The Quotidian

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

56 min read

Open Library: OL19721496W

Read e-book edition.

Overview

On the topic of God as King

Chapter 4

  • Kingship in Sumer was symbolised by the “rod and line” which were probably the tools of the surveyor and linked with information collecting, and therefore writing. It suggests the pre-historical path to political ascendancy was through monopolizing resources using these tools and elevating this role to supreme leader, i.e. a king

Key terms

Opinionated or invented

  • Late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps: proto-villages and towns. Species here means both flora and fauna

Common

  • Alluvium: fertile soil, created by water erosion, deposited downstream
    • Mesopotamian alluvium refers to the floodplain
  • Interregna (pl.): the time between the rule of kings, i.e. dark ages
  • Carrying capacity: the maximum population an environment (including how humans act on that environment) can support

Uncommon

  • Corvée labour: a form of taxation paid with labour as it is unpaid, intermittent, and, in the context of agriculture, seasonal
  • Pyrophytes: fire-adapted species
  • Autarkic: self-sufficient, not importing
  • Swiddening: clearing land by burning flora, usually trees and grasses

Key arguments

The continuum of state

State has features, so-called by the author ‘modules’, which appear on a continuum rather than is/isn’t relationship.

  • The earliest we generally consider as states are ‘pristine’, meaning well-defined and also well-documented in the archaeological record and from surviving writing
  • Settlements may wax into a state and wain in a ‘dark age’ to return to independence
    • for the author, independent federations are preferred
  • Not to be confused with civilization, which precedes the state and outlasts its coming and going

Agriculture

  • Precedes states
  • Less enjoyable lifestyle, harder
  • Narrow agriculture (fixed-field, mono-crop, etc.) bad for human well-being and non-existent without state force
    • Irrational dependence on narrow food sources, in contrast with hunter-gatherer extensive food webs
    • Vulnerable to failure due to weather, pests, theft
    • Poor diet
    • Hard labour
  • Better seen on a continuum with the collection of wild grains and the general creation of ecologies for desired flora and fauna to thrive and undesired removed or made uncomfortable
    • The use of fire here is primary, i.e. swiddening
    • Forest gardens

How did early states eventually thrive to take over (much of) the world?

  • Domestication, for all species, leads to
    • Higher rates of mortality, BUT
    • Higher rates of reproduction = combined to a net positive population growth which allows for the spread of peoples
  • Climate change caused as retreating of existing semi-concentrated populations and reduced the available strategies for food without the peoples dispersing as climate ‘refugees’ to other climates, as they might have done in previous eras, due to their habilitation to the domus

State capture, coercion, flight, and surplus creation from freedom

  • Flight was common and state walls were as much about keeping people in as keeping invaders out
  • Peasantry, or pre-peasantry nonstate primitives, do not have a surplus or an incentive to create one, the logic of surplus is a feature of the state and populations must be compelled to create a surplus as they would, if left to their own devices, “consume” it in leisure or cultural activity

Collapse, interregna, and dark ages, a reverse of valence and timeline

  • More frequent than often assumed, and in fact (bold claim) more common than times of rulership
    • Accused that states use propaganda to misrepresent their stability, lineage, and scope of rule
  • Only dark in terms of the available data, e.g. the archaeological record
  • Likely to be an improvement in well-being for people compared with life in the state/empire
  • Often the result of diseases of large communities, i.e. epidemics, which was perhaps the main contributor to collapse
  • Since states are coercive to the anarchist author, seen positively as “the destruction of an oppressive social order”

Barbarians rethought

  • The ‘shadow empire’ of the settled state
    • Dependent on and parasitic of settled people and the state in particular
    • Absorb ‘leakage’ of people
  • Life likely to be better in many ways, from health to freedom
  • A political category, not a cultural one, seen through the eyes of the state
  • Vying for the right to exploit settled peoples through raids, and therefore no different in this respect from state elites
  • Raiding, however, less important (by proportion of actual activity) that trade
    • barbarians, especially when mounted, relied on traders

Characteristics of a state

  • Fragile, liable to frequent collapse
    • Allegory is children creating a human pyramid

Note however that it is central to the book that none of these things, perhaps barring writing, is actually invented by the state but are various ‘modules’ that are combined and intensified by state builders, see below.

The modules of a state

Some of these are related or overlapping, e.g. social hierarchy and coerced labour, with tax collection and grain production, etc.

Pre-existing

  • Sedentism, staying in one place, most often only temporarily with frequent abandonment
    • Becomes clear that this should not be seen as collapsing but as natural balancing and opportunistic migration
  • Grain production
    • Tax crop (domestic appropriation)
    • Usually one of wheat, barley, rice, or maize
    • Must have determinate, predictable, simultaneous harvest
    • Must be visible above ground (legible), therefore excluding tubers
    • Must be measurable to even small quantities and therefore must be divisible without destruction, i.e. small grains with husks or dryable
  • Confinement, population enclosure, ‘protection’ of peoples
  • Coerced labour, up to and including chattel slavery
  • Social hierarchy
    • Most often in many more levels of stratification than found in non-state peoples
    • Often a king or similar at apex
  • War
    • In early states raids for slaves and materials, not territory
    • Key way to replenish ‘leaked’ population
  • Skill specializations
    • Hardening to professions, classes, or castes
  • Water transport

Required ‘innovations’

  • Tax collection
  • Walls
  • Specialized administrative staff
  • Writing
    • Record keeping of resources for taxation
    • Payments for labour
    • Debts and commercial activity (acknowledged influence of Debt by David Graeber though not emphasized)
    • This is how the state ‘sees’ (the topic of another of the author’s books, Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott)
    • More than 1000 years between invention of writing for practical purposes of bookkeeping to ‘elevated’ writing of ‘literature’
  • Landscaping
    • Intentional (irrigation, etc.)
    • Unintentional (deforestation, erosion, etc.)

