Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

forbidding nontaxable subsistence activities such as swiddening and foraging, and trying to prevent the flight of its subjects.

What is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized.

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

but intrinsic causes tell us more about the self-limiting aspects of early states. To this end, I speculate on three fault lines that are by-products of state formation itself.

disease effects

urbanism

intensive irrigated agriculture.

Many kingdoms were, in fact, confederations of smaller settlements, and “collapse” might mean no more than that they have, once again, fragmented into their constituent parts, perhaps to reassemble later.

Finally, in case it is the so-called barbarians who are at the gate, we should not forget that they often adopt the culture and language of the rulers whom they depose.

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.

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—

As sedentary communities, the earliest states were vulnerable to more mobile nonstate peoples. If one thinks of hunters and foragers as specialists at locating and exploiting food sources, the static aggregations of people, grain, livestock, textiles, and metal goods of sedentary communities represented relatively easy pickings.

The growth of sedentary agricultural settlements that were everywhere the foundation of early states can be seen as a new and very lucrative foraging site for nonstate peoples—one-stop shopping, as it were.

only the barbarians could supply the necessities without which the early state could not long survive: metal ores, timber, hides, obsidian, honey, medicinals, and aromatics.

that could be traded for lowland products such as grain, textiles, dates, and dried fish.

Both foraging and hunting became, with the expansion of trade, more a trading and entrepreneurial venture than a pure subsistence activity.

hybridity far greater than the typical “civilized-barbarian” dichotomy would allow.

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.

Perhaps the main commodity traded to the early states was the slave—typically from among the barbarians.

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.

The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing.2

The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.

Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was a broad-spectrum omnivore, pounding, grinding, mashing, fermenting, and pickling raw meat and plants,

In the archaeological record the surge in brain size coincides with hearths and the remains of meals.

One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight.

With this suite of domesticates the full “Neolithic package,” seen as the decisive agricultural revolution that marks the beginning of civilization, including the first small urban agglomerations, is in place.

Yet sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little or no cereal cultivation.

The only viable intensification strategy was irrigation, for which there was archaeological evidence. Irrigation alone could guarantee the abundant harvests where rainfall was so woefully inadequate.

which implied the existence of a public authority capable of assembling and disciplining that labor force. Irrigation works made for a dense agro-pastoral economy that, they assumed, fostered state formation as a condition of its existence.

Insofar as any human landscaping was necessary in this setting, it was far more likely to be drainage than irrigation.

Southern Mesopotamia at that time was not at all arid, but rather more like a foragers’ wetland paradise.

The inhabitants of these marshes lived on what are called “turtlebacks,” small patches of slightly higher ground,

The point is that the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized food supply.

but there is no doubt that it gives a radically different tempo to the lives of hunting and fishing peoples in contrast to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farmers often read as indolence.

The advantage of waterborne transport compared with overland cart or donkey travel is almost impossible to exaggerate.

Even their hunter-gatherer ancestors were not at all isolated—trading obsidian and prestige goods over substantial distances.

The work of civilization, when it came to marshes, was precisely to drain them and transform them into orderly, productive grain fields and villages. Civilizing arid lands mean irrigating them;

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.

Whether in ancient China, in the Netherlands, in the fens of England, in the Pontine Marshes finally subdued by Mussolini, or in the remaining southern Iraq marshes drained by Saddam Hussein, the state has endeavored to turn ungovernable wetlands into taxable grain fields by reengineering the landscape.

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.

Subsistence in these zones was so diverse, variable, and dependent on such a multitude of tempos as to defy any simple central accounting.

A state—even a small protostate—requires a subsistence environment that is far simpler than the wetland ecologies we have examined.

The breathtaking four-millennia gap between the first appearance of domesticated grains and animals and the coalescing of agro-pastoral societies we have associated with early civilization commands our attention.

An implicit assumption of the standard “progress of civilization” narrative is that once domesticated cereals and livestock were available, they would generate, more or less automatically and rapidly, a fully formed agrarian society.

Such a term, however, seems singularly inappropriate, as its emphasis on “production” implies a society that is “stuck” at some inferior and unsatisfactory equilibrium.

Parallels can be made with static equilibrium models, and Jospeh Tainter’s explanation that complex societies collapse because of diminishing returns in their stubborn insistence upon certain paradigms.

Rather than relying on only a small bandwidth of food resources, they seem to have been opportunistic generalists with a large portfolio of subsistence options spread across several food webs.

cold and dry periods when sedentism might have been the result of crowding in the available refugia, and warm, wet periods of population growth and dispersion.

Given the variation and risks, it would have made no sense for early populations to rely on a narrow bandwidth of subsistence resources.

We have surely underestimated the degree of agility and adaptability of our prestate ancestors.

just as, much later, agriculturalists migrating from Taiwan to Southeast Asia (roughly five thousand years ago) often abandoned planting for foraging and hunting in their new and bounteous forest settling.