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.

narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first great agrarian kingdoms.

Agriculture, it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless, and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads. Fixed-field crops, on the other hand, were the origin and guarantor of the settled life, of formal religion, of society, and of government by laws. Those who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt.

Pastoralists and hunting-and-gathering populations have

fought against permanent settlement, associating it, often correctly, with disease and state control.

sedentism is actually quite common in ecologically rich and varied, preagricultural settings—especially wetlands bordering the seasonal migration routes of fish, birds, and larger game.

in ancient southern Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”), one encounters sedentary populations, even towns, of up to five thousand inhabitants with little or no agriculture.

crop planting associated with mobility and dispersal except for a ...

“Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.”9

The early state strives to create a legible, measured, and fairly uniform landscape of taxable grain crops and to hold on this land a large population available for corvée labor, conscription, and, of course, grain production.

The early state, in fact, as we shall see, often failed to hold its population; it was exceptionally fragile epidemiologically, ecologically, and politically and prone to collapse or fragmentation.

Thus the long era of relatively weak agrarian states and numerous, mounted, nonstate peoples was something of a golden age of barbarians; they enjoyed a profitable trade with the early states, augmented with tribute and raiding when necessary; they avoided the inconveniences of taxes and agricultural labor; they enjoyed a more nutritious and varied diet and greater physical mobility.

WHAT fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in South Africa.1 At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety from nocturnal predators as well as a precursor to the domus or hearth.

Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.

Armed with fire to sculpt the environment and able to eat so much more of it, early man could both stay closer to the hearth and, at the same time, establish new hearths in previously forbidding environments.

We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding.

domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears—far longer than previously imagined.

the gap between these two key domestications and the first agrarian economies based on them is now reckoned to stretch for 4,000

y...

The classical view that ancient Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong.

Rather than an arid zone between two rivers, as it largely is today, the southern alluvium was an intricate deltaic wetland crisscrossed by hundreds of distributaries,

indelible association of civilization with the major grains—

swamps, marshes, fens, and wetlands generally have been seen as the mirror image of civilization—

The work of civilization, when it came to marshes, was precisely to drain

Early sedentary communities near Jericho, the earliest settlements in the lower Nile, were wetland-based and only marginally, if at all, dependent on planted grains.

oral cultures that left no written records

perishable nature of their building materials:

“common property resources”—

little evidence of any hierarchy

In the earliest versions, Gilgamesh’s soul companion Enkidu is merely a pastoralist, emblematic of a fused society of planters and herders. In versions a millennium later, he is depicted as subhuman, raised among beasts, and requiring sex with a woman to humanize him.

cereal grains can be harvested, threshed, and stored in a granary for several years and represent a dense store of starches and protein if, by chance, there is a sudden shortage of wild resources.

subsistence insurance policy

Storage “on the hoof” in the form of livestock

flood-retreat agriculture, seeds are generally broadcast on the fertile silt deposited by an annual riverine flood.

A flood clears a “field” by scouring and drowning back all competing vegetation and, in the process, deposits a layer of soft, easily worked, nutritious silt as it recedes. The result, under good conditions, is often a nearly perfectly harrowed and fertilized field ready for sowing at no cost in labor.