What I Am Reading: "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by James C. Scott
James C. Scott chased me down like I was some kind of prey animal on the savannah, and he has finally caught me. He first came to my attention in December when I was reading The Address Book by Deirdre Mask; that book mentioned his Seeing Like A State, which lodged itself into a corner of my mind. Then, this month, I was reading a book review of another book on prehistory; that book was noted, like some others on the topic (and their own linked reviews), as being too safe and apolitical, and not really interested in making the leaps in social commentary that one could glean from the lives of hunter-gatherers. This was juxtaposed with another book willing to make that leap: this one, by the Seeing Like A State guy. Then, a friend independently found Scott, and asked me if I had read him. Fine, fine! I’ll read it!
I’ve been trying to branch out a little into ancient history and prehistory, which had never interested me much earlier in my historical “career.” When it comes to the subject, I am a fan of tasteful modern analogies and connections, such as my much-cited “weapons-grade tin” of 1176 B.C. by Eric Cline. One book on the list for this year that should scratch precisely that itch is Debt by David Graeber. Looking back, I think my growth in interest in the topic comes from Neal Stephenson’s formulation of state-building as running a program, in Snow Crash; and from Owen Lattimore’s discussion of the relationship between the Chinese states and their nomadic neighbors in Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Lattimore, to my satisfaction, is cited repeatedly in this book for his writing on the dealings between nomads and neighboring Chinese states; Neal Stephenson’s civilizational programming, however, is a narrative that comes under fire.
Scott, who runs the agrarian studies program at Yale, is an amateur on the topic who set out to compile existing data. Part of his background, informing his anarchist leanings, is in studies on non-state people in Southeast Asia. The book says, and I agree, that we have a lot of misconception about non-state people and hunter-gatherers, and sets out to provide background on the formation of states and correct misconceptions (and intellectual bias) on the topic.
Broadly speaking, the book’s agenda is to prove that the birth of the state isn’t some “just-so story” of gradual progress and improvement, that we didn’t just go from hunting and gathering to farming to large-scale civilizations organized around agriculture because it was the only possible way to advance and we had to follow our destiny. In fact, people were, in some ways, better off as “barbarians” living before or outside of the earliest states. Our historical narrative privileges the state side of things because, of course, that’s necessarily where the written record comes from. The record left by non-state peoples (whom Scott calls, tongue-in-cheek, “barbarians,” and I will as well) is fragmentary, and thus a “deep history” can only be gleaned and extrapolated from archaeological and anthropological evidence, and from civilizational records read “against the grain” to deduce meanings that the original record-keeping did not intend but accidentally revealed.
The book comes in seven chapters. The first chapter is on domestication: the domestication, if one wants to put it that way, of fire, that of beasts of burden, and the corresponding domestication of humans. Control of fire by early peoples allowed for the first large-scale reshaping of the landscape, as areas were burned to provide spaces for new growth that could be more productively foraged. In fact, by the modern era, everything on Earth could be considered to be fire-adapted; Scott thinks of the use of fire as the actual advent of the Anthropocene. Fire is of course also used in cooking, an externalization of digestion that allowed for more efficient nutrient intake, allowing the growth of human brains and other biological changes.
After fire came the first examples of human sedentism along the littoral of the wetlands. Traditional narratives have humans settling down and then heading right into agriculture, but the actual timeline of sedentism predates the domestication of grains and of animals. Thus, there are long gaps between sedentism, agrarianism, and the state; which many, such as my Neal Stephenson example, incorrectly think was the natural result of agrarianism in order to provide logistics for large-scale irrigation. In fact, this reliance on the idea of irrigation’s necessity for farming ignores the fact that Mesopotamia (the region focused on in the book) was much greener a few thousand years ago, and its overlapping ecotones provided abundance to hunter-gatherers, who had no need to scratch a dreary-but-safe living out of the soil through farming, as they must in the traditional narrative. There are about four thousand years of a semi-sedentary mixed lifestyle before states arise. Cultivation likely existed alongside hunting/gathering and pastoralism, likely just in the form of flood-retreat agriculture to provide extra food.