Incompatibilities with the state (at least early and archaic states)

Ecology

  • Wetlands
    • Diverse and abundant food sources
    • Difficult to navigate in large groups, easy for small groups
    • Difficult to build settlements on
  • Mountainous regions
  • Deserts

Social and group styles and strategies

  • Physical mobility
  • Diverse sustainable sources
    • Many food webs, e.g. alluvial abundance foraging
    • Invisible farming, e.g. below ground tubers
    • Year-round or indeterminate fruiting/harvesting, e.g. many legumes

Unanswered questions:

  • What led to the first states being formed? Since this has happened independently around the world, it begs explanation and suggests something of a force or essential character of humanity expressed, or even (dare we say it) an inevitability
    • The author often expresses their astonishment that early states developed at all given the uniformly poor well-being of life there but fails to address this more than disbelief
    • Implies that it was spontaneous if the conditions are right, i.e. “I think of the polities of early Mesopotamia as gradually becoming states” due to the existence of necessary ‘modules’ of state creation
    • More or less confirms this, but leaves the reader to puzzle it together, that the various ‘modules’ of a state consist of a scale of ‘stateness’
  • How did the first elites for a given state project elevate themselves to high status among their peers and convince or compel others to take on lower status, creating social stratification?

✅ ANSWERED but it is not a key finding offered by the book. The lack of emphasis on this point is somewhat confusing.

  • How did the earliest states that persisted beyond a few decades or a hundred years actually persist? or did they?
    • The author notes in Chapter 3 that this is due to the growth rate of populations being positive, where an increase in fertility of “domesticated” women leads to birth rates that more than make up for higher infant mortality and poorer health
    • Implied that this allowed states to overtake other populations, though in many places the author is clear that states were short-lived in the early states period

Clarifying questions

  • If writing itself, as Lévi-Strauss apparently has it, is designed for exploitation over enlightenment, how has it become so central to exactly the latter? Is this best seen as parasitic? (the author often uses such terms)

Further thoughts

  • The idea of parallel civilizations, read in the new history of the West, would be interesting to incorporate here
  • Like many other writers with a left-wing, utopian bent, the author tacitly endorses their views plainly while explicitly, at least once or twice, rejecting romanticizing other periods. It seems that despite the negative sides of being non-state, the author would choose it and suggests that most have chosen it historically, implying that they are with the majority on the right side of sense.
  • On the book itself and its writing, there is far too much repetition of arguments and ideas here. It is unfortunate as the ideas are often well-put and persuasively argued, if a little thin in places and highly opinionated. Scanning through my highlights it is all too clear how there are only a few important arguments for the author and these are liberally peppers throughout the text.

Quotes by chapter

As I read this as e-book, there are no page numbers attached to quotes.

Although clunky, quotes are given stars, increasing with interest, which appear before the quote.

Prefatory quote:

Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. … It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind.

This is a central argument of the book.

Preface

This is…a self-consciously derivative project. It creates no new knowledge of its own but aims, at its most ambitious, to “connect the dots” of existing knowledge in ways that may be illuminating or suggestive.

  • This is quite true and worth bearing in mind, that the arguments of the books come from other original research and this is an introduction or overview, though opinionated

It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared. Sedentism and the first appearance of towns were typically seen to be the effect of irrigation and of states. It turns out that both are, instead, usually the product of wetland abundance. We thought sedentism and cultivation led directly to state formation, yet states pop up long after fixed-field agriculture appears.

…the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage…

…there is a strong case to be made that life outside the state—life as a “barbarian”—may often have been materially easier, freer, and healthier than life at least for none elites inside civilization.

Introduction

The first states in the Mesopotamian alluvium pop up no earlier than about 6,000 years ago, several millennia after the first evidence of agriculture and sedentism in the region.

…for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting-and-gathering bands.

…the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism. This massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize the state form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established, states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units of political order.

  • The author then denaturalizes the state form, implying that it is not the most logical or efficient political order, yet does not say here why

Historical humankind has been mesmerized by the narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first great agrarian kingdoms.

⭐️

[From the perspective of state builders,] Those who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt. In virtually all early agricultural settings the superiority of farming was underwritten by an elaborate mythology recounting how a powerful god or goddess entrusted the sacred grain to a chosen people.

  • Like the Egyptians, I believe it was Isis, mentioned later, and the Greeks but I can’t remember which. Note that in the Hebrew creation myth, the first children develop it on their own.
  • In Asimov’s Guide to the Bible by Isaac Asimov, his commentary speculates that the story of Cain (farmer and, implied by the name, smith) and Able (herdsman, animal husbandry) is allegorical of the transition from nomadism (and hunter-gatherer lifestyle) to settled farming (and smithing of metals). Though cursed, Cain kills Able and sets the superiority of farming in human affairs
  • There is also the punishment of Adam, the first man, as he who will have to work the soil hard for food, a divine mandate for farming

Pastoralists and hunting-and-gathering populations have fought against permanent settlement, associating it, often correctly, with disease and state control.

At the very least, we have no warrant at all for supposing that the sedentary “givens” of modern life can be read back into human history as a universal aspiration.

⭐️

The basic narrative of sedentism and agriculture has long survived the mythology that original supplied its charter. …the sequence of progress from hunting and gathering to nomadism to agriculture (and from band to village to town to city) was settled doctrine. Such views nearly mimicked Julius Caesar’s evolutionary scheme from households to kindreds to tribes to peoples to the state (a people living under laws)… [It is] imprinted on the brains of schoolgirls and schoolboys throughout the world.

  • This is discussed later and it is noted that tribes are themselves an invention of the state, who are in reality a more diffuse and complex collection of kin groups and peoples. This is revealed by the names of these so-called tribes, given by place name or pejorative characteristics in the state language, such as ‘robbers’
  • On the influence to children, we can link here to the Civilization game series and its reference to children’s history books for reference materials, mentioned in Sid Meier’s Memoir! by Sid Meier

(continuing from the above)

Each step is presumed to represent an epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being: more leisure, better nutrition, longer life expectancy, and, at long last, a settled life that promoted the household arts and the development of civilization.

