Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Paperback – July 24, 2018

James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale. He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker. A while back, he decided to update two lectures on agrarian societies that he had been giving for 20 years. He began studying recent research and — gasp! — realized that significant portions of traditional textbook history had the strong odor of moldy cultural myths. So, a quick update project turned into five years, and resulted in a manuscript that I found to be remarkably stimulating, from cover to cover — Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.While the human saga is several million years old, and Homo sapiens appeared on the stage maybe 200,000 years ago, the origin myth I was taught began just 10,000 years ago, with domestication and civilization. We were transformed from hungry, dirty, dolts into brilliant philosophers, scientists, and artists, who lived indoors, wore cool clothes, and owned lots of slaves.As a curious animal interested in ecological sustainability, I’m amazed that every other animal species has, for millions of years, lived on this planet without destabilizing the climate, spurring mass extinctions, poisoning everything, and generally beating the <bleep> out of the planet. These are the unintended consequences of our reckless joyride in a hotrod of turbocharged progress. They define the primary aspects of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the era when tropical primates with huge throbbing brains left permanent scars on the planet.Experts argue about when the Anthropocene began. Did it start with the sorcery of nuclear fission, or the curse of fossil-powered industry? Many point to the domestication of plants and animals, and the birth of civilization. Scott is among the few who say it began with the domestication of fire, which occurred at least 400,000 years ago, sparked by our Homo erectus ancestors. Every other species continues to survive via the original power source, the sun’s wildfire. Plants grow green solar panels that produce the nutrients that keep the fauna alive and happy, a perfectly brilliant design.Imagine waving a magic wand, and eliminating everything in the world made possible by domesticated fire — no metal, no concrete, no plastic, no glowing screens. Would humans still be around? Fire historian Stephen Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness.” We wouldn’t be able to survive outside the tropics. The plant and animal species that enabled civilization lived north of the tropics. Without domesticated fire, we’d still be wild and free — and far less crowded.Scott focused on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states. What are states? They are hierarchical societies, with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding. The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice. Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store than yams or breadfruit. States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.The moldy myths imply that domesticated plants and animals, sedentary communities, and fixed-field agriculture emerged in a close sequence. Wrong! There is scattered evidence of sedentary hunter-gatherers by 12,000 B.C. Domestication began around 9000 B.C. It took at least four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3100 B.C.Moldy myths assume that the Fertile Crescent has been a desert since humans first arrived. Wrong! Southern Mesopotamia used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers. There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities. “Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush. They ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.” In a land of abundance, it would have been absolutely stupid to pursue the backbreaking drudgery of agriculture.Moldy myths often give us the “backs-to-the-wall” explanation for the shift to agriculture, which was far more work. Simply, we had run out of new alternatives for feeding a growing mob, while hunting was producing less meat, and wild plants were producing less food. We had no choice! But in the Middle East, there appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the decline of either game animals or forage.Cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity. Every year, floods deposited silt along the riverbanks, moist fertile soil ready for sowing. So, flood-retreat farming would have required far less toil than tilling fields, while producing useful nutrients. More nutrients enabled further population growth, which eventually pressed the shift to miserable labor-intensive irrigated agriculture.The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household). In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.” As a result of living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and behaviorally. In this process, wild species became domesticated. Over time, some species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their survival. Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors. Pig brains are a third smaller. Protected from predators, regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, they became less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs. They reached reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.” The domus was a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites. Unnatural crowds of animals spent their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water. It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for infectious diseases. Humans share a large number of diseases with other domus animals, including poultry (26), rats and mice (32), horses (35), pigs (42), sheep and goats (46), cattle (50), and dogs (65).Other writers have noted that, prior to contact, Native Americans had no epidemic diseases. With very few domesticated animals, they lacked state of the art disease incubators. Scott goes one step further, asserting that prior to the domus, there was little or no epidemic disease in the Old World. “The importance of sedentism and the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand.” Thus, the humans that first crossed from Siberia to North America 13,000 years ago were free of disease because little or no infectious disease existed anywhere in the world!Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble. “Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.” Once harvested and stored in the granary, grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi. The biggest vulnerability of states was that they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two staple grains. Crops could be wiped out by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.Mesopotamian life was largely human powered. Workers grew the grain that the tax man hauled away to the plump elites. More workers meant more wealth and power for the big shots. In screw-brained hierarchical cultures (including ours), it’s impossible to have too much wealth. Therefore, peasants and slaves were husbanded like livestock. The diabolical “more is better” disease was devastating. Some believe that monumental walls were built as much for defense as to prevent taxpayers and slaves from escaping to freedom.Early states were vulnerable in many ways, and they frequently collapsed. Collapse sounds like a tragedy. But it could simply mean breaking up into smaller components. Larger was not necessarily better. A drought might cause a state’s population to disperse. For the non-elites, life in a Mesopotamian state could be oppressive and miserable. Sometimes, collapse was a cause for celebration. Yippee!Anyway, the book is fascinating. Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders, and on and on. It’s an outstanding book!WARNING: The expensive Kindle edition contains numerous charts, maps, and diagrams. When downloaded to the Kindle for PC application (v 1.20.1), most are unreadably small, even on a 24” monitor. Clever nerds can tediously capture the images to another application, expand them, and read them. Strong reading glasses (3.75 lens or higher) also work with a big monitor.

