In responding to Scott's Against the Grain, my goal is not to write a book review. I take it as unnecessary to point out all the details that Scott, a historical anthropologist of South East Asia, got wrong about ancient history and archaeology. Instead, I want to take seriously Scott's own hope that his book would be read as a provocation and, in doing so, work through some of its larger problems and its potential.

Essentially the argument of Against the Grain is that humans have become increasingly entrapped by their own domestication of the world, beginning with fire and ending (like Hegel) with the state. With this, Scott has joined the likes of Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker on the ‘big history’ bandwagon. While this is not the venue to debate the merits of this historiographical trend comprehensively, it is relevant to ask just what sort of big history Against the Grain is. At one end of the spectrum of sophistication, big history builds on the advances of the Annales School—investigating processes, events and their articulations across spatio-temporal scales. At the other end, it builds speculative, truthy meta-narratives for general audiences—more mythopoesis than history, and with more than a little in common with nineteenth-century speculative grand narratives. As a lightly researched, heavily reductionist and massively speculative counter-narrative of the last 10,000 years, Scott's entry into big history is clearly more towards the shallow end of historiographical sophistication. As a 256-page book written for a wide audience, one might be tempted to say it could not have been otherwise, but although macroscale analysis, by its nature, trades detail for scale, a longue durée narrative without meso- and micro-scale articulations basically takes for granted that these scales are irrelevant. Thus, human agency, institutions and culture are assumed to be insignificant before the relentless currents of macro-historical process.

Is this justified? Scott never does so overtly, and to judge the historical assumptions behind Against the Grain, we need to break the argument down further. Big historical narrative is either conceived as consisting of macro-processes and events, or it is simply a descriptive ‘just so story’. I would argue that Against the Grain has elements of both. Understanding ‘events’ as structure changing, we might ask, ‘what are the macro-historical events at play in Scott's argument?’ These are: the invention of fire; the development of sedentism; the domestication of plants and animals; and the formation of the first states. Through each of these ‘inventions’, Scott sees the logic of concentration and domestication. Thus, fire concentrates resources, either through driving game or reshaping environments, but also allows people to concentrate as well. Sedentism is predicated on the concentration of humans and resources, and the domestication of plants and animals intensifies the trend towards simplification and concentration. States, in turn, emerge as a kind of protection racket necessitated by the predation of non-sedentary peoples and develop in interaction with them. This domesticating Zeitgeist, then, was in place from before anatomically modern humans and led us inexorably to our current over-domesticated predicament of environmental degradation, war and inequality. While the outlines of the narrative thus far, aside from the guiding logic of domestication, are not unfamiliar, Scott's counternarrative to the Whig story of human civilization is a series of reversals—agriculture and sedentism, rather than progressive developments, led to poor diet and disease, concentrated pests and parasites and precipitated greater environmental risk and societal fragility. States, though coming into being to protect these sedentary resource concentrations, through their exploitative, non-producing classes and additional concentration of populations in cities end up by adding additional fragility. ‘Barbarians’ (everyone not living in ‘states’) are said to have had the upper hand both in terms of population and military power, but in the end, ‘willingly dug their own grave’ (p. 256) through their slaving and military assistance to states.

Along the way, we get some nods to contingency (climate events, environmental niches, the affordances of pre-adapted species) and a healthy dose of path-dependency and entanglement (sedentary population pressure leading to increased Neolithization, barbarian dependency on states, states’ dependency on grain, etc.). Nevertheless, looking closely at the big events in Scott's narrative—Neolithization and the rise of ‘the state’, although certainly structure-changing in Scott's telling and of world-historical significance, they are more the products of speculative extrapolations from a single superficially researched case (Mesopotamia) and some cherry-picked comparanda than of comparative archaeology. To argue, for instance that grain production likely originated in flood retreat agriculture because it is ‘a form that an intelligent, work-shy hunter-gather might take up’ (p. 66) is not only a teleological materialist speculation, but ignores or is ignorant of the variety of environmental conditions in which domestication processes are known to have taken place around the world. Likewise, it is not clear how Scott's claim that environments with diverse and rich resources were ‘resistant to centralization and control from above’ (p. 57) squares either with his observation on the page before that early Teotihuacan was set in a wetland, or the florescence of complex polities along the Yangzi river or the Mayan lowlands. Over and over again, the Zeitgeist of domestication and its teleological endpoint in the simplifying, fragile and parasitic ‘state’ trumps evidence of diversity and half a century of archaeological work demonstrating the variability of social complexity. Even the most die-hard of neo-evolutionists gave up unilinealism in the 1990s.