⭐️

Long before the deliberate planting of seeds in ploughed fields, foragers had developed all the harvest tools, winnowing baskets, grindstones, and mortars and pestles to process wild grains and pulses.

⭐️

…a great deal of archaeology and history throughout the world is state-sponsored and often amounts to a narcissistic exercise in self-portraiture.

…written documents…are invariably state-centric texts: taxes, work units, tribute lists, royal genealogies, founding myths, laws. … The larger the state archives left behind, generally speaking, the more pages (in contemporary history books) devoted to that historical kingdom and its self-portrait.

On a generous reading, until the past four hundred years, one-third of the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and independent horticulturalists, while states, being essentially agrarian, were confined largely to that small portion of the globe suitable for cultivation. Much of the world’s population might never have met that hallmark of the state: a tax collector.

  • Influenced by Graeber or his influences here as it echos his claim, an important one, since it goes against popular ideas of a world totally divided into states, at least claimed
  • Uncertain if the author is being dishonest here in their claimed bias of “one-third of the globe”. It implies it means one-third of the population of Earth but careful reading will show that it must mean of the physical globe itself. Does this mean only habitable land or include inhabitable zones like Antarctica or even the seas?

⭐️⭐️

In most cases, interregna, fragmentation, and “dark ages” were more common that consolidated, effective rule.

  • Bold claim, we must look at the sources for this. It is a central argument, coming up several times, and is one of several that is a strike against the mythic idea of a continuous civilizational project from farming to the modern age.

⭐️⭐️

In a good part of the world, the state, even when it was robust, was a seasonal institution. … Despite the state’s self-image and its centrality in most standard histories, it is important to recognize that for thousands of years after its first appearance, it was not a constant but a variable, and a very wobbly one at that in the life of much of humanity.

…it appears that flight from the early state domains to the periphery was quite common, but, as it contradicts the narrative of the state as a civilizing benefactor of its subjects, it is relegated to obscure legal codes.

⭐️

It turns out that while it provides ideal conditions for state making, the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp involved a lot more drudgery than hunting and gathering and was not at all good for your health. Why anyone not impelled by hunger, danger, or coercion would willingly give up hunting and foraging or pastoralism for full-time agriculture is hard to fathom.

  • Again, using incredulity and astonishment that is close to a lack of imagination. I would say, then fathom it and explain why!

It is almost a metaphysical question who is the servant of whom (of domesticated flora and fauna)—at least until it comes time to eat.

⭐️⭐️

…there is no reason why a forager in most environments would shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion.

  • Finally, makes it plain

Diseases with which we are now familiar—measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other community acquired infections—appeared for the first time in the early states.

⭐️⭐️

Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery.

⭐️

It follows, I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence is spread across several food webs, as it is for hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, marine foragers, and so on, a state is unlikely to arise, inasmuch as there is no readily assessable and accessible staple to serve as a basis for appropriation.

Contrary to some earlier assumptions, the state did not invent irrigation as a way of concentrating population, let alone crop domestication; both were the achievements of prestate peoples. That the state has often done, once established, however, is to maintain, amplify, and expand the agr-ecological setting that is the basis of its power by what we might call state landscaping.

…wheat, barley, rice, or maize—the four crops that account, even today, for more than half of the world’s caloric consumption…

The early state strives to create a legible, measured, and fairly uniform landscape of taxable grain crops and to hold on this land a large population available for corvée labor, conscription, and, of course, grain production.

…what is a state anyway? I think of the polities of early Mesopotamia as gradually becoming states. That is, “stateness,” in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgement of more or less. A polity with a king, specialized administrative staff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, and tax collection and distribution is certainly a “state” in the strong sense of the term. … Before (Ur III for example in the fourth millennium BCE) there were polities with substantial populations, commerce, artisans, and, it seems, town assemblies, but one could argue about the degree to which these characteristics would satisfy a strong definition of stateness.

What is required (for a state to arise) is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized. Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making.

  • This reminds me of the bayou in True Detective, where the reach of the state is infrequent and people do not have access to many social supports, such as schools, and treat agents of the state with suspicion

Evidence for the extensive use of unfree labor—war captives, indentured servitude, temple slavery, slave markets, forced resettlement in labor colonies, convict labor, and communal slavery (for example, Sparta’s helots)—is overwhelming. … The ancient world clearly shared Aristotle’s judgement that the slave was, like a plough animal, a “tool for work.”

⭐️⭐️

…the great walls of China were built as much to keep Chinese taxpayers in as to keep the barbarians out.

⭐️⭐️

Early states surely did not invent the institution of slavery, but they did codify and organize it as a state project.

Many kingdoms were, in fact, confederations of smaller settlements, and “collapse” might mean no more than that they have, once again, fragmented into their constituent parts, perhaps to reassemble later.

⭐️

Even in the case of, say, flight or rebellion against taxes, corvée labor, or conscription, might we not celebrate—or at least not deplore—the destruction of an oppressive social order?

⭐️

Civilizations should never be confused with the states that they typically outlast, nor should we unreflectively prefer larger units of political order to smaller units.

  • showing their anarchist, probably federalist opinions

⭐️

Barbarians are not essentially a cultural category; they are a political category to designate populations not (yet?) administered by the state.

The lowland kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot (to ‘barbarians’), in the long run, than as a site of plunder.

Chapter 1, The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and … Us

(Fire) has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool. …fire has a life of its own…(and therefore) is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.

Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world—a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide.

⭐️

Unlike optimal foraging theory that takes the disposition of the natural world as given and asks how a rational actor would distribute his or her efforts in procuring food, what we have here is a deliberate disturbance ecology in which hominids create, over time, a mosaic of biodiversity and a distribution of desirable resources more to their liking. Evolutionary biologists term such activity, combining location, repositioning of resources, and physical safety, niche construction: think “beaver.”

In the archaeological record the surge in brain size coincides with hearths and the remains of meals.

