Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

creating malarial wetlands that are both anthropogenic and perhaps uninhabitable.

The state no more invented war than it did slavery. It did, however, once again scale up these institutions as major state activities.

It was this core zone that was the key to state power and cohesion. It was also the state’s Achilles’ heel, as it was this zone that was likely to be squeezed first and hardest in any crisis.24 Precisely because this zone was closest at hand, most valuable, and dense with resources, it would, in a pinch, yield the most manpower and grain. An audacious ruler, one with military or monumental ambitions, one threatened by invasion or by internal enemies, would be tempted, as the line of least resistance, to draw resources from this core.

it was quite likely to confiscate too much grain in a bad year, leaving its subjects on the edge of starvation. That is, quite apart from rapaciousness, the first states lacked the fine-grained knowledge that would have made it easier to modify their appropriation in line with the capacity of their subjects to pay. They were, as a colleague of mine once said, “all thumbs and no fingers for fine-tuning.”25 The results of their misjudgment were also compounded by the inability to monitor the rapaciousness of their own tax collectors on the ground, intent on appropriating for themselves.

Evidence from the later stages of the Akkadian Dynasty (circa 2,200 BCE) indicates that the core of the kingdom was periodically squeezed, as it was both the juiciest and closest source of revenue.

Some commentators stress the bare-bones “kit” of the cultivating subjects and sumptuary laws that excluded 90 percent of the population from wearing certain clothing, owning prestige goods, or celebrating certain rituals reserved for the elite.

One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations.

This is emphatically not to deny that life outside the state may often be characterized by predation and violence of other kinds, but rather to assert that we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and violence.

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.

“Barbarians” are certainly not a culture or a lack thereof. Neither are they a “stage” of historical or evolutionary progress in which the highest stage is life in the state as taxpayer,

Until the last half of the first millennium BCE, when larger, sail-driven ships could transport larger cargoes longer distances, states had to hug the grain core quite tightly.

The Record of Rites (Liji) of the Zhou Dynasty contrasts the barbarian tribes who ate meat (raw or cooked) instead of the “grain food” of the civilized.

Among the Romans, the contrast between their diet of grain and the Gallic diet of meat and dairy products was a key marker

Primitives could enter the sphere of civilization—this was, after all, the grand narrative—but it was inconceivable that the “civilized” could ever revert to primitivism.

Many of a state’s adjacent barbarian populations may well have been, in effect, refugees from the state-making process itself.

This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism.”

The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery. Places of refuge where they accumulated over time became “shatter zones,” as their linguistic and cultural complexity reflected that they were peopled by various pulses of refugees over an extended period.

Lattimore, as a student of frontiers in general, quotes a scholar of the late Western Roman Empire who noted the same pattern there too, as “the pitiless collection of taxes and the helplessness of citizens before wealthy law-breakers” drove Roman citizens to seek the protection of Attila’s Huns.

“In other words,” Lattimore adds, “there were times when the law and order of the barbarians was superior to those of civilization.”

The attraction of the Goths in the sixth century CE was at least as great as that of the Huns had been earlier.

Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation.

Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject. That tribality is above all a relationship to the state is captured nicely by the Roman practice of reverting to the use of former tribal names to describe provincial populations that had broken away and rebelled against Rome.

These groups were all loose confederacies of disparate peoples brought together briefly for military purposes and then characterized by the threatened state as a “people.”

For the Romans and the Tang Dynasty, tribes were territorial units of administration, having little or nothing to do with the characteristics of the people so designated. A great many of the so-called tribal names were simply place names: a particular valley, a range of hills, a stretch of river, a forest.

Over time, of course, such an administrative fiction might take on an autonomous existence of its own. Once in place the fictions were institutionalized by courts, tribute payments, lower native officials, land records, and public works, structuring that part of native life that involved contact with the state. A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity.

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.

To be sure, the state is often no richer than its periphery, but as we have seen, the decisive difference is that the wealth of the state, or any sedentary community, is all conveniently stacked up in a confined space, while the wealth of the periphery is widely dispersed.

The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture,”

They might be disguised as payment to a militia that would ensure peace at the border. In return for the payment, the raiders would agree to plunder only enemies of their allied state, and the state, for its part, would often recognize the raider’s independence in a particular territory.

Seven centuries later, under the Tang, officials were delivering half a million bolts of silk to the Uighurs annually on similar terms. On paper it may have looked as if the nomads were tributary inferiors to the Tang emperor, but the actual flow of revenue and goods suggests the opposite in practice. The nomads were, in effect, collecting bribes from the Tang in exchange for not attacking.

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.

Ur and Uruk were possible only by virtue of products from higher altitudes: stone, ores, oils, timber, limestone, soapstone, silver, lead, copper, grindstones, gems, gold, and, not least, slaves and captives.

This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end in itself.

A second analogy, much later, might be the worldwide demand for ivory—in the North Atlantic mainly for piano keys and billiard balls—that set off a myriad of intertribal wars for control of the trade and, not incidentally, destroyed much of the elephant population.

On a smaller but no less revolutionary scale for their epoch, the various peripheries of the agrarian states became valuable commercial landscapes—in some ways more valuable than the alluvium itself—

Civilization itself created its own barbarian plague.

Such arrangements, under which the barbarians received part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding, might be thought of as a de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians.

In fact, it is the rare state or empire that has not recruited units from among the barbarians, often in return for trade privileges and local autonomy.

Caesar’s pacification of Gaul was accomplished largely with Gallic troops.

Their quasi-derivative status is emphasized by the fact that they tend to disappear when their host collapses. As Nikolay Kradin puts it, “The degree of centralization among nomads is in direct proportion to the extent of the neighboring agricultural civilization. . . .”

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.

In his account of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars, for example, Thucydides discusses dozens of different hill and valley peoples: those with kings and without kings, those with whom Athens has relations of alliance, tribute, or enmity. Each of those pairs, were their histories known, would add immeasurably to our understanding of the relations between states and their nonstate neighbors.

For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern nation-state did not yet exist. Physical movement, flux, an open frontier, and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period.

Hundreds and hundreds of petty states formed, thrived briefly, and decomposed into their elementary social units of villages, lineages, or bands.

the pattern of raiding, trading, and slaving remained a major activity in the Malay world and in upland Southeast Asia among hill peoples.

There are, however, two deeply melancholy aspects of the golden age of barbarians. Each has directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life. Many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other nonstate peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core. So pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia that one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups raided their weaker and more dispersed neighbors. In so doing they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians.