In Against the Grain, James Scott has produced an admirably broad and sweeping account of state origins. He takes humans’ first use of fire as his starting point and works his way toward states by way of the transition to settled agricultural life in the Neolithic. The intended audience would seem to be primarily the general public, for whom Scott's goals are ‘condensing the best knowledge we have … and then suggesting what it implies’ (p. xii). It is clearly, however, an audience more professionally concerned with state origins that he has in mind when he says ‘…these implications … are meant to be provocations … intended to stimulate further reflection and research’ (p. xiii), and his book provides plenty of fuel for such stimulation.
Scott is eager to challenge a ‘standard narrative’ (p. 9) of human progress enabled by a series of technological advances running from mobile Palaeolithic foragers through sedentary Neolithic farmers to early (and later) states. This narrative was always more ethnocentrism and ideology than social science (as Scott points out) and was tidily summed up in anglophone archaeology by V. Gordon Childe (Reference Childe1936) in Man Makes Himself. Scott correctly observes that this story is challenged by ‘recent research’ (p. 10), although it was also already under withering attack in archaeology and ethnology decades ago when Scott and I were graduate students—a classic example by Marshall Sahlins (Reference Sahlins, Lee and DeVore1968) is ‘Notes on the original affluent society’. For archaeologists, then, rejection of this story is not news, but Scott accurately comments on the near-impossibility of ‘dislodging this narrative from the world's imagination’ (p. 9), and this makes his cogent attempt to continue the effort laudable.
Social scientists worth their salt should certainly be provoked to reflect and to pursue novel research by Scott's book, just as he intended, and the remainder of this review is an attempt at just such reflection on ideas and empirical support for them.
Scott has an appealing knack for developing and working a thought-provoking contrarian perspective, whether entirely novel or not. Some of these contrarian perspectives pay off more handsomely than others. The thought that crops and herds domesticated us as much as we domesticated them is clever and seductive, but its potential for new insights is undermined by the facts about who finally killed and ate whom, as well as by its intentional attribution of agency to wheat and barley. The idea of our species as domesticated victims of cereal grains, though, sets the stage for Scott's truly central thesis that the stairway to state organization led, not up, but down, to fewer options for how to live, increased labour for survival, heavy tax burdens and more risk of death from starvation, disease, or violence—the very antithesis of progress.
For Scott, states primarily benefit, not their citizens, but instead the ‘barbarians’ at their gates. He thus turns on its head the historical view embodied in accounts written by the official scribes of those states. This leads to productive thinking about the symbiotic relationships between states and the neighbours they considered uncivilized. The Berber saying ‘Raiding is our agriculture’ that Scott cites (pp. 34, 237) sums up nicely the central idea that Scott develops. He stresses that permanent settlements with large stores of grain are extremely vulnerable to raiding, and he includes this vulnerability among the weaknesses that make states, for him, fragile and impermanent enterprises. Barbarians do loom large among the bugaboos of early historic cities and states in the Old World, from Uruk to Yin to Rome, and Scott's take on this relationship is enlightening and thought provoking. The kind of predation by nomadic mounted barbarians that becomes prototypical in Scott's account, though, was peculiarly associated with states bordering the Eurasian steppes, and by the time archaeological evidence indicates that these mounted barbarians existed, the ‘earliest’ (that is, prehistoric or even early historic) states had long since come and gone. Scott uncritically projects historical accounts of Old World barbarian depredations into time periods hundreds or even thousands of years earlier, and fails to note that nothing much like this took place in the Americas at all as states emerged, grew and disintegrated there. One begins to wish for more attention to the archaeological record of the late prehistoric periods when Mesopotamian states actually formed and for a more broadly comparative (less Mesopotamia-centred) account.
The emphasis on both demography and disease in Against the Grain is more than welcome. In Scott's view, a stereotypical crowded Neolithic village (especially one with livestock) created an ideal environment for communicable diseases to emerge and flourish, and he imagines that this would happen rapidly and inevitably at the beginning of sedentary agricultural living and cause a ‘demographic bottleneck’ (p. 96). The empirical evidence he adduces in support of this bottleneck is a global population estimate of 4 million for 10,000 bc and almost no growth to a mere 5 million during the ensuing 5000 years, the period in which he places the Neolithic transition. Here Mesopotamia-centrism and a lapse in the attentiveness Scott shows to archaeological data for earlier periods combine with the scale-dependency of demographic dynamics to create problems for the argument.
