James C. Scott–Against the Grain

A state can be defined as a territory over which an elite exercised coercive power maintaining itself by taxing the population either through its produce or its labour. Scott takes a rather bleak view of early states but his critique provides a fascinating insight into just how they worked. 

He argues that for a state to exist it needed to be reliant on a staple that could easily be taxed – and grain was the ideal. Because the fields were fixed and the crop ripened over a short period of time it was impossible for the farmer to avoid the tax collector. 

Communities elsewhere in the world reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams and manioc as their staple were more able to avoid tax since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested over a long period. 

Such societies seldom develop into states. Another advantage of grain to the state was that it had a higher value per unit volume than most other foodstuffs and was easy to store in the protection of the city, from where it could be doled out to slaves and soldiers or used to feed the population when under siege. Through taxation the state became the quartermaster and producers became subjects. The non-productive elites who emerged in such a system had a keen interest in protecting the grain-producing farmers and so some of the surplus they controlled was invested in city walls and armies.

Scott argues convincingly that early states are “population machines” designed to control labour, domesticating them as a farmer domesticates his herd. Maintaining the numbers of workers was vital and if numbers fell a new crop had to be gathered through warfare, adding to the ranks of the unfree. Raiding to acquire goods and manpower – an aspect of what Max Weber referred to as “booty capitalism” – became a normal part of life. 

Women were also herded into state enterprises. Around 3000 BC there were 9,000 textile workers in the city of Uruk (in today’s Iraq) – about 20% of the population – most of them women. From the farmer paying his dues to the state, either as a tithe of his crop or as labour, to the captive slave, all the working population were in some kind of bondage, their efforts supporting the ever-increasing luxury in which the elite demanded to live. Underpaid fast-food workers standing out against employment conditions that allow their companies’ CEOs to pay themselves vast salaries can be excused for thinking that little changes.

Early states were fragile constructs and Scott offers a particularly revealing analysis of this. Within the system lie the seeds of its own destruction. Large urban populations living in close proximity are prone to epidemics, a threat that increased as trade developed, bringing strangers to the city carrying diseases to which the locals had no resistance. 

Then there was ecocide–the degeneration of the environment through overuse – deforestation and overgrazing causing sedimentation and floods that, in turn, led to increased salinisation and the development of malaria.

Add to this social unrest and endemic warfare and it is surprising that early states managed to survive. In fact, most did not, and episodes of “collapse” punctuate the historical record. Scott sees collapse not as a disaster but as an opportunity. The oppressive state system is dismantled and the population disperses, redistributing itself across a wider territory – it is a bolt for freedom.

Early states were surrounded by a sea of “barbarians”, who were essentially mobile, adopting varying subsistence strategies – hunting and gathering, foraging, slash-and-burn cultivation and pastoralism. In contrast to the state, they were complex and diverse but the two had to live together in some sort of unstable equilibrium. 

The natural tendency of the barbarian was to raid – after all, why go through the drudgery of cultivation if you can get all the grain you need by spilling a little blood? But then why go to this effort at all if a symbiosis could be established through an exchange of goods and services, the state offering grain and manufactured goods while the barbarians could provide raw materials and slaves and offer themselves as mercenaries. And so the system moved to another stage of complexity.

Scott’s original book is history as it should be written – an analysis of the deep forces exposed in the eternal conflict between humans and their environment. What makes it even more welcome is that it has been written with the enthusiasm of discovery.