…we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. …we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. …it is no exaggeration to say that we are utterly dependent on fire. It has in a real sense domesticated us.

…the so-called “founder crops” (were) the cereals and legumes: lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax (for cloth)…

Permanent proto-urban settlements emerge in the wetlands of the southern alluvium near the Persian Gulf around 6,500 BCE. The southern alluvium is not the earliest site of year-round settlements; nor is it the site where the first evidence of domesticated cereals appears.

…southern Mesopotamia not only was the site of the first state system, but it also directly influenced later state making elsewhere in the Middle East as well as in Egypt and India.

…sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little or no cereal cultivation.

⭐️

…the earliest large fixed settlements sprang up in wetlands, not arid settings; they relied overwhelmingly on wetland resources, not grain, for their subsistence; and they had no need of irrigation in the generally understood sense of the term. Insofar as any human landscaping was necessary in this setting, it was far more likely to be drainage than irrigation. The classical view that ancient Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong.
Southern Mesopotamia at that time (seventh and sixth millennia BCE) was not at all arid, but rather more like a foragers’ wetland paradise.

…the very breadth of a subsistence web—hunting, fishing, foraging, and gathering in a variety of ecological settings—poses insurmountable obstacles to the imposition of a single political authority.

The density and diversity of resources that are lower in the food chain, in particular, make sedentism more feasible. … The cornucopia of subsistence resources from lower trophic levels in the wetlands of Mesopotamia was perhaps uniquely favorable to the early creation of substantial sedentary communities.

A subsistence niche in the southern Mesopotamian wetlands was, compared with the risks of agriculture, more stable, more resilient, and renewable with little annual labor.

⭐️

…the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized food supply. …there is no doubt that it gives a radically different tempo to the lives of hunting and fishing peoples in contrast to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farms often read as indolence.

…the development later of large kingdoms and trading centers depended on an advantageous positioning for waterborne trade.

  • as well as transportation in general

One must not imagine these early sedentary villages as autarkic (totally self-sufficient) economies, consuming only what they produced. Even their hunter-gatherer ancestors were not at all isolated…

⭐️

Why, one might well ask, were the wetland origins of early sedentary villages and early urbanism overlooked? …the larger context of this historical myopia comes from the nearly indelible association of civilization with the major grains… Within this perspective, swamps, marches, fens, and wetlands generally have been seen as the mirror image of civilization—as a zone of untamed nature, a trackless waste, dangerous to health and safety. …civilizing swamps means draining them; the goal in each case is making arable grain lands. … The work of civilization, or more precisely the state, as we shall see, consists in the elimination of mud and its replacement by its purer constituents, land and water.

  • Indeed, in The Inferno by Dante Alighieri there are images of swamps in Dante’s infernal ecology, focusing on the dirt, stagnation and smells, associated with feces.

⭐️⭐️

A last and more speculative reason for the obscurity of wetland societies is that they were, and remained, environmentally resistant to centralization and control from above. They were based on what are now called “common property resources”—free-living plants, animals, and aquatic creatures to which the entire community had access. There was no single dominant resource that could be monopolized or controlled from the center, let alone easily taxed. … There was, therefore, little evidence of any hierarchy in such communities (as usually measured by differential grave goods). … A state—even a small protostate—requires a subsistence environment that is far simpler than the wetland ecologies we have examined.

  • This, though speculative, is a key argument for the author

The “social will to sedentism” should not be taken for granted.

  • Nor, the author might say, the social will to be a state subject, even in the modern age?

⭐️⭐️

A striking illustration of the shift (“of read(ing) back the much later stigmatization of pastoralists by agrarian states”) may be found in Anne Porter’s perceptive reading of the many variants of the The Epic of Gilgamesh. In the earliest versions, Gilgamesh’s soul companion Enkidu is merely a pastoralist, emblematic of a fused society of planters and herders. In versions a millennium later, he is depicted as subhuman, raised among beasts, and requiring sex with a woman to humanize him. Enkidu becomes, in other words, a dangerous barbarian who knows not grain, houses, or cities, or how to “bend the knee.” The “late” Enkidu is, as we shall see, the product of the ideology of a mature agrarian state.

  • The symbolic civilizing of men by women, dramatized as intercourse, appears frequently in other myths (independently?)

Historically, the subsistence safety of hunters and gatherers lay precisely in their mobility and the diversity of food sources to which they could lay claim.

⭐️

The periodic evidence throughout this long period of the abandonment of settlement for pastoralism and for migratory foraging attests to sedentism as a strategy rather than the ideology it would later become.

⭐️

The general problem with farming—especially plough agriculture—is that it involves so much intensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor: “flood-retreat” (also known as décrue or recession) agriculture. … This form of cultivation was almost certainly the earliest form of agriculture in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, not to mention the Nile Valley. It is still widely practices today and has been shown to be the most labor-saving of agriculture regardless of the crop being planted.

Chapter 2, Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex

Long before what many would consider “proper” agriculture, Homo sapiens had been deliberately rearranging the biotic world around itself with consequences both intended and unintended.

Give sufficient time to work its magic, slow motion forest “gardening” of this sort can create the soils, flora, and fauna that represent an abundant subsistence niche.

For animals, short of full domestication, hunters have long been burning to encourage browse for prey…

Domestication, in light of the deep history and massive effects of these practices, needs to be seen far more expansively than mere planting and pastoralism. Since the dawn of the species, Homo sapiens has been domesticating whole environments, not just species. …making us the world’s most successful invasive mammal…

⭐️

…much of the world was shaped by human activity (anthropogenic) well before the first societies based on fully domesticated wheat, barley, goats, and sheep appear in Mesopotamia. This is why, finally, the conventual “subspecies” of subsistence modes—hunting, foraging, pastoralism, and farming—make so little historical sense.

⭐️

The dominant explanation until fairly recently was what might be called the “backs-to-the-wall” theory of plough agriculture… (which proposes that) …full cultivation was taken up not as an opportunity but as a last resort when no other alternative was possible. … This demographic transition to drudgery has been read by many as metaphorically captured in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden to a world of toil. Despite its apparent economic logic, the backs-to-the-wall thesis, at least in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, fails to match the available evidence. …but it has not been replaced by a satisfactory alternative explanation for the spread of cultivation.