This is a controversial, if highly erudite, book. It owes its title to a hymn sung in ancient Ur ahead of the construction of a major temple, when the ordinary life of slaves and enslaved debtors was temporarily suspended in favor of a brief egalitarian moment (pp. 162 – 164). The main thesis of the book is that civilization as we know and celebrate it is a prison, of sorts.The topic is rather fashionable. Everybody who’s read the 2011 blockbuster Sapiens can repeat the cute little argument about how wheat domesticated man, rather than the other way round, citing that it was man, not wheat, who moved from the wild into a domus -Latin for house- to pursue agriculture and tend to his crops. And that foragers had a much healthier and varied diet, lived better and longer and grew to be taller than their civilized counterparts inside the walls.This is a rather more serious effort, in that it provides the reader with a very wide background before any such thesis is made. And it sets the record straight: when it comes to the eating, it’s man who eats the wheat / pork / whatever so that’s who’s been doing the domesticating. But there is a story to tell here and there’s a message too.First things first: not only was the history we’ve been taught written from the perspective of the paradigm that prevailed, but any gaps that had to be filled were filled from that angle too. And now that we know better, it’s time to set a number of important records straight:1. Man had been cultivating the earth for millenia before he settled down in cities; the idea that once man had discovered how to work the earth there was no turning back is a false narrative.2. For millenia, hunter-gatherers had the better diet, better life and more leisure than their agriculturalist counterparts who worked the land in and around city walls.3. The original agriculture-based settlements in Mesopotamia only survived because they were placed on the cusp of four different climate zones and took advantage of other sources of food, besides, like fishing.4. Most illnesses and plagues we know originated only after man settled down with his domestic animals in one place; prior to the establishment of these settlements it was impossible for smallpox, measles etc. to spread, for lack of hosts. Possibly even malaria and other illnesses were caused by (inadvertently) man-made marshes, in combination with the emergence of cities.5. The original agriculture-based settlements were unstable and constantly on the verge of catastrophe due to two vulnerabilities: to any disasters involving their main crop and to the new threat of the plague.6. The original city-state may be unthinkable in the absence of slave labor to do much of the drudgery.7. The barbarians who lived outside the walls and the city dwellers were, first and foremost, each other’s trading partners and had complementary lives (much as city dwellers lived under the constant threat of being raided)8. As far back as we can look, slaves were both an important trading commodity and the main objective of war, which was seldom, if ever, waged for territory. Territory was ample.After he gets all these basics straight, the author shows his true colors and moves on to the meat of his book, a paean to the barbarian life and a lament for the fact that it is no longer a legitimate choice. Bottom line, the man is an anarchist!This is the place to mention that every single page of the book contains a lesson. If it’s not a lesson in history or anthropology or sociology, you’re always guaranteed a lesson in English! Keep a dictionary handy as you’re reading this. It’s written for the author’s university professor colleagues, not for you and me. We’re welcome to read it, but we’re not the intended audience.I say it’s a lesson in English, but actually I learned plenty of Greek from it too! So I’m reading the word zoonoses (the title of chapter 3, no less) and I’m like “what on earth is a zoonosos?” I’ve spoken the language for fifty years, so I’m like “OK, zoon is animal and nosos is illness, so OK, I’ve got this” but it was like that the whole time. The dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a total amateur compared to James C. Scott, basically. I’d never given any thought to the fact that “parasite” means “next to” (para) “the wheat” (sitos) so that was a bit of a knockout, too.He repeats a lot. The reason is that every chapter can stand alone. But the fourth time I read that the purpose of the Great Wall of China was not to keep out the