Chapter 2 details the advent and consequences of the “domus,” the fixed habitation that Scott also refers to as the “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp,” in what I hope is a joke. As noted previously, there was a lot of domestication in the form of landscape modification and management of ecosystems before planting and pastoralism came along. Modern researchers do not know why humans switched to primarily cultivation; the back-against-the-wall theory that this was the only thing that could provide enough steady calories to survive is no longer considered likely, according to Scott, because the evidence is that agrarianism first developed in resource-rich areas, not the resource-poor areas that one would expect in this formulation. In any event, it did develop, and the result was that a whole new ecosystem was created, that of scavengers and parasites around humans and their crops and animals, all three of which were also modified by their environment. Domesticated life was, in aggregate, smaller, sicker, more fecund, and less reactive to stress. In some ways we were duller too: agrarians are slave to a specific plant and its cycles, and were no longer the opportunists and generalists of hunter-gatherer days. We had only one almanac and not a whole library of them, as Scott puts it.
The third chapter is, correspondingly, on zoonosis, the spread of diseases from animals to humans. Humans turned to sedentism in roughly 10,000 BC, for unknown reasons as noted above but perhaps as part of a “broad spectrum revolution” of more intensive exploitation of an array of resources after over-hunting eliminated big game options. Another (or a corresponding) possibility is that sedentism was necessary because of the “cold snap” of the Younger Dryas from 10,500 to 9,600 BC, which reduced the amount of habitable land and thus necessitated more intense use of the land that remained; though it developed (according to Scott) in areas of little population pressure, so this may not be the right explanation. In any event, after the switch to sedentism, there is about five thousand years, from 10,000 to 5,000 BC roughly, of stagnant population. It is likely that the new diseases that developed and spread from the unprecedented concentration in the domus was to blame. On top of this, the eventual limited diet of agrarianism leads to nutritional deficiencies, which may have been a compounding factor as people were weakened for the new diseases. That being said, despite this demographic bottleneck, the writing was on the wall by this point in favor of sedentism, because, as noted earlier, one of the effects was more fecundity, improved fertility rates. These rates don’t have to be that much better than that of hunter-gatherers and other non-sedentary people (pastoralists, swiddeners (slash-and-burn agriculturalists), shoreline foragers, etc.), and indeed they weren’t, in order for sedentary people to win out in the long run.
Chapter 4 notes again the gap in the timeline – people were sedentary for a long time before they were agricultural, and were agricultural for a long time before they formed states. Settlement, agriculture, trade, and even small-scale towns were necessary conditions for the formation of states, but were not sufficient ones. In Mesopotamia around 3300 to 2300 BC, the first states formed in alluvial soil areas (where the river had deposited silt); perhaps locations that people were pushed to by climate change and the receding marshes. People living in marsh areas or alongside wetlands did not form states – they were still able to live off the fat of the land, as the overlapping maritime, river, marsh, and arid environments provided an abundance of food and resources so that they weren’t dependent on only one thing that they must order their lives around.
The state needed to be built on grain. Grain was the tax collector’s ideal crop. It was easy to spot and to count, easy to gather, came on a predictable schedule, and could be sub-divided to infinity for distribution or payment. Scott contrasts this with potatoes, which can be hidden and remain in the ground, are of irregular size, must be dug up, and can sprout multiple times in a year. It is easy to hide your potatoes from The Man, it is hard to hide your grain. The book doesn’t have much to say about the specific process of forming states, but my assumption is that basically the toughest people around force others to grow grain, then take a fraction of it. Presumably there was a lot of experimentation and Darwinism that led to this successful formula. After time, states developed things like walls (to keep their grain laborers in and to keep raiders out) and writing, in order to maximize their efficiency, and evolve from plunder into extraction.
The fifth chapter was about this control of population by the early states. The state apparatus was dependent on the production of a surplus, and needed a population centralized in their fertile riverine areas to produce and transport that surplus. Despite the fecundity advantage, early states often needed to replenish their subject population – war captives, slaves, forcibly resettled populations, and so on were all put to work in the grain mines. The extent of slavery in early states is contentious but Scott thinks that it was likely widespread; just like in the antebellum South, slaves were there to do the dirty work so that the next level up wouldn’t get restless. Slaves are of course not the focus of ancient writings, and must be found in reading “against the grain” like many other topics. However, in many societies with large-scale slaving apparatuses or that practiced raiding-based “booty capitalism,” the descendants were likely integrated into society within a few generations to keep the wheel turning.
