Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

Captives were settled near the court, and regulations restricted population movement. One of the hallmarks of early statecraft in agrarian kingdoms was to hold the population in place and prevent any unauthorized movement.

We have thus far concentrated on the intention of state officials, through writing, statistics, censuses, and measurement, to move beyond sheer plunder and to more rationally extract labor and foodstuffs from their subjects.

Under the Qin, reflecting the importance of population, the state not only forbade flight but instituted a pro-natalist policy, with tax breaks to women and their families who gave birth to new subjects.

What little evidence we do have suggests that without the structure of officials, administrative records, and hierarchical communication, literacy shrinks greatly if it does not disappear altogether.

One suspects that in the earliest states, writing developed first as a technique of statecraft and was therefore as fragile and evanescent an achievement as the state itself.

One student of early writing in Mesopotamia suggested, admittedly speculatively, that writing was elsewhere resisted because of its indelible association with the state and taxes, just as ploughing was long resisted because of its indelible association with drudgery.

The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites.

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.

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.

without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree.

Many centuries later Thucydides acknowledges the logic of manpower by praising the Spartan general Brasidas for negotiating peaceful surrenders, thereby increasing the Spartan tax and manpower base at no cost in Spartan lives.6

The Old Babylonian legal codes are preoccupied with escapees and runaways and the effort to return them to their designated work and residence.

Human bondage was undoubtedly known in the ancient Middle East before the appearance of the first state.

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.

Sparta’s slaves were largely “helots,” indigenous cultivators conquered in place by Sparta and made to work and produce communally for “free” Spartans.

merchants and ordinary soldiers who expected to become rich by selling or ransoming the captives they had taken personally.

The ubiquity of slaves as a commodity was reflected in the fact that in the classical world a “standardized” slave became a unit of measurement: in Athens at one point—the market fluctuated—a pair of working mules was worth three slaves.

Slavery, while hardly as massively central as in classical Athens, Sparta, or Rome, was crucial for three reasons: it provided the labor for the most important export trade good, textiles; it supplied a disposable proletariat for the most onerous work (for example, canal digging, wall building); and it was both a token of and a reward for elite status.

The most unambiguous category of slaves was the captured prisoner of war.

One ideogram for “slave” in third-millennium Mesopotamia was the combination of the sign for “mountain” with the sign for “woman,” signifying women taken in the course of military forays into the hills or perhaps bartered by slave takers in exchange for trade goods.

the purpose of war was largely the acquisition of captives, then it makes more sense to see such military expeditions more in the light of slave raids than as conventional warfare.

The only substantial, documented slave institution in Uruk appears to have been the state-supervised workshops producing textiles that engaged as many as nine thousand women.

Nor was it insignificant demographically. Various estimates put the Uruk population at around forty thousand to forty-five thousand in the year 3,000 BCE. Nine thousand textile workers alone would represent at least 20 percent of Uruk’s inhabitants, not counting the other prisoners of war and slaves in other sectors of the economy.

Why valuable manpower would be so carelessly destroyed is, I believe, less likely to be owing to a cultural contempt for war captives than to the fact that new prisoners of war were plentiful and relatively easy to acquire.

Finally, war helped to a great discovery—that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved;

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.

The domesticated flock of sheep has many ewes and few rams, as that maximizes its reproductive potential.

It is possible that the earliest Mesopotamian states traded for many of these commodities, thereby outsourcing the drudgery and labor control to others.

In either of these cases, such early societies would not have appeared superficially to be slave societies. And in fact, they would not have been slave societies in quite the Athenian or Roman sense.

States, we know, did not invent slavery and human bondage; they could be found in innumerable prestate societies.

In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor.

A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general.

If one’s own agrarian population could not be made to do this work without risking desertion or rebellion, then a captive, domesticated, alien population must be made to do it.

If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages.4 Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent.

They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement.

Apart from a justified awe at the cultural, aesthetic, and architectural achievements of these early civilizations, there was something of a competitive imperial scramble to appropriate both their lineage of grandeur and their artifacts. Finally, through the schoolbooks and the museums, the prevailing standard images of these early states have become icons: the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the Athenian Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the warrior tombs at Xian. So when these archaeological superstars evaporated, it seemed as if it were the end of an entire world. What in fact was lost were the beloved objects of classical archaeology: the concentrated ruins of the relatively rare centralized kingdoms, along with their written record and luxuries.

Yoffee and Cowgill have aptly borrowed from the administrative theorist Herbert Simon the term “modularity”: a condition wherein the units of a larger aggregation are generally independent and detachable—in Simon’s terms, “nearly decomposable.”5 In such cases the disappearance of the apical center need not imply much in the way of disorder, let alone trauma, for the more durable, self-sufficient elementary units.

There seems to be no consensus on which causes were most significant, but there is no doubt that ruralization rather than urbanization dominated Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years after the fall of Ur III, apparently owing to pastoralist incursions.

was “overdetermined,” and because the difficulties they faced were so manifold, a coroner-archaeologist would be hard-pressed to single out a particular cause of death.

First, unlike more contingent events like an invasion, they have a systematic character that may be linked directly to state processes.

Second, such causes are likely to be slighted by most historical analyses, as they appear to have no direct, proximate human agent behind them and often leave no obvious archaeological signature behind to identify themselves.

States are notorious for another activity: warfare, which has enormous epidemiological consequences.

Among the captives, of course, were the enemy’s four-footed livestock, which would have brought their own diseases and parasites along to the victor’s capital.

Quarantine and the isolation of maritime travelers (later institutionalized as lazarretti) must have arisen in one form or another along with new and dreaded epidemics. At the same time, even the earliest town dwellers must have understood that flight and dispersal from the site of a lethal epidemic represented the best hope of avoiding becoming infected.

Of the environmental limits that were most likely to threaten the existence of the state, I examine two of the most important: deforestation and salinization.

they are more gradual or, better put, more insidious than sudden.

If, as often happens, the process of siltation has raised the river bed to the level near that of the surrounding land, the river becomes exceptionally erratic, jumping from one channel to another as each silts up.

Historically, China’s Yellow River is the textbook example of massive floods and radically fluctuating paths to the sea, responsible for millions of deaths.

It has been suggested that malaria is a “disease of civilization,” in the sense that it arose with land clearance for agriculture. J. R. McNeill intriguingly suggests that this may be related to deforestation and river morphology.