Mongols, as our historians claim, but actually to wall-in Chinese laborers who might be entertaining notions of escaping their drudgery and join the much happier savages north of the border, I thought I’d had enough. Hadrian’s Wall gets described both ways, btw. So there are some consistency issues there too.Oh, and he DOES NOT WRAP UP. It’s chapter, chapter, chapter and then The End.So it’s a bad book and a great book at the same time, if you know what I mean. And after he’s set the scene, the author lets rip:On wheat, for example: do you want to know what’s special about wheat? It’s that the taxman can tax it efficiently. Your whole crop has to be planted at the same time and it needs to be harvested at the same time. You can’t hide from him. Oh, and after you’ve harvested it, it’s not only simple to keep, it’s also infinitely divisible and transportable, so the taxman can come take it from you and even pay his army with it. He can’t do that with potatos, can he? So wheat and barley are favored by the state because it’s got you, the farmer, where it wants.On writing he goes one better: did you know that on at least three separate instances (Chinese, Greek and cuneiform writing) the whole point was for the state to keep tabs on things and quite possibly had zero correspondence to speech? Greek and cuneiform writing both preceded by 500 years the next version of writing (imported from the Phoenicians in our case) that was any good for poetry, for example. Indeed, the Chinese form of writing persists to our days precisely because it does not correspond to how anybody talks, and can thus be used by conquered peoples as well!Scott has a field day with “collapse” as well: who is to say a civilization collapsed just because our archaeologists have found that the palace was deserted? Why do we frown on the “geometric” period that followed the Doric invasion of Greece around 1,100 BC when it gave us the Iliad and the Odyssey? Yes, the early state was extremely fragile, but that’s something to celebrate. What’s so awful about peasants abandoning the drudgery of their fields and going back to becoming hunter-gatherers? So why do historians want to see grand monuments? He provides the answers too: because our history is written to serve our current polity, which likes to draw a straight line back to the grand civilizations that built the monuments, that’s why!Predictably, then, the author’s admiration is reserved for the barbarians and the best ideas in the book are the ones regarding the demise of their lifestyle. They lost out for a number of reasons:1. Demographic reason #1: Barbarian women who were “on the run” could only have one baby every four years, because they had to be mobile; settled women did not only have worse skeletal structure, bad knees and curled toes to show for a life confined to drudgery, they also had a baby every year. Once the first five millenia of settled life had gone by and settled people had developed resistance to the illnesses that came with their settled lifestyle, the growth in their population left that of the barbarians in the shade.2. Demographic reason #2: the barbarian peoples were not naturally selected against and therefore did not develop resistance to the epidemics, as best exemplified by the decimation that befell Native Americans after the conquistadores arrived.3. They often sold other barbarians to the state as slaves, further diminishing their collective ranks.4. They often fought as mercenaries for the states, chiefly helping them conquer other barbarians. It was Celts to subjugated other Celts for the Romans, apparently.5. We’ve now filled all space; they’ve got nowhere to go!The last chapter of the book is, almost inevitably, a paean to the barbarian life and a celebration of their golden age. The author is genuinely sad that their lifestyle is no longer an option. Sad enough that he could not get himself to finish the book!No idea how accurate this all was, but it was well worth reading!

Excellent research on how and why humans moved from being hunter/gathereres to agriculture. Separates out the myths we had assumed were true and gets down to what is known and what is still speculation. I learned a lot, such as that it took 4000 years to transition, that hunter/gatherating was somewhat prevelant in Europe until the renaissance, that agriculture isn't the big advancement we assumed it was. The authors also touches all the problems associated with it, such as slavery, poor nutrition, and more.

James Scott rules