James C. Scott wrote:
Despite enormous progress in documenting climate change, demographic shifts, soil quality, and dietary habits, there are many aspects of the earliest states that one is unlikely to find chronicled in physical remains or in early texts because they are insidious, slow processes, perhaps symbolically threatening, and even unworthy of mention. For example, it appears that flight from the early state domains to the periphery was quite common, but, as it contradicts the narrative of the state as a civilizing benefactor of its subjects, it is relegated to obscure legal codes …
The burdens of life for nonelites in the earliest states … were considerable. The first … was drudgery. There is no doubt that, with the possible exception of flood recession (décrue) agriculture, farming was far more onerous than hunting and gathering. As Ester Boserup and others have observed, there is no reason why a forager in most environments would shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion. A second great and unanticipated burden of agriculture was the direct epidemiological effect of concentration—not just of people but of livestock, crops, and the large suite of parasites that followed them to the domus or developed there. Diseases with which we are now familiar—measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other community acquired infections—appeared for the first time in the early states. It seems almost certain that a great many of the earliest states collapsed as a result of epidemics analogous to the Antonine plague and the plague of Justinian in the first millennium CE or the Black Death of the fourteenth century in Europe.
Then there was … the state plague of taxes in the form of grain, labor, and conscription over and above onerous agricultural work. How, in such circumstances, did the early state manage to assemble, hold, and augment its subject population?
Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery …
It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states. (“Banana republics” don’t qualify!) My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentrations of human subjects …
… It follows, I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence is spread across several food webs, as it is for hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, marine foragers, and so on, a state is unlikely to arise, inasmuch as there is no readily assessable and accessible staple to serve as a basis for appropriation. One might imagine that ancient domesticated legumes, say—peas, soybeans, peanuts, or lentils, all of which are nutritious and can be dried for storage—might serve as a tax crop. The obstacle in this case is that most legumes are indeterminate crops that can be picked as long as they grow; they do not have a determinate harvest, something the tax man requires.”
Some agro-ecological settings may be considered “preadapted” for concentrating grain fields and population, owing to rich silt and plentiful water, and these areas are in turn possible locations for state making. Such settings are perhaps necessary for early state making, but not sufficient. One could say that the state has an elective affinity for such locations. Contrary to some earlier assumptions, the state did not invent irrigation as a way of concentrating population, let alone crop domestication; both were the achievements of prestate peoples.
What the state has often done, once established, however, is to maintain, amplify, and expand the agro-ecological setting that is the basis of its power by what we might call state landscaping. This has included repairing silted channels, digging new feeder canals, settling war captives on arable land, penalizing subjects who are not cultivating, clearing new fields, forbidding nontaxable subsistence activities such as swiddening and foraging, and trying to prevent the flight of its subjects …
… An alert reader might at this point ask, what is a state anyway?
I think of the polities of early Mesopotamia as gradually becoming states. That is, “stateness,” in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgment of more or less. A polity with a king, specialized administrative staff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, and tax collection and distribution is certainly a “state” in the strong sense of the term. Such states come into existence in the last centuries of the fourth millennium BCE and seem to be well attested at the latest by the strong Ur III territorial polity in southern Mesopotamia around 2,100.
Before that there were polities with substantial populations, commerce, artisans, and, it seems, town assemblies, but one could argue about the degree to which these characteristics would satisfy a strong definition of stateness.
As may already be obvious, the southern Mesopotamian alluvium is at the center of my geographical attention for the simple reason that it was here that the first small states arose. “Pristine” is the adjective normally used to describe them …
… The early state, in fact, as we shall see, often failed to hold its population; it was exceptionally fragile epidemiologically, ecologically, and politically and prone to collapse or fragmentation. If, however, the state often broke up, it was not for lack of exercising whatever coercive powers it could muster. Evidence for the extensive use of unfree labor—war captives, indentured servitude, temple slavery, slave markets, forced resettlement in labor colonies, convict labor, and communal slavery (for example, Sparta’s helots)—is overwhelming. Unfree labor was particularly important in building city walls and roads, digging canals, mining, quarrying, logging, monumental construction, wool textile weaving, and of course agricultural labor. The attention to “husbanding” the subject population, including women, as a form of wealth, like livestock, in which fertility and high rates of reproduction were encouraged, is apparent. The ancient world clearly shared Aristotle’s judgment that the slave was, like a plough animal, a “tool for work.”