…evolutionary biologists and natural historians stress that certain species were “preadapted” (for domestication), having characteristics in the wild that predisposed them to life in the domus. Among the characteristics proposed are, above all, herd behavior and the social hierarchy that accompanies it…

(Domestication leads to) a reduction in male-female differences (sexual dimorphism)… (being) far more fertile than their wild cousins … neoteny: the relatively early attainment of adulthood … (a) reduction in brain size… higher mortality rates (though) the rates of fertility may increase so dramatically as to more than offset the losses through mortality. …declining tooth size, facial shortening, a reduction in stature and skeletal robustness…

…we are as much a product of self-domestication in both intended and unintended ways as other species of the domus are products of our domestication.

One might argue that the spread of sedentism transformed Homo sapiens into far more of a herd animal than previously.

⭐️⭐️

…only 240 human generations have elapsed since the first adoption of agriculture and perhaps no more than 160 generations since it became widespread.

The domestication of plants as represented ultimately by fixed-field farming, then, enmeshed us in an annual set of routines that organized our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structure, the built environment of the domus, and much of our ritual life. …the dominant cultivar [grown or managed food source] organizes much of our timetable.

⭐️⭐️

These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, and mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the center of any comprehensive account of the “civilizing process.” They strap agriculturalists to a minutely choreographed routine of dance steps; they shape their physical bodies, they shape the architecture and layout of the domus; they insist, as it were, on a certain pattern of cooperation and coordination. … Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants and, in Mesopotamia particularly, wheat or barley.

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…in the early Middle East, it is striking how the agricultural calendar came to determine much of public ritual life… [and] gods for particular grains.

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I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling.

Chapter 3, Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm

Why would foragers in their right mind choose the huge increase in drudgery entailed by fixed-field agriculture and animal husbandry unless they had, as it were, a pistol at their collective temples?

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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.

Time and time again there is evidence of a sudden and otherwise unexplained abandonment of previously well-populated sites.

Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding of 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.

The Epic of Gilgamesh provides perhaps the most powerful evidence when its hero claims that his fame will outlive death as he depicts a scene of bodies felled, probably by pestilence, floating down the Euphrates. Mesopotamians, it seems, lived in the ever-threatening shadow of fatal epidemics.

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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.

…the Akkadian word for epidemic disease “literally meant ‘certain death’ and could be applied equally to animal as well as human epidemics.”

The greater the genetic similarity—the less variation—the greater the likelihood that they will all be vulnerable to the same pathogen.

The diseases of crowding are also called density-dependent diseases or, in contemporary public health parlance, acute community infections. …[therefore] none of these diseases could have existed before the populations of the Neolithic. It also explains the generally vibrant good health of the New World populations—as well as their later vulnerability to the Old World pathogens.

Emblematic of this collateral effect was the concentration of animal and human wastes: in particular, feces.

The hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average. This presumably reflected their more varied and abundant diet. It would be hard, as we have explained, to exaggerate that variety.

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The literal meaning of “parasite,” from the original Greek root, is “beside the grain.”

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…the earliest civilizations and states…rested, however, on an extremely slender and fragile genetic foundation: a handful of crops, a few species of livestock, and a radically simplified landscape that had to be constantly defended against a reconquest by excluded nature. At the same time, the domus was never even remotely self-sufficient. It required a constant subsidy, as it were, from that excluded nature… Its [the domus’] very concentration and simplicity made it uniquely vulnerable to collapse. … An illness—of crops, livestock, or people—a drought, excessive rains, a plague of locusts, rats, or birds, could bring the whole edifice down in the blink of an eye. … How, despite its fragility, the domus module of fixed-field agriculture became a hegemonic, agro-ecological and demographic bulldozer that transformed much of the world in its image is something of a miracle.

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…how [did], in light of the pathogens Neolithic cultivators faced, this new form of agrarian life managed to survive at all, let alone thrive[?] The short answer, I believe, is sedentism itself. …sedentary agriculturalists…had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction—enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.

  • I missed the importance of this on the first reading and it is the key to the authors grudging acceptance of how sedentary, grain-based states took over the world all the way to the present age.

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Nonsedentary populations typically limit their reproduction deliberately. …achieved by delayed weaning, abortifacients, and neglect and infanticide. Furthermore, some combination of strenuous exercise with a lean and protein-rich diet meant that puberty arrived later, ovulation was less regular, and menopause arrived earlier.

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Given enough time, the small reproductive advantage of farmers was overwhelming.

Chapter 4, Agro-ecology of the Early State

(quote from chapter heading)

Ultimately men now down to the man, or group of men, who can and dare take over the hoard, the store of bread, the riches, to distribute among the people again. — D. H. Lawrence

…the embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation.

Although there were earlier proto-urban settlements elsewhere in the region outside the southern alluvium, it seems clear that urbanism, thanks to wetland abundance, was more persistent, durable, and resilient in the alluvium than anywhere else.
This complex, however, represented a unique new concentration of manpower, arable land, and nutrition that, if “captured”—“parasitized” might not be too strong a word—could be made into a powerful node of political power and privilege. The Neolithic agro-complex was a necessary but not a sufficient basis for state formation; it made state formation possible but not certain.

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What constitutes a state in this context? How would we know the first pristine state when we saw it? The answer is not cut and dried; I am inclined to see “stateness” as a more-or-less proposition rather than strictly either/or.
Pinpointing the birth of the early state…is a relatively arbitrary exercise… [although] among these characteristics, I propose to privilege those that point to territoriality and a specialized state apparatus: walls, tax collection, and officials.