As one might guess from the discussion of epidemics, of monocultures, and of restless populations, there were many threats to a state. Early states were rare and were frequently subject to collapse, or perhaps “collapse.” While there were some dramatic falls at the hands of enemies or of massive floods or whatnot, in some cases a “collapse” was really just dissolution back into constituent parts, modular and self-sufficient farming communities that, if anything, were better off without having someone extract taxes at them from the point of a spear. Collapse was bad for elites in the core area receiving (and living off) surpluses, and was somewhat bad for trade, literacy, record-keeping, specialization, and social complexity; but it is likely that most collapses were just a re-dispersal and decentralization of population and not a mass death event. They may not have reduced health, wealth, or nutrition, and may have in fact improved them. The lamentation of collapse comes from, in Scott’s suggestion, the “heroic era” of archaeology that focused on monumental buildings and written records, and most keenly feels their absence. I was interested in that kind of archaeology too, back in the day, but I’m glad that researchers have broadened their focus to more humble sites, and more ordinary people.
States could collapse dramatically in a flood or a war or an epidemic, but they are, if anything, more likely to have dwindled and faded over a few generations because the deforestation of their up-river areas could have caused siltation and salinization of their fields. Other than causing dramatic collapse, warfare and other crises could have caused early “statesmen” to draw too heavily on their core agricultural regions (those whose exploitation was economically feasible), thus hastening unrest and flight. Scott finds it likely that population was constantly “leaking” from state areas as people preferred the non-state life to agrarianism, hence the constant replenishment needed. In summation of this sixth chapter: various Dark Ages weren’t necessarily bad, their loss in social complexity was balanced by decentralization and the alleviation of some of the harms caused by sedentism and agrarianism.
The seventh and final chapter concerns those “barbarians” who were left outside of the state, hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and other non-sedentary (or non-permanently-sedentary) peoples who lived in all the ways that state people didn’t but nevertheless interacted with, and came to be defined by, the state. Scott refers to the time from the rise of the first state to the assertion of total state hegemony (which he ballparks at 1600 CE with the rise of gunpowder empires) as “the golden age of the barbarians.” The new concentrated states were easy pickings for barbarians, who were able to raid them or trade with them. The state was in some ways just a particularly rich patch of forage.
These barbarians weren’t necessarily “pristine” barbarians who had never been part of the state; some were likely people who had fled the state for one reason or another for the improved conditions on the outside, and the freedom from exploitation noted above. This natural population exchange especially picked up speed as dying states spiraled down. Barbarians were often categorized as “tribes” by the states they interacted with, but this often started as an administrative fiction based on lifestyle or geography; though the fiction might take on a life of its own as the state grew closer in one way or another.
States were reliant on trade with barbarians, as the alluvial plans good for farming didn’t necessarily provide other important resources. This worked out well for the barbarians, as the other way to get resources from the state was by raiding. This was inherently an unstable prospect, however, as the elimination or destabilization of the state might “kill the goose that laid the golden egg.” Instead, successful interactions often evolved into a protection racket, as states paid barbarians tribute to refrain from raiding. Eventually, barbarians might evolve from an agglomeration of nearby peoples and state outcasts through a tribe-on-paper into a real tribe that acted as a “dark twin” of a state, a pastoral (or what-have-you) confederation exploiting the fragile surplus of an agricultural population in the same way that a state elite did. This “dark twin” is in fact the creation of the state itself, as the barbarians have congregated at its borders in order to trade with or prey upon it, and would themselves be dispersed if the state weren’t there. This dichotomy might dissolve if the barbarians conquered the state to rule it, as happened in China or with Osman in Anatolia; or if the state subsumed the barbarians to be its mercenary army against other states and their barbarian protection rackets, as happened in many circumstances. The empowerment of states in this way, and through trade, and through merely allowing their survival, was also the barbarians “[digging] their own graves,” as Scott puts it in the book’s final line.
I liked this book a lot, I think it greatly expanded my horizons on “barbarian studies.” I have always considered myself to be someone happy with the millennia-long civilizational paradigm, as someone who enjoys modern comforts, survives because of modern technology, consumes a lot of written material, and literally works for an organ of the state. I have the positive left-wing view of states as a collective undertaking to better humanity’s lot and raise us to new heights, and channel our animal instincts into the public good. I am too far gone (and the world is too far gone) for this book to have booted me out of that paradigm, but it has given me some background to think more critically about it. I will especially bring it to bear on the topic of collapse; I have reached the point in my intellectual development where I am able to process that the end of a system where an exploited peasantry props up the existence of an “enlightened” scribe class is a good thing, and that a “dark age” is not as bad as Voltaire wanted us to think. The book remains clinically detached from the instance of collapse itself, though, in a way that Cline does not in his book about the collapse of an international system. One has to exist on a high intellectual plain to examine these topics in this way, and not get into the visceral side of things. That quibble aside, it is definitely something that makes me better appreciate those tantalizing and mysterious gaps, or cracks, in the historical record. It’s not impossible that everything was just going fine.