Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

And that assumption is that sedentary life itself is superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of subsistence.

the grain hypothesis.

virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states.

Contrary to some earlier assumptions, the state did not invent irrigation as a way of concentrating population, let alone crop domestication; both were the achievements of prestate peoples.

Mesopotamian state forms, in turn, influenced subsequent state-making practices in Egypt, in northern Mesopotamia, and even in the Indus Valley.

One is reminded in this context of Owen Lattimore’s admonition that the great walls of China were built as much to keep Chinese taxpayers in as to keep the barbarians out.

Early states surely did not invent the institution of slavery, but they did codify and organize it as a state project.

While raiding’s spectacular quality tends to dominate accounts of the early state’s relationship with barbarians, it was surely far less important than trade.

The lowland kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot, in the long run, than as a site of plunder.

The result of this symbiosis was a cultural hybridity far greater than the typical “civilized-barbarian” dichotomy would allow. A convincing case has been made that the early state or empire was usually shadowed by a “barbarian twin,” which rose with it and shared its fate when it fell.

Selling both their fellow barbarians and their martial service to the early states, the barbarians contributed mightily to the decline of their brief golden age.

I concentrate in this book on these later sites for two important reasons. First, these urban agglomerations at the mouth of the Euphrates—for example, Eridu, Ur, Umma, and Uruk—go on to become, much later, the very first “statelets” in the world. Second, while other ancient societies such as Egypt, the Levant, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley, and Maya in the New World have their own variants of the Neolithic revolution, southern Mesopotamia not only was the site of the first state system, but it also directly influenced later state making elsewhere in the Middle East as well as in Egypt and India.

The presumption, still commonly held, was that hunting and foraging required such mobility and dispersal that sedentism was out of the question.

The prevailing view that “making the desert bloom” by irrigated agriculture was the foundation of the first substantial sedentary communities, however, turns out to be mistaken in nearly every particular.

The “harvest” of hunters and gatherers is less a daily hit-or-miss proposition than a carefully calculated effort to intercept the roughly predictable (late-April and May) mass migration of game such as the huge herds of gazelle and wild asses in the alluvium. The hunt was carefully prepared in advance.

The work of civilization, or more precisely the state, as we shall see, consists in the elimination of mud and its replacement by its purer constituents, land and water.

the state has endeavored to turn ungovernable wetlands into taxable grain fields by reengineering the landscape.

The wetland origins of population settlement

Thus neither the presence of domesticates or domesticatable resources nor the diffusion of food producing technologies is sufficient to induce the adoption of food production as a guiding principle of subsistence economy.”21

Thus far we have considered only the climatological and ecological givens and their effect on population distribution and sedentism.

The “social will to sedentism” should not be taken for granted.24 Nor should the terms “pastoralist,” “agriculturalist,” “hunter,” or “forager,” at least in their essentialist meanings, be taken for granted. They are better understood as defining a spectrum of subsistence activities, not separate peoples, in the ancient Middle East.

From a broader perspective, one might view the landscape as a forager probably saw it: as a massive, diverse, living storage area of fish, mollusks, birds, nuts, fruits, roots, tubers, edible rushes and sedges, amphibians, small mammals, and large game. If one source failed in a given year, another might be abundant. In the diversity and varying temporalities of this living storage complex lay its stability.

Neither “food storage” nor “delayed return” are remotely plausible reasons for the limited use of domesticated grains that we find in the historical record.

The general problem with farming—especially plough agriculture—is that it involves so much intensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor: “flood-retreat” (also known as décrue or recession) agriculture.

For our purposes, flooding in this case can be seen to accomplish the same landscape sculpting as the fire deployed by hunter-gatherers or swidden (slash-and-burn) cultivators.

Despite its apparent economic logic, the backs-to-the-wall thesis, at least in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, fails to match the available evidence.

“Fully domesticated” means simply that it is, in effect, our creation; it can no longer thrive without our attentions.

The case of the sheep and goat, the first noncommensal domesticates in the Middle East, however, constitutes a profound revolution in mammalian affairs.

Another common and striking morphological change among domesticates is known as neotany: the relatively early attainment of adulthood by many domesticates and their retention, as adults, of much of the juvenile morphology—especially the skull—and juvenile behaviors of their free-living ancestors.

Very interesting since certain human society demonstrate similar phenomenon

Compared with their wild ancestors, sheep have undergone a reduction in brain size of 24 percent over the ten thousand–year history of their domestication;

The paradox of relative ill health and high newborn mortality on the one hand, coupled with more-than-compensating increases in fertility on the other, is one to which we shall return, as it bears directly on the demographic explosion of agricultural peoples at the expense of hunters and gatherers.

To what degree is it plausible to look for analogous changes in morphology and behavior as Homo sapiens adapted to sedentism, crowding, and an increasingly cereal-dominated diet?

One way of determining whether a woman who died nine thousand years ago was living in a sedentary, grain-growing community as compared with a foraging band was simply to examine the bones of her back, toes, and knees.

Is it the case, for example, that like their domesticates, sedentary, grain-planting, domus-sheltered people have experienced a comparable decline in emotional reactivity and are less intently alert to their immediate surroundings? If so, is it related, as in domestic animals, to changes in the limbic system, which governs fear, aggression, and flight responses?

It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.23

I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling.

I am in no position to adjudicate, let alone resolve, the controversy over what drove people over several millennia to agriculture as a dominant mode of subsistence.

The first pulse of intensification was termed “the broad spectrum revolution,” a reference to the exploitation of more varied subsistence resources at lower trophic levels.

In an outdated list, now surely even longer, we humans share twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-two with rats and mice, thirty-five with horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six with sheep and goats, fifty with cattle, and sixty-five with our much-studied and oldest domesticate, the dog.

It is quite likely, however, that the crowding diseases, including especially zoonoses, were largely responsible for the demographic bottleneck of the early Neolithic.

Based on a narrow food web, Neolithic agriculture was far more productive, in a concentrated way, but also far more fragile than hunting and gathering or even shifting-cultivation, which combined mobility with a reliance on a diversity of foods.

Despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-à-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out that sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction—enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.

Among sedentary agriculturalists, by contrast, the burden of a much shorter spacing of children as experienced by mobile foragers is much reduced and, as we shall see, the greater value of the children as a labor force in agriculture is enhanced.

The demographic expansion (if the crude order of magnitude we are using is realistic) of world population from four million to five million over five thousand years seems puny indeed. As the proportion of Neolithic farmers to hunter-gatherers was far greater in 5,000 BCE than in 10,000 BCE, it is quite likely that even in this bottleneck period, the grain famers of the world were demographically overtaking hunter-gatherers.

farming communities in the Levant, Egypt, and China were expanding and spreading to alluvial bottomlands, apparently at the expense of nonsedentary peoples.

On the basis of what we now know, the embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation.

There are many plausible attributes to stateness, and the more of them a particular polity possesses, the more likely we are to call it a state.

We think of states as institutions that have strata of officials specialized in the assessment and collection of taxes—whether in grain, labor, or specie—and who are responsible to a ruler or rulers. We think of states as exercising executive power in a fairly complex, stratified, hierarchical society with an appreciable division of labor (weavers, artisans, priests, metalworkers, clerks, soldiers, cultivators). Some would apply more stringent criteria: a state should have an army, defensive walls, a monumental ritual center or palace, and perhaps a king or queen.

maximized the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality.

Why, however, should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states?