While 10,000–5000 bc was the key period for the protracted transition from mobile foraging to sedentary agro-pastoral living in Mesopotamia and surrounding regions, most of the world experienced this transition much later. Global population estimates thus muddle together a few small populations settling into farming life with vastly larger ones doing nothing of the kind. Scott convincingly rejects population pressure as a cause of the broad-spectrum subsistence revolution that seems to have opened the door to plant and animal domestication around 10,000 bc in Mesopotamia. He does this on the basis of solid empirical archaeological evidence (very skilfully and accurately synthesized and presented): populations in the regions where this occurred were far too small to have created pressure on resources in even the most extensive foraging subsistence regimes. He contradicts himself, however, in attributing ‘the development of agriculture proper, some three or four millennia later’ (in Mesopotamia) to ‘growing population pressure’ (p. 95). This is precisely the period during which he earlier argued that global population growth stagnated. Of much more importance, in region after region around the globe, increasingly reliable archaeological evidence shows population growth to be almost imperceptibly slow during the long period when foragers increasingly meddled with the plants and animals that eventually became domesticated staples. Immediately following the establishment of sedentary living dependent primarily on these domesticated staples, however, it is not a demographic bottleneck, but rather a population explosion that seems almost inevitable, as elaborately established by Bocquet-Appel and many others (Bocquet-Appel & Bar-Yosef Reference Bocquet-Appel and Bar-Yosef2008).
Following his thorough and accurate characterization of the archaeological data on which we must rely for any knowledge of human history in the waning Palaeolithic and dawning Neolithic, Scott abandons archaeology just as fully sedentary agricultural life emerges in Mesopotamia around 6000 bc. As for disease, he despairs of finding archaeological evidence of it, or even of the villages afflicted by it, and leaps to the Epic of Gilgamesh dealing with events at least 3000 years later. He then simply projects this and other even later written accounts of disease onto his vision of 6000 bc. Elsewhere he laments how settlements of this period ‘have remained relatively invisible’ because they ‘left no written records’ and because of ‘the perishable nature of their building materials’ (pp. 56–7). On the contrary, settlements dating to the last two or three millennia before the historically documented states are emphatically not invisible to archaeology. True enough, generations of archaeologists have been infatuated with the spectacular remains of ‘civilizations’ and the periods after about 3200 bc in Mesopotamia that are within the reach of written history and well represented in Scott's narrative. But the past 30 years have witnessed an explosion of archaeological knowledge about the millennia leading up to state emergence in Mesopotamia and (at different actual dates) around the world. These ‘barbarians’ (to use Lewis Henry Morgan's (Reference Morgan1877) name for them) are just as important to the story as the much later ones that assailed some established states in the Old World.
Scott briefly recognizes the importance during these millennia in Mesopotamia of the proliferation of agricultural villages and of the emergence of ‘towns with a thousand or more inhabitants facilitating commerce’ (p. 117), but his narrative skips from the Neolithic transition directly to Uruk with 25,000–50,000 inhabitants, consisting of administrators, tax collectors, priests, kings, soldiers, servants, craftspeople and merchants. We now have solid and direct archaeological evidence that all these kinds of people did not suddenly spring fully armed like Athena from the head of Zeus, but emerged by fits and starts in trajectories of incremental development in hundreds of regions around the world, only a few of which saw the eventual consolidation of ‘pristine’ states. It was in these societies that resource mobilization for a political economy began and that inequalities, not only of wealth but also of social prestige and ritual participation, emerged to serve later as foundations for the power differentials seen in states.
Of greatest relevance to Scott's central thesis that each step on the path to statehood was so disadvantageous that coercion must have been required, it is in these societies that we first see in action the centripetal forces that drew people together into large communities that began to serve as centres integrating regional polities. We know that overtly political coercive force of a violent nature was sometimes involved, as well as that many trajectories lack evidence of such a dynamic. We know that the degree and nature of economic interdependence varied substantially, and that ritual and ceremony were sometimes (but not always) strong centripetal forces (Drennan & Peterson Reference Drennan and Peterson2006; Drennan et al. Reference Drennan, Peterson, Fox, Price and Feinman2010; Earle Reference Earle1997). We know also that these regional polities differed in their modes of growth (Drennan & Peterson Reference Drennan, Peterson and Smith2012; Peterson & Drennan Reference Peterson, Drennan and Smith2012). The extent to which inequality and power drove this growth is debated (Carballo Reference Carballo2013; Price & Feinman Reference Price and Feinman2010), but we do know that the forces impelling and shaping trajectories of social change during this non-state stage vary substantially from region to region (even within the same part of the world). We know that most of these trajectories do not look much like Mesopotamia, and that the coalescence of temple, administration, writing and taxation that characterized early Mesopotamian states was quite unusual, both for regions where no pristine state emerged as well as for the world's other pristine states. All this indicates that there is a much richer story waiting to be told than the old Mesopotamia-centric standard narrative of progress that Scott offers to replace with a dystopian, but equally Mesopotamia-centric revision.
Our direct archaeological knowledge of these pre-state or non-state societies has grown so explosively and so recently that our understanding of their social dynamics has lagged far behind. Fascinating observations and ideas lurk in this thicket. We need an entire brigade of James Scotts with the vision to see a forest through this set of trees—visions that will contrast with each other and spur us to find empirical ways of evaluating both the validity and the generality of provocative ideas like those Scott has set forth in Against the Grain.