So if Against the Grain is not really history (big or otherwise), what is it? I would argue that, rather than see it as academic counternarrative—flogging, as it is, a horse decades dead—it is more accurately a kind of Romantic mythopoesis for the twenty-first century. The world is too much with us, Foucault's biopolitics really began with Homo erectus, and we are all Homo domesticus crippled by the unintended consequences of our success. This is the etiology of Western civilization that palaeo-dieting, anarchist environmentalists have been waiting for.

This is not to deny the brilliance of Scott's guiding metaphor of domestication, but rather to say Against the Grain is more philosophy than history. And yet, there are useful provocations here—taking a broad view of domestication allows what is normally thought of in narrow biological terms to be re-envisioned as a social-cultural phenomenon as well, linked to long-term processes of entanglement and interdependency, to violence and to civilization. Treated with more precision and nuance, Scott's broadened notion of domestication could be the basis for a much-needed bridging of bio- and palaeobotanical archaeologies and contemporary approaches to socio-political complexity. On a socio-theoretical plane, it could be the big history analogue of Foucault's biopolitics, or, as Scott himself notes, Elias’ civilizing process. The benefits and perils of concentration and simplification are also factors that need be taken into consideration in any discussion of socio-political development and decline, especially if deployed with more nuance and among other potential factors.

More problematic, even pernicious, however, is Scott's anachronistic construct of ‘the state’. For anyone familiar with Scott's previous work, the reified ‘state’ that elicits peasant resistances or engineers its own disasters through over-simplification is nothing new. What is new, and in my opinion ill-considered, is the projection of the imagination of a totalizing, simplifying, high Modernist political form all the way back to Uruk. If anyone needed an object lesson in what is wrong with the state concept in archaeology, Against the Grain presents one of the best examples. Although Scott adroitly avoids the state presence/absence classificatory trap with a ‘stateness’ continuum, he falls back on a pseudo-Childean trait-list, claiming that states in the ‘strong sense’ have ‘a king, specialized administrative staff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, tax collection and distribution’ (p. 23). As generations of archaeologists have already pointed out, trait lists inevitably fail to capture the breadth of variation, propose features too vague to be useful, or simply list superficial phenomena generalized from a particular historical case taken as ideal type. The claim that ancient states should have walls seems to derive both from Scott's focus on Mesopotamia and his projection of a proto-Modernist dystopian political monolith that must keep its population from fleeing, while also protecting its assets from predatory state and non-state actors—a sort of Mad Max: Fury Road meets 1984. The prominent examples, from Anyang to Teotihuacan, of early complex polities without walls never bubble to the surface of Scott's relentlessly simplifying narrative. Likewise, archaeological work of the last several decades demonstrating the variety of political forms and modes of authority that fall under the rubric ‘early complex polities’ is ignored. In Scott's vaguely Marxian telling, ‘states’ are invariably parasitic—the bringers of nothing but subjugation, pestilence and war. They are fragile simplification machines, archaic versions of the reified high Modern state he critiques in his earlier writings. It is not surprising, then, that he focuses on Ur III or the Qin dynasty, selecting two of the most precociously totalitarian regimes of the ancient world, the latter famously short-lived. Of course, if Scott had chosen not to ignore the 2000 years of early complex polities before the Qin empire, his simplifying narrative would have become untenable. The beginning of a dramatic increase in the scale of societies and urban agglomerations at the end of the third millennium bc was not due to the simplification of agricultural practices to millet production—millet had been domesticated millennia before—but rather corresponds with a diversified complex of crops including rice, wheat and soybeans and livestock including grass-eating domesticates introduced from the Eurasian Steppe. Diversification, not simplification, characterizes the first great watershed of social complexity in China.

Taxation in many early complex polities, likewise, does not consist of extraction in kind, but rather in labour. Thus, the argument that lentils and tubers cannot be the basis of state subsistence economies problematically assumes that rulers cannot simply demand a certain amount of agricultural service on their lands—a perfectly legible and rational way of extracting surplus. The truth is that ancient complex polities everywhere relied on a spectrum of food resources and a variety of fiscal mechanisms—in Mesopotamia and elsewhere—and Scott's exclusive focus on grain has more to do with his teleology of the simplifying, mono-cropping Modernist state than it does with ancient history.

In the end, and despite the apparent progressiveness of his grand narrative, what bothers me most about Against the Grain, aside from its cherry-picking abuse of archaeological data, is that in its haste to critique ‘civilization’ and pillory his old enemy ‘the state’, Scott tramples on the richness of history, denying, with his own simplifications, the diversity of past political forms and, by extension, possible futures. If all governance is domination and domestication an unmitigated evil, what are we supposed to do? With no chance of the world's 7.6 billion humans instantly dropping ‘off the grid’ short of some global calamity, perhaps a better use of the past than paving it over with tendentious meta-narrative would be to take it seriously, learn its lessons, and let the richness of lost human worlds teach us new lessons for the future.