James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, challenges the conventional wisdom about state formation in his insightful discussion. He argues that states did not emerge simultaneously with agriculture, but much later, and critiques the health implications of early farming. Scott explores the dynamics of domestication, the advantages of 'barbarian' societies, and the role of cereal crops in state power. He also reflects on the ongoing debates about urbanization and state success, hinting at his future project related to the Irrawaddy River.
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insights INSIGHT
Early State Assumptions
Common assumptions about early states are wrong: they didn't necessarily improve nutrition or health.
Domesticated plants existed long before agrarian societies, challenging the standard narrative.
insights INSIGHT
Health and Diet
Early states had worse nutrition and health than hunter-gatherers due to community infections and limited diets.
Hunter-gatherers had a broader diet and were less prone to disease outbreaks.
insights INSIGHT
State Formation and Population
States are not binary but exist on a spectrum of 'stateness'.
Early states faced population decline due to people fleeing and disease, leading to 'wars of capture'.
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In 'Against the Grain', James C. Scott argues that the early agrarian states were not the result of a voluntary transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles, but rather were formed through coercion and violence. He challenges the conventional narrative that agriculture led to settled communities, civilization, and improved living standards. Instead, Scott posits that these early states were often hierarchical, plagued by malnutrition and disease, and reliant on slavery. The book explores the domestication of fire, plants, and animals, and how these processes led to the control of populations and the emergence of states. It also discusses the tensions between states and non-state peoples, highlighting the adaptability and resilience of nomadic and hunter-gatherer communities.
We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place.
James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present.
New Books in Food 