(9) JAMES C SCOTT –

AGAINST THE GRAIN: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE EARLIEST STATES (2017)

It’s all about the grain! Or against it!

Zac Snyder’s Rebel Moon was right! Except his mistake was setting his epic about grain in the far future of space opera, where he should have set it in the deep past of prehistoric, well, grain opera – which is how Scott, anarchist political scientist and anthropologist, sees the first human states, essentially brutal granaries. Grain literally makes states.

It always seems a little odd how our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopted (grain) agriculture. Sure – not so odd looking back from our modern perspective of industrialized and mechanized agricultural abundance but much more odd looking forward as it were from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, seemingly much healthier and with richer diets for far less effort than their agricultural descendants.

It reminds me of that meme of a wolf asking itself what’s the worst that could happen from getting food at the human campfire, only to end up 10,000 years later as some ridiculous domesticated dog photo.

How could our own hunter-gather ancestors let themselves be hoodwinked into becoming peasants – stunted and malnourished, overworked and overtaxed, perpetually on the edge of famine and disease as well as serfdom or slavery by states or ‘nobility’?

I had always attributed it to something of a combination of the frog in a pot, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and Malthusian trap. Sure, agriculture has benefits for consistency and reliability of food over time, particularly in storage, leading to population growth and the accumulation of resources – but once you realize you’re hard pressed to keep those benefits ahead of being wiped out by the pressures of more mouths to feed, it’s too late to do anything else except more agriculture. And except of course for reaping the one benefit of higher populations against less populous neighbours – superiority in war, even when agricultural populations were typically inferior as individual warriors.

However, Against the Grain suggests that the trap was a little less Malthusian and a little more Orwellian – that while they barely hovered above collapse and the defection of their subjects, states achieved their power through grain agriculture and weren’t about to let it go without a struggle, in turn using that grain agriculture as an instrument to keep ratcheting up their power, including by forced or slave labor.

This theme is evident in the chapter titles, perhaps none more so than for the first chapter – The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and…Us. Obviously that last word of the title conveys how agriculture above all domesticated humans. To paraphrase Orwell, all humans were effectively domesticated, but some humans were more domesticated than others – because they were domesticated BY others.

As a quick note, I was particularly intrigued by the domestication of fire as the first world-shaping human technology – and one that humans used that way even as hunter-gatherers.

The theme of domestication of humans continues in the second chapter, Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex, to which is added agriculture as the perfect environment for disease in the third chapter, Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm.

The chapter titles continue in a similar vein – Agro-Ecology of the Early State, Population Control: Bondage and War, Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly – although my favorite remains the final chapter title, The Golden Age of the Barbarians. Scott posits this age – when the majority of the world’s population had never seen a tax collector or at least the majority of the world’s territory was one of “barbarian zones” (tracts of land where states found it either impossible or prohibitively difficult to extend their rule) – persisted up until 400 or so years ago.

“Not only did this place a great many people out of the reach of the state, but it also made them significant military threats to the state’s power” – not least because on an individual level, barbarians tended to be better warriors than the subjects of agricultural states, even as they also tended to have a symbiotic relationship with those states.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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