Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The life of “late barbarians” would, on balance, have been rather good. Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs; being dispersed, they would have been less vulnerable to the failure of a single food source. They were more likely to be healthier and live longer—especially if they were female. More advantageous trade made for more leisure, thus further widening the leisure-drudgery ratio between foragers and farmers. Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state. They were in almost every respect freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer. This is not a bad balance sheet for a class of barbarians over whom the waves of history were supposed to have rolled a long time ago. There are, however, two deeply melancholy aspects of the golden age of barbarians. Each has directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life. Many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other nonstate peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core. So pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia that one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups raided their weaker and more dispersed neighbors. In so doing they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians. The second melancholy aspect of the new livelihoods at the per...