A sure sign of the manpower obsession of the early states, whether in the Fertile Crescent, Greece, or Southeast Asia, is how rarely their chronicles boast of having taken territory. One looks in vain for anything resembling the twentieth-century German call for lebensraum. Instead, the triumphal account of a successful campaign, after praising the valor of the generals and troops, is likely to aim at impressing the reader with the amount and value of the loot … so many horses, so many sheep, so many cattle, so many people … wars were fought when the grain was ripe, so that it too could be seized as plunder and fodder.
… Max Weber’s concept of “booty capitalism” seems applicable to a great many such wars, whether conducted against competing states or against nonstate peoples on its periphery. “Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit. In one form, a group of warlords might hatch a plan to invade another small realm, with both eyes fixed on the loot in, say, gold, silver, livestock, and prisoners to be seized. It was a “joint-stock company,” the business of which was plunder. Depending on the soldiers, horses, and arms that each of the conspirators contributes to the enterprise, the prospective proceeds might be divided proportionally to each participant’s investment. The enterprise is, of course, fraught, inasmuch as the plotters (unless they are merely financial backers) potentially risk their lives. To be sure, such wars may have other strategic aims, like the control of a trade route or the crushing of a rival, but for the early states, the taking of loot, particularly human captives, was not a mere by-product of war but a key objective. Slaving wars were systematically conducted by many of the earliest states in the Mediterranean as a part of their manpower needs. In many cases—in early Southeast Asia and in imperial Rome—war was seen as a route to wealth and comfort. Everyone from the commanders down to the individual soldier expected to be rewarded with his share of the plunder. To the degree that men of military age were engaged in slaving expeditions, as they were in imperial Rome, it posed a problem for the labor force in grain and livestock production at home. In time, the huge influx of slaves allowed landowners—and peasant soldiers—to replace much of the agrarian labor force with slaves who were not themselves subject to conscription …
… Mass deportation and forced settlement was, in the neo-Assyrian Empire, systematically applied to conquered areas. The entire population and livestock of the conquered land were marched from the territory at the periphery of the kingdom to a location closer to the core, where they were forcibly resettled, the people usually as cultivators. Although, as in other slaving wars, some captives were “privately” appropriated and others formed into labor gangs, what was distinctive about deportation and forced settlement was that the bulk of the captive community was kept intact and moved to a site where its production could be more easily monitored and appropriated. Here, the manpower and grain–centralizing machine is at work but at a wholesale level, taking entire agrarian communities as modules and placing them at the service of the state. Even allowing for the exaggerations of the scribes, the scale of the population transfers was unprecedented. More than 200,000 Babylonians, for example, were moved to the core of the neo-Assyrian Empire, and the total deportations appear staggering. There were specialists in deportations. Officials conducted elaborate inventories of the captured populations—their possessions, their skills, their livestock—and were charged with provisioning them en route to their new location with a minimum of losses. In some cases, it seems that the captives were resettled on land abandoned earlier by other subjects, implying that forced mass resettlement may have been part of an effort to compensate for mass exoduses or epidemics. Many of the captives were referred to as “saknutu”, which means “a captive made to settle the soil.
“The problem for the historian or archaeologist who seeks to illuminate a dark age is that our knowledge is so limited—that, after all, is why it’s called a “dark age”. At least two obstacles obscure our view. The first is that the self-reporting, and self-inflating, apex of an urban political formation has been removed. If we want to know what’s going on, we will have to scout on the periphery, in the smaller towns, villages, and pastoral camps. Second, the trove of written records and bas reliefs has dwindled if not disappeared, and we are left if not exactly “in the dark,” at best in the realm of oral culture that is hard to trace and date. The self-documenting court center that offered convenient one-stop shopping for historians and archaeologists is replaced by a fragmented, dispersed, and largely undocumented “dark age” …
… The key point for our purposes is that, once established, the state was disgorging subjects as well as incorporating them. Causes for flight varied enormously—epidemics, crop failures, floods, salinization, taxes, war, and conscription—provoking both a steady leakage and occasionally a mass exodus. Some of the runaways went to neighboring states, but a good many of them—perhaps especially captives and slaves—left