  • This does however give us little indication of why these strategies or modules may be knit together as a state or what kind of people were those that elevated themselves to the upper elite of such societies

⭐️⭐️

If state formation depends on the control, maintenance, and expansion of the concentrations of grain and manpower on the alluvium, the question arises of how the early state could have come to dominate these population-and-grain modules. The would-be subjects of this hypothetical state, after all, had direct, unmediated access to water and flood-retreat agriculture as well as a variety of subsistence options beyond cultivation. Once convincing explanation for hos this cultivating population might have been assembled as state subjects is climate change.

⭐️⭐️

Climate change, then, by forcing a kind of urbanization in which 90 percent of the population lived in settlements of thirty hectares or more, intensified the grain-and-manpower modules that were ideal for state formation. Aridity proved the indispensable handmaiden of state making by delivering, as it were, an assembled population and concentrated cereal grains in an embryonic state space that could not, at that epoch, have been assembled by any other means.

⭐️⭐️

The state form colonizes this nucleus as its productive base, scales it up, intensifies it, and occasionally adds infrastructure—such as canals for transport and irrigation—in the interest of fattening and protecting the goose that lays the golden eggs. In terms used earlier, one can think of these forms of intensification as elite niche-construction: modifying the landscape and ecology so as to enrich the productivity of its habitat. …it was only in such settings that the first bureaucratic states were likely to arise.

  • I question the appropriateness of the niche argument for elites, meaning human elites, as it uses evolutionary terms to apply to a subset of the population of the same species which bear no differences beyond social status or perhaps education to the other members of their species. Is cultural factors such as lineage enough to create a sub-species within Homo sapiens to support this kind of thinking? Likely not and the author is just being careless here, misusing scientific language in what we might criticise as scientism, the misuse of scientific language and jargon to give a non-scientific argument validity.
  • Still, there is a good point here, badly put, that elites created or increased their control (how they bootstrapped this remains uncommented on and wanting in the analysis) by taking advantage of scarcity, and extremely relatable strategy as we see it ubiquitously up to the present time.

Interregna were more common that “regna,” and long episodes of collapse and disintegration were commonplace.

Taxes and warfare can serve to illustrate the added fragility. … To judge from agrarian history in general, the tax in grain is unlikely to have been less than a fifth of the harvest.

The evidence for frequent warfare among rival polities in the southern alluvium is abundant. … One account of warfare among the peer polities of the alluvium asserts that the population lived at the subsistence level except when a victorious army returned with loot and tribute. [But]…one’s own army was as likely to be as big a threat to livelihood as the enemy’s.

I am tempted to say, “no water transport, no state”—only a slight exaggeration.

Arid deserts and mountainous zones (barring fertile intermontane basins) virtually require dispersed subsistence strategies and can hardly server as the nucleus of a state. These “nonstate spaces,” owing to their different subsistence patterns and social organization—pastoralism, foraging, and slash-and-burn cultivation—are often stigmatized and coded “barbarian” by state discourses.

Unlike a landscape of plough agriculture, the exuberant diversity of livelihoods in the wetlands was not favorable to state making.

  • The author goes on to argue that delta regions, where large rivers meet the sea, were not part of early states even when in proximity, such as the Nile Delta in Egypt or the Yellow River delta in China.

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…population concentration must be distinguished from state making

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…only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”

…an ancient tax-collection official [is] interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.

If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly.

The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops.

One reason for the official distrust and stigmatization of the merchant class in China was the simple fact that its wealth, unlike that of the rice planter, was illegible, concealable, and fugitive. One might tax a market, or collect tolls on a road or river junction where goods and transactions were more transparent, but taxing merchants was a tax collector’s nightmare.

  • Kind of a hot take here, unsure how well researched this is or if it is just speculative

The problem with most of the legumes, from a tax collector’s perspective, is that they product fruit continuously over an extended period. … One-stop shopping on the part of the tax collector works best for determinate-ripening crops.

Archaic states endeavored, whenever possible, to mandate a planting time for a given district.

Where grain, and therefore agrarian taxes, stopped, there too did the state’s power begin to degrade.

…outside the earliest grain state lay most of the world and its population as well. The grain states were restricted to a narrow ecological niche that favored intensive agriculture.

The Ottoman Empire, founded by pastoralists, found it exceptionally difficult to tax herders.

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In one way or another, nongrain peoples—that is* to say most of the world—embodied forms of livelihood and social organization that defeated taxation: physical mobility, dispersal, variable group and community size, diverse and invisible subsistence good, and few fixed-point resources.

The existence of walls was an infallible proxy for the presence of a permanent cultivation and food storage.

it was common practice for a conquering city to tear down the walls of the town it had defeated.

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…might one see the creation of the state as a joint creation—a social contract, perhaps?—between cultivating subjects and their ruler (and his warriors and engineers) to defend their harvests, families, and livestock from attacks by other statelets or nonstate raider?
But the matter is more complicated. Just as a farmer may have to defend his crops against human and nonhuman predators, so state elites have an overwhelming interest in safeguarding the sinews of their own power: a cultivating population and its grain stores, its privileges and wealth, and its political and ritual powers. … City walls were thus intended to keep the essentials of state preservation inside.

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…the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. …behind the coercive machinery [of the state] lie piles of paperwork…that is for the most part mystifying and beyond [the] ken [of illiterate subjects].

…the first act of many peasant rebellions has been to burn down the local records office where these documents are housed.

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As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector.”

  • I would be interested in the reference here, it is footnote 31 of chapter 4

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On one hand, groups of priests, strong men, and local chiefs were scaling up and institutionalizing structures of power that had previously used only the idioms of kinship. … On the other hand, thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control.
It is at roughly this time that writing makes its first appearance.

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…it is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping… The first condition of state appropriation (for whatever purpose) must be an inventory of available resources…

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A powerful case for linking state administration and writing is that it seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature mythology, praise hymns, kings lists and genealogies, chronicles, and religious texts. The magnificent Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dates from Ur’s Third Dynasty (circa 2,100 BCE), a full millennium after cuneiform had been first used for state and commercial purposes.

…the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.

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…the symbol of kingship in Sumer was the “rod and line,” almost certainly the tools of the surveyor.

