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An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative. Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family-all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.… (more)
User reviews
The first few chapters of the book discuss how agriculture, ecology, war and slavery on the one hand facilitated early state formation, but on the other hand were so precarious that the balance could (and did) often turn to state disintegration as well. There was no linear development from hunting and gathering to agriculture and state formation, but complex back-and forth oscillation with lots of human traffic going in all directions for several millenia. These points are well taken.
The later chapters were in my opinion more interesting. The author argues that the historical record contains a state-centered bias because (p.214) "the self-documenting court center offered convenient one-stop shopping for historians and archaeologists". This bias should not lead us to think that early states offered a better life to its citizens than smaller communities, or that the "collapse" of a state necessarily had, in the long term, negative consequences. The population just dispersed, and they did not leave a written record. Our traditional power- and text-centered historical sequences of "civilization" (Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Maya...) are quite myopic. Most of humanity lived in less powerful societies without written state records.
I think the book could have been structured a bit better, and the argument in the later chapters could have been extended in more detail almost up to modern history (as the author does very briefly at the end). But the title of this book is appropriate and I would recommend it to anyone who likes to think about human history from different perspectives.
Goes well with Mann's 1491, Scott's Seeing Like A State, and basically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin. Maybe David Quinn's Ishmael, too -
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