Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, reformed, corrected, punished.

They understand implicitly that behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders—paperwork that is for the most part mystifying and beyond their ken.

True, you cannot govern without record

A powerful case for linking state administration and writing is that it seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature, mythology, praise hymns, kings lists and genealogies, chronicles, and religious texts.33 The magnificent Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dates from Ur’s Third Dynasty (circa 2,100 BCE), a full millennium after cuneiform had been first used for state and commercial purposes.

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

So it was for bookkeeping , right?

The late-Neolithic resettlement camp was the kernel of the earliest states, but much of early statecraft was an artful political landscaping to facilitate appropriation: more grain land, a larger and more concentrated population, and the information software made possible by written records that could make it all more accessible to the state.

If early writing is so inextricably bound to state making, what happens when the state disappears?

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. It was not as if all Greek culture disappeared in the interim. Instead, it took oral forms, and we owe both the Odyssey and the Iliad, later transcribed, to this period.

To see the early states as “population machines” is not far off the mark,

At this time, population was the scariest resource

The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.

Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is “consumed” in leisure and cultural elaboration.

Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed.2 Access to resources—land, pasture, hunting—was open to all by virtue of membership in a group, whether tribe, band, lineage, or family, that controlled those resources. Short of being cast out, an individual could not be denied direct and independent access to whatever means of subsistence the group in question disposed of. And in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A. V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.

The important point for our purpose is that 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.

Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus.

Slavery was not invented by the state.

As with sedentism and the domestication of grain that also predated state formation, the early state elaborated and scaled up the institution of slavery as an essential means to maximize its productive population and the surplus it could appropriate.

As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.

Slaves represented a clear majority—perhaps as much as two-thirds—of Athenian society, and the institution was taken completely for granted; the issue of abolition never arose.

“The pre-Greek world—the world of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians . . .—was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the west has come to understand the concept.

The principle of socially detached servants—Janissaries, eunuchs, court Jews—has long been seen as a technique for rulers to surround themselves with skilled but politically neutralized staff.

It would be difficult to imagine the first elaborate social stratification in the earliest states without war-captive slaves at the bottom and elite embellishment, dependent on those slaves, at the top.

Max Weber’s concept of “booty capitalism” seems applicable to a great many such wars, whether conducted against competing states or against nonstate peoples on its periphery. “Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit.

States, we know, did not invent slavery and human bondage; they could be found in innumerable prestate societies. What states surely did invent, however, are large-scale societies based systematically on coerced, captive human labor.

Their vulnerability and fragility were so manifest that it is their rare appearance and even rarer persistence that requires explanation.

roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine),

The key point is that, as a subspecies of sedentary grain communities, states were subject to the same perils of dissolution as sedentary communities in general, as well as to the fragility particular to states as political entities.

They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.

the “Uruk world system,”

It is very interesting to note that states trade no mattet it be sedentists or nomads. Trading items were surplus they own, inports were important as a surplus carrier as well as a social infrastructural builder. Distribution of wealth links the social elements and defines the social structures

What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order.

Episodes of collapse are frequently succeeded by what comes to be known as a “dark age.”

Most of the world’s population in the epoch of the early states comprised nonstate hunters and gatherers.

we have a “dark age” of epic proportions among peoples “without histories” that went unnoticed by history itself.

For the most part, states did not seek to rule fiscally sterile areas beyond the core that would not normally repay the cost of governing them. Instead, states sought military allies and proxies in the hinterland and traded to obtain the scarce raw materials they needed.

Let’s understand, then, that henceforth, when I use the term “barbarian,” it is merely an ironic shorthand for “nonstate peoples.”

The period between the first appearance of states and their hegemony over nonstate peoples represented, I believe, something of a “golden age of barbarians.” What I mean is that it was in many ways “better” to be a barbarian because there were states—so long as those states were not too strong.

The greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians, however, was less as sites for predation than as trading posts.

As a state grew in population and wealth, so too did its commercial exchange with nearby barbarians.

Plunder of and trade with the state, then, made economic life on the state’s margins more viable and lucrative than it could otherwise have been. But plunder and trade were not simply alternative modes of appropriation; as we shall see, they were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft.

Barbarian societies can, like the oppida Celts, be quite hierarchical, but their hierarchy is generally not based on inherited property and is typically flatter than the hierarchy found in agrarian kingdoms.

In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.

If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module.

Kradin and others include among the pairs that arise and fall together the Xiongnu and the Han, the Turkish Khaghanat and the Tang, the Huns and the Romans, the “sea people” and the Egyptians, and perhaps the Amorites and the Mesopotamian city-states. Presumably the Yuan and Manchu Dynasties do not count in this series, as they swallow the sedentary kingdom rather than disappearing.

While the increase in population would have, by itself, encouraged more intensive subsistence strategies, the fragility of the state, its exposure to epidemics, and a large nonstate periphery would not have allowed us to discern anything like state hegemony until, say, 1600 CE at the earliest. Until then a large share of the world’s population had never seen a (routine) tax collector or, if they had seen one, still had the option of making themselves fiscally invisible.

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.