  • This is very important for my research into the earliest kings as it reveals or at least suggests, if correct, the pre-historic path to ascendancy

Population—as producers, soldiers, and slaves—represented the wealth of the state.

At the core of Umma’s project of legibility was a census of population by location, age, and gender as the basis for assigning the head tax and corvée labor, and for conscription. It was the “immanent” project, never realized in practice except perhaps for the temple economy and dependent labor force.

Some of the Sumerian polities, especially Ur III, look like command-and-control economies…

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The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardization is the very invention of a standard nomenclature, through writing, of all the essential categories…

  • Also very important
  • A reaction to this kind of insight is that abstraction, and abstract thought in general, is irredeemably associated with the state and oppressive state projects such as colonialism, and therefore we see some of their (questionable) logic in contemporary calls for the decolonization of practices and bodies of knowledge such as mathematics

The Qin, rather like Ur III, was a systematizing, order-obsessed regime that laid out a rather comprehensive vision of the total mobilization of its resources. On paper, at least, it was even more ambitious. Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.

  • That it, it was abstracted to the conceptual level and therefore transcended language, illustrated by the way that Chinese ideograms are independent of spoken manifestation

One of the hallmarks of early statecraft in agrarian kingdoms was to hold the population in place and prevent any unauthorized movement. Physical mobility and dispersal are the bane of the tax man. Land, happily for the tax collector, does not move.

Under the Quin, reflecting the importance of population, the state not only forbade flight but instituted a pro-natalist policy, with tax breaks to women and their families who gave birth to new subjects.

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If early writing is so inextricably bound to state making, what happens when the state disappears? What little evidence we do have suggests that without the structure of officials, administrative records, and hierarchical communication, literacy shrinks greatly if it does not disappear altogether. This should not be surprising inasmuch as in the earliest states, scriptural literacy was confined to a very thin veneer of the population, most of whom were officials.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

One suspects that in the earliest states, writing developed first as s technique of statecraft and was therefore as fragile and evanescent an achievement as the state itself.

Chapter 5, Population Control: Bondage and War

(from chapter opening quotes)

In the multitude of people is the king’s honor, but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince. — Proverbs 14:28

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…control over the acquisition and control of population was at the very center of early statecraft. … To see the early states as “population machines” is not far off the mark… The state remained as focused on the number and productivity of its “domesticated” subjects as a shepherd might husband his flock or a farmer tend his crops.

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…[state populations] produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is “consumed” in leisure and cultural elaboration. …in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. …
The important point for our purpose is that a peasantry—assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs—will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it.

⭐️⭐️

Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor…but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier. Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. … [Quoting Ester Boserup] “…When a population becomes so dense that land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working class of the right to be independent cultivators”—forager, hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, pastoralists.

…the prize of war was more often captives than territory…

…we know that the vast majority of the wars in the [Mesopotamian] alluvium were not those between the larger and well-known urban polities but, rather, the petty wars by each of those polities to conquer the smaller independent communities in its own hinterland to augment its laboring population and hence its power.

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The Old Babylonian legal codes are preoccupied with escapees and runaways and the effort to return them to their designated work and residence.

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Slavery was not invented by the state.

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It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently. …as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.

…one is tempted to assert: “No slavery, no state.”

The workshops [of ancient Uruk] represented a sequestered “gulag” of captive labor that supported a new strata of religious, civil, and military elites.

Other evidence about slavers and prisoners of war indicates that they were not well treated. … There are many reports of captives being deliberately blinded… [T]he servile population did not reproduce itself. … 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.

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…absconding [from the state] was a preoccupation of alluvium politics; the later well-known code of Hammurabi fairly bristles with punishments for aiding or abetting the escape of slaves.

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An admonition to become a scribe captures the burdens of subjects: “Be a scribe. It saves you from toil and protects you from all manner of work. It spares you from bearing hoe and mattock, so that you do not carry a basket. It sunders you from plying the oar and spares you torment, as you are not under many lords and numerous masters.”

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The principle of socially detached servants—Janissaries, eunuchs, court Jews—has long been seen as a technique for rulers to surround themselves with skilled but politically neutralized staff.

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If manpower-hungry polities like, say, Native American societies or Malay society historically are any indication, it is common to find pervasive slavery together with rapid cultural assimilation and social mobility.

Women captives were at least as important for their reproductive services as for their labor.

The domesticated flock of sheep has many ewes and few rams… In the same sense women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.

The continuous absorption of slaves at the bottom of the social order can also be seen to play a major role in the process of social stratification—a hallmark of the early state. …[This lead to] further solidifying the line between “free” subjects and those in bondage, despite its permeability over time.

It would be no exaggeration at all to think of such work as an early gulag, featuring gang labor and high rates of mortality.

…quarrying, mining, and logging, which only desperate or highly paid men will undertake voluntarily…

A sure sign of the manpower obsession of the early states, whether in the Fertile Crescent, Greece, or Southeast Asia, is how rarely their chronicles boast of having taken territory. … Instead, the triumphal account of a successful campaign, after praising the valor of the generals and troops, is likely to aim at impressing the reader with the amount of value of the loot.

The towns and villages of the defeated peoples were generally destroyed so that there was nothing to go back to.

…most of the wars were fought when the grain was ripe, so that it too could be seized as plunder and fodder.

forced mass resettlement may have been part of an effort to compensate for mass exoduses or epidemics.

What states did invent, however, are large-scale societies based systematically on coerced, captive human labor.

Chapter 6, Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly

…as a subspecies of sedentary grain communities, state were subject to the same perils of dissolution as sedentary communities in general, as well as to the fragility particular to states as political entities.

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(What happens when a state collapses?)

Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent.

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(What does not happen?)

They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human, health, well-being, or nutrition, and…may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

…much that passes as collapse [is] rather, a disassembly of larger but more fragile political units into their smaller and often more stable components. …these smaller nuclei of power—a compact small settlement on the alluvium, for example—..are likely to persist far longer than the brief miracles of statecraft that lash them together into a substantial kingdom or empire.

