentially the mirror image of the agro-ecology of the state. It is a zone of hunting, slash-and-burn cultivation, shellfish collection, foraging, pastoralism, roots and tubers, and few if any standing grain crops. It is a zone of physical mobility, mixed and shifting subsistence strategies: in a word, “illegible” production.

Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning.

The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications.

If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it.

we are utterly dependent on fire. It has in a real sense domesticated us. One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight.

The cornucopia of subsistence resources from lower trophic levels in the wetlands of Mesopotamia was perhaps uniquely favorable to the early creation of substantial sedentary communities.

A last and more speculative reason for the obscurity of wetland societies is that they were, and remained, environmentally resistant to centralization and control from above. They were based on what are now called “common property resources”—free-living plants, animals, and aquatic creatures to which the entire community had access.

These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, and mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the center of any comprehensive account of the “civilizing process.”

Once cereals became established as a staple in the early Middle East, it is striking how the agricultural calendar came to determine much of public ritual life: ceremonial ploughing by priests and kings, harvest rites and celebrations, prayers and sacrifices for an abundant harvest, gods for particular grains. The metaphors with which people reasoned were increasingly dominated by domesticated grains and domesticated animals: “a time to sow and a time to reap,” being “a good shepherd.” There is hardly a passage in the Old Testament that fails to make use of such imagery. This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of wild fauna for a handful of livestock. I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling.

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.”

The greater the genetic similarity—the less variation—the greater the likelihood that they will all be vulnerable to the same pathogen.

It means that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand.

the meat of the domesticates on which they might occasionally feast contained far fewer vital fatty acids than wild game.

The literal meaning of “parasite,” from the original Greek root, is “beside the grain.”

wetlands abundance, as we have seen, could lead to incipient urbanism and commerce, but did not lead to state formation without grain growing on a large scale.

So, anarchy? Or how did these people organize themselves?

the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”

Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the remainder stored where they grew, underground.

Interesting, as resistance is often metaphorized as the underground

Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by opposing armies.

“aboveground”

grains

le...

These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the ...

But why is there not a chickpea or lentil state?

One-stop shopping on the part of the tax collector works best for determinate-ripening crops.

groups of priests, strong men, and local chiefs were scaling up and institutionalizing structures of power that had previously used only the idioms of kinship.

Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.

From roughly 1,200 to 800 BCE, Greek city-states disintegrated in an era known as the Dark Age. When literacy reappeared it no longer took the old form of Linear B but was an entirely new script borrowed from the Phoenicians.

One suspects that in the earliest states, writing developed first as a technique of statecraft and was therefore as fragile and evanescent an achievement as the state itself.

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.

in Athens at one point—the market fluctuated—a pair of working mules was worth three slaves.

the “Uruk world system” around 3,500 to 3,200 BCE as an integrated world of trade and exchange stretching from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south and from the Iranian Plateau in the east to the Eastern Mediterranean in the west.

the “Uruk world system,” despite the grandiosity of the term, may well have prefigured, on a smaller scale, the integration of the Chinese, Indian, and Mediterranean disease pools around the year 1 BCE that is seen to have touched off the world’s first devastating pandemics,

arose with land clearance for agriculture. J. R. McNeill intriguingly suggests that this may be related to deforestation and river morphology.

Similarly, many Greeks and Romans joined the Huns and other Central Eurasian peoples, where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home.