The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

The Neolithic, he suggests, began with flood-retreat agriculture, which was easy work and encouraged redistribution; the largest populations were, indeed, concentrated in deltaic environments, but the first states in the Middle East (he concentrates largely on these; and China) developed upriver, in areas with an especially strong focus on cereal agriculture – wheat, barley, millet – and relatively limited access to a range of other staples. The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground – unlike, say, certain tubers or legumes – grain crops were also highly visible and amenable to appropriation. Cereal agriculture did not cause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to their fiscal requirements.