James C. Scott's Against the Grain has immense relevance for how archaeologists view the dynamics of early states and complex polities. In this volume, Scott—already established as a leading theorist of states and statecraft (e.g. Scott Reference Scott1997; Reference Scott2009)—brings his analytic power and capacity to turn a phrase to bear on the topic of the ‘earliest states’.
Building on his model of the state developed in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott argues that early complex polities were outgrowths of Neolithic lifeways embedding themselves in hyper-productive alluvial environments. He pays particular attention to southwest Asia, and especially to the Mesopotamian alluvium, beginning by synthesizing recent research on the heterogeneity, length and co-evolutionary nature of the biosocial processes of domestication. He views the earliest states (especially in the southern alluvium) as comprising collections of domesticated bodies, including those of slaves and of women. This is understood as essentially a deleterious process, one from which individuals and groups made concerted efforts to escape—to hills, swamps, or deserts, across ecotones beyond which state power was less effective and where urban elites struggled to exert governance horizontally. So far, so relatively uncontroversial, but Scott's synthesis of the lurching, ratchet feedbacks of ‘domestication’ (a process which he views catholicly) serves as an extended prolegomenon to his broader assertion: that all early states—although Uruk and its peers loom large in his thesis—were grain-built enterprises, desperate to ‘simplify’ via the metrics and quanta of cereal agrarianism, a desperation which transformed economic and ecological symbioses and prodded incipient complex polities down cereal-specific pathways. He argues that other crops (and notably some major Neotropic components of New World foodways) involving tuber or corm harvest intrinsically resisted the state-esque urge to quantify and tax. States, in this view, are quintessentially bound up with cereal agrarianism. For Scott, the collision of domesticated lifeways and Old World alluvium (and loess, in China) is to seed a Petrie dish, resulting in the same outcome—an appropriate metaphor, considering the attention he pays to early states and their cities as ground zero for zoonotic transfer.
If lowland complex polities reliant on grain-cores are reminiscent of Scott's earlier work in Southeast Asia, so is his focus on the brittle and potentially inefficacious structure of early complex polities. He emphasizes their capacity to be auto-corrosive, with a combination of disease (an outcome of zoonoses deriving from domestication), tax-in-kind burdens and unenlightened policy driving the attrition of their human capital—and this in human capital-intensive agrarian regimes. Accordingly, the ‘barbarians’ of Scott's earlier work re-enter the scene, as active products of flight from and evasion of state-making (and state-maintaining) enterprises. Barbarian living is, for Scott, an antithetical alternative to lowland statism. Considering the biophysical constraints on grain-cores, however, and the generally low-level ability of grain-core states to project power horizontally over extended periods of time, Scott sees this as a barbaric golden age—a period dominated by barbarian anti-polities of steppe, forest, tundra and delta, all built on food and subsistence systems which resist, mitigate, or bypass the logics of cereal agriculture, either via herding, swiddening, or exploiting diverse suites of wetland domesticates.
Early states are, accordingly, fragile in Scott's account, prone to dissolution via residential mobility, disease, and the growth constraints placed upon demographics of which large chunks are slave or indentured labour. This fragility (a theme echoed elsewhere: Yoffee Reference Yoffee2016) derives, then, from the centrifugal dynamics that emerge from how states operate and attempt to cohere themselves. Moreover, he finds them logistically and mechanically limited in their capacity to project power away from their centres. Frictionless surfaces (rivers) allow capillary state action into the hinterland, but—like Zomia—the attrition of non-grain landscapes and relief breaks up and frustrates governance. This might potentially be considered a timely corrective: not only in terms of the optimistic and potentially anodyne and unidirectional narratives associated with collective action theory (Blanton & Fargher Reference Blanton and Fargher2016), but also as a rejoinder to the state-city as an unequivocally omnibeneficent form of living (Glaeser Reference Glaeser2011). Scott argues that urban living invites social and ecological disaster.
How right (or how wrong) is this vision of early complex polities, and how legitimate is the assumption that we can compare large-scale social processes on a truly global scale? Considering Scott's abilities as a synthesizer, his reach between, beyond and above disciplines, and his tacit challenge in this book (that most early states derived, ultimately, from broadly comparable eco-logics), the Cambridge Archaeological Journal commissioned a series of reviews of Against the Grain from archaeologists who specialize in the emergence and operation of early states around the globe. These reviews examine to what extent Scott's model can be generalized; or whether it represents a more partial reading. Reviewers especially focus on Scott's central idea of the brittle and almost epiphenomenal state (which is nonetheless locally ecologically transformative in its cereal monomania), as well as dealing with its antithesis: ‘barbarian’ modes of living as deliberate, non-state choices. Scott kindly—and bravely—agreed to respond to these comments. The result is a wide-ranging discussion which contextualizes Against the Grain, but also variously ponders and queries some of the most pressing issues in the comparative archaeology of emergent social complexity.