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State-making sites were above all structurally vulnerable to subsistence failures that had little to do with how adept or incompetent their rulers were.

In early Southeast Asia…it was rare for a kingdom to last for more than two or three reigns…

It has been suggested that malaria is a “disease of civilization,” in the sense that it arose with land clearance for agriculture.

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Only for state elites might [state collapse] have been experienced as a tragedy of “collapse.”

The constant warfare and jockeying for manpower further contributed to the fragility of the early states.

Struggles to control an advantageous location were never trivial, even among prestate societies, but the advent of the early states raised the stakes largely because they represented a stock of fixed capital—canals, defensive works, records, storehouses, and, often, a valuable location with respect to soil, water, and trade routes.

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As in all agrarian economies, they key issue in class relations is which class absorbs the inevitable shocks of a bad year—or, in other words, which class ensures its economic security at the expense of whom.

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The collapse of the manpower-grain state is captured in this passage from the famous Lamentation over Ur: “Hunger filled the city like water…its king breathes heavily in his palace, all alone, its people dropped their weapons.”

  • Check this out, very interesting

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Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require.

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We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order.

Much of the fascination with “collapse” comes to us from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

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One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations. Above all, the well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center.

The abandonment of the state may…be experienced as an emancipation. …we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and violence.

What would seem to many to be a retrogression and civilizational heresy may on closer examination be nothing more than a prudent and long-practiced adaption to environmental variability.

⭐️⭐️

…the term “dark age” needs to be queried: “dark” for whom and in what respects? … The term is often a form of propaganda by which a centralizing dynasty contrasts its achievement with what it casts as the disunity and decentralization that preceded it.

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The problem for the historian or archaeologists who seeks to illuminate a dark age is that our knowledge is so limited—that, after all, is why it’s called a “dark age.” …we are left if not exactly “in the dark,” at least in the realm of oral culture that is hard to trace and date. The self-documenting court center that offered convenient one-stop shopping for historians and archaeologists is replaced by a fragmented, dispersed, and largely undocumented “dark age.”

⭐️⭐️

…the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad…date from precisely this dark age of Greece [from roughly 1,100 to 700 BCE] and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them. One might well argue, in fact, that such oral epics that survive by repeated performance and memorization constitute a far more democratic form of culture than texts that depend less on performance than on a small class of literate elites who can read them.

There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. … The decentralization that arises may not only lessen the state-imposed burdens but may even usher in a modest degree of egalitarianism. …decentralization and dispersal may prompt both a reformulation and a diversity of cultural production.

Chapter 7, The Golden Age of the Barbarians

…“barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who might, under certain circumstances, be incorporated; “savages,” on the other hand, were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable as raw material for civilization, who might be ignored, killed, or enslaved.

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Barbarians are to domesticated subjects as wildlife, vermin, and varmints are to domesticated livestock. …weeds in the cultivated field are to domesticated crops as barbarians are to civilized life.

…it was in many ways “better” to be a barbarian because there were states—so long as those states were not too strong.

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…virtually all of our knowledge of barbarian “threats” comes from state sources—sources that might well have self-interested reasons to downplay or, more likely, to overdramatize the threat and to define the term “barbarian” narrowly or widely.

…Bennett Bronson claims that the relative absence of any strong states in the Indian subcontinent was due largely to the many powerful nomadic raiding groups that prevented states from consolidating.

State and nonstate peoples were natural trading partners.

“Barbarians” are certainly not a culture or a lack thereof. Neither are they a “stage” of historical or evolutionary progress in which the highest stage is life in the state as taxpayer, in line with the historical discourse of incorporation shared by the Romans and Chinese.

…“barbarian” is best understood as a position vis-à-vis a state or empire. Barbarians are a people adjacent to a state but not in it.

⭐️⭐️

A great many apparently ethnic names turn out to be, when translated literally, a description of a people’s geography, applied to them by state discourse: “hill people,” “swamp dwellers,” “forest people,” “people of the steppes.”

⭐️⭐️

In a Sumerian myth, the goddess Adnigkidu is admonished not to wed a nomad god, Martu, as follows: “He who dwells in the mountains…having carried on much strife…he knows not submission, he eats uncooked food, he has no house where he lives, he is not interred when he dies…” One can scarcely imagine a more telling mirror image of life as a grain-producing, domus-based state subject.

Barbarian societies can, like the oppida Celts, be quite hierarchical, but their hierarchy is generally not based on inherited property and is typically flatter than the hierarchy ground in agrarian kingdoms.

…Primitives could enter the sphere of civilization—this was, after all, the grand narrative—but it was inconceivable that the “civilized” could ever revert to primitivism. We now know this view to be, on the historical evidence, fundamentally wrong.

…“going over to the barbarians,” is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. … Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot. … Such voluntary self-nomadization was neither rare nor isolated.

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Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject.

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A great many of the so-called tribal names were simply place names: a particular valley, a range of hills, a stretch of river, a forest. In some cases the term might designate the character of the presumed group—for example, a group of Romans called Cimbri, which means “robbers” or “brigands.” … Over time, of course, such an administrative fiction might take on an autonomous existence of its own. … A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. …it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.

  • We can link this to Graeber’s work, or maybe this claim actually comes from Graeber, the author does list a source of Debt by David Graeber, check the endnotes around this section

Mobile raiders, especially if they are mounted, have the military initiative. … Their advantage lies in lightning raids; they are unlikely, for example, to lay siege to a fortified city… Under premodern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons, mobile armies of pastoralists have generally been superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of states.

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…a stable protection racket [by “barbarians” in lieu of raiding]…is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself.

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…barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module.

Such arrangements, under which the barbarians received part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding, might be thought of as a de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians.

…barbarian confederations operate as “shadow empires” adjacent to and parasitic on large sedentary polities. Their quasi-derivative status is emphasized by the fact that they tend to disappear when their host collapses.

…barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state.

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