Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Against the Grain by James C. Scott.

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When I was in college in the late 1970s, I was taught that agriculture was a product of the river beds where people retreated during a drought or other environmental crisis. Agriculture developed from people being forced to intensively exploit the naturally occurring grains in that environment in order to avoid starvation. This situation meant that villages developed simultaneously and from there it was a short hop to states and civilization.

This book takes a new look at this model and finds that science has left this model behind. Thus, it turns out that sedentism predated agriculture by thousands of years and agriculture was around for thousands of years before anyone through to building up a state. Scott places the relevant dates of these events as follows: 12,000 BC (Scattered evidence of sedentism); 7,000 to 8,000 BC (Domestication of founder crops); 6,000 BC (permanent towns); 3,100 BC (Walled statelets.)

The time intervals between these events are long and deep. 3,000 years to go from towns to states? 2,000 years to go from agriculture to towns? What were people doing in the interim?

The answer is that the advantages for each development are not obvious and the costs and risks are high. Occasional sedentism may have been occasionally preferable to picking up and carrying things to new settlements but not always. Founder crops could be domesticated in situ by bands moving through territories where they knew such crops could be found. Walled towns become necessary only after a population has developed the habit of storing grain and other valuables.

As for the state, Scott points out that states are not the natural institution we think they are. States require a lot of developments to make them work, such as a record-keeping system, surplus agricultural production, a military caste and other features. Scott points out that most states are short-lived affairs. We may call the interregnum periods “dark ages” but such dark ages are the natural state of mankind, which gets along fine without the high culture of buildings and literature that we enjoy from the far future.

Scott compares state formation to the human period which people can laboriously build-up only to see it come tumbling down the first moment any of the lower tiers weaken. One of the collapse points according to Scott was likely to have been disease, which would have found a much greater opportunity to afflict human populations once they began to cluster in towns and communicate with each other through trade and war. In addition, the domestication of animals introduced new vectors of contamination. Ancient religions often made a point of supplicating plague demons which is an indication of the role of plagues in such societies.

Scott writes:

“Epidemic disease is, I believe, the “loudest” silence in the Neolithic archaeological record. Archaeology can assess only what it can recover and, in this case, we must speculate beyond the hard evidence. There are nonetheless good reasons for supposing that a great many of the sudden collapses of the earliest centers of population were due to devastating epidemic diseases.3 Time and again there is evidence of a sudden and otherwise unexplained abandonment of previously well-populated sites. In the case of adverse climate change or soil salinization one would also expect depopulation, but in keeping with its cause it would be more likely to be regionwide and rather more gradual. Other explanations for the sudden evacuation or disappearance of a populous site are of course possible: civil war, conquest, floods. Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding the Neolithic revolution made possible, is the most likely suspect, judging from the massive effects of disease that appear in the written records once they become available.”

And:

“The first written sources also make it clear that early Mesopotamian populations understood the principle of “contagion” that spread epidemic disease. Where possible, they took steps to quarantine the first discernible cases, confining them to their quarters, letting no one out and no one in. They understood that long-distance travelers, traders, and soldiers were likely carriers of disease. Their practices of isolation and avoidance prefigured the quarantine procedures of the lazaretti of the Renaissance ports. An understanding of contagion was implicit not only in the avoidance of people who were infected but avoidance as well of their cups, dishes, clothes, and bed linen.5 Soldiers returning from a campaign and suspected of carrying disease were obliged to burn their clothing and shields before entering the city. When isolation and quarantine failed, those who could fled the city, leaving the dying and deceased behind, and returning, if ever, only well after the epidemic had passed. In doing so, they must frequently have brought the epidemic to outlying areas, touching off a new round of quarantines and flight. There is little doubt in my mind that a good many of the earlier and unchronicled abandonments of populous areas were due more to disease than to politics.”

Another feature necessary for state formation was the domestication of grains as opposed to other forms of starch. The early states were grain states rather than tuber or bean states because grain is harvested at a regular time above ground at a definite time, which enables the state to identify grain production and take its cut. This would not be possible with other forms of starch production.

Scott argues that the key purpose of early states was the domestication of humans. States squandered human population and were constantly beset with the issue of filling up lightly populated or depopulated territory with new population. Hence, the state went big into the slavery racket and would specialize in transferring populations from the exterior to the core in order to ensure that grain production was maintained. Scott notes: “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.”

Slavery was only a temporary solution given the horrific treatment of slaves:

“Perhaps the strongest evidence of brutal treatment is the general conclusion by scholars that the servile population did not reproduce itself. In lists of prisoners, it is striking how many are listed as dead—whether from the forced march back or from overwork and malnutrition is not clear.22 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.”

You also have to wonder about whether human empathy extended to strangers. If you read the Achilles' response to Hector in the Illiad, you see a primitive inability to understand that the other being was a fellow human.

Scott also points to the instability of sedentism:

“Sedentism was, as we have noted earlier, not a once-and-for-all achievement. Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine), archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.”

One thing that went along with sedentism and states was the formation of barbarians who lived off of settled peoples and often viewed settled people as their “herds.” Barbarians were sometimes formed from refugees fleeing the epidemics and the oppression of the core areas or from people in areas shattered by state activity, including slave raiding. Barbarians could place pressure on, or provide opportunities to, sedentary populations that destabilized them.

There is a lot here in a “big think” way. The book can be dry at times, but big ideas drop out at a fairly regular rate. In its way, this book should be of particular interest to those with an interest in political philosophy or the origin of the state.

One interesting question that isn't answered is, why now? After tens of thousands of years of wandering, why did “traces of sedentism” emerge only 14,000 years ago? And why would towns develop 8,000 years ago rather than 8,000 years from now? What is the reason that we are reading this on the internet today, rather than living on a planet orbiting another star or, just as easily, hunting and gathering on a lightly populated Earth?