Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott (Yale University Press, 2017). Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one already: so there are these hunter-gatherers, right, and one of the things they like to gather as they roam around following the herds of gazelles or whatever is the large, carbohydrate-rich seeds of local grasses. Then one day some bright soul gets the idea of planting those seeds on purpose, humans select for plants with exciting mutations like “have really big seeds” and “don’t shatter your stalk and scatter your really big seeds everywhere when they’re ripe, just hang out and wait to be reaped,” and people start staying in one place to tend their fields. Well, it turns out that agriculture can create a lot more calories than foraging, so all of a sudden your society has this nice surplus that can go towards supporting non-food-producing specialists like dedicated craftsmen, priests, bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) and kings to expedite and organize all that agricultural labor, and, hey presto, you have civilization.
Excellent review! I will have to pick up a copy of this over the winter.
I find myself wondering if the best way to think of these sorts of society's isn't state/nonstate, or agrarian/hunter gatherer, but rather by why percentage of their population is engaged in what sorts of roles. Every society does a bit of everything, but agrarian societies are far more focused on farming with only a relatively few people who make their living hunting predominantly, etc. That leaves the state as a sort of growing profession; in early stages almost no one can make a living doing "state things", but over time it becomes more and more possible. The state things people do are in some cases beneficial, and in other cases parasitic. In effect, the size of the state partially measures how many stationary bandits the society can support, because they are a decidedly mixed bag.
It also raises interesting questions when one thinks of the classes of jobs that change over time to become more dominant: hunter gatherers give way to agriculturalists, agriculturalists give way to industrial workers, industrial workers to service/knowledge workers. Government workers grow along side the others without necessarily giving way, but at the same time the knowledge worker (or maybe managerial worker) seems like a sub-type of government worker. Maybe they give way to some other sort? What comes next?
This was really fun and interesting - great read. It reminds me in places of “The Dawn Of Everything”. The Post-Roman world example gives pause for thought - it would be interesting to know how differences in well-being track after different “collapses” over time. I imagine it becomes quite contextual on environmental, geographical, trade factors etc
As always, a wonderful piece. Your discussion toward the end of the complexity of capabilities demonstrated by hunter-gatherers versus specialized agriculturalists and statists reminded me a bit of *Sand Talk* by Tyson Yunkaporta, an Australian Aborigine and anthropologist. In it, he talks about "indigenous ways of knowing," which has much of the political weighting you might expect, but I thought made some rather interesting points about the kind of things you know when you are deeply connected to a particular bit of land and its seasons, and the ways of knowing things you embrace when knowledge is mostly passed down through observation and verbal explanation, rather than by writing. I think you might find it interesting, and I'd certainly love to see a review on it if you end up reading it.
Excellent review! I will have to pick up a copy of this over the winter.
I find myself wondering if the best way to think of these sorts of society's isn't state/nonstate, or agrarian/hunter gatherer, but rather by why percentage of their population is engaged in what sorts of roles. Every society does a bit of everything, but agrarian societies are far more focused on farming with only a relatively few people who make their living hunting predominantly, etc. That leaves the state as a sort of growing profession; in early stages almost no one can make a living doing "state things", but over time it becomes more and more possible. The state things people do are in some cases beneficial, and in other cases parasitic. In effect, the size of the state partially measures how many stationary bandits the society can support, because they are a decidedly mixed bag.
It also raises interesting questions when one thinks of the classes of jobs that change over time to become more dominant: hunter gatherers give way to agriculturalists, agriculturalists give way to industrial workers, industrial workers to service/knowledge workers. Government workers grow along side the others without necessarily giving way, but at the same time the knowledge worker (or maybe managerial worker) seems like a sub-type of government worker. Maybe they give way to some other sort? What comes next?
This was really fun and interesting - great read. It reminds me in places of “The Dawn Of Everything”. The Post-Roman world example gives pause for thought - it would be interesting to know how differences in well-being track after different “collapses” over time. I imagine it becomes quite contextual on environmental, geographical, trade factors etc
"the landscape of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium in the seventh and sixth centuries BC"
Did you mean seventh and sixth millenniums BC?
As always, a wonderful piece. Your discussion toward the end of the complexity of capabilities demonstrated by hunter-gatherers versus specialized agriculturalists and statists reminded me a bit of *Sand Talk* by Tyson Yunkaporta, an Australian Aborigine and anthropologist. In it, he talks about "indigenous ways of knowing," which has much of the political weighting you might expect, but I thought made some rather interesting points about the kind of things you know when you are deeply connected to a particular bit of land and its seasons, and the ways of knowing things you embrace when knowledge is mostly passed down through observation and verbal explanation, rather than by writing. I think you might find it interesting, and I'd certainly love to see a review on it if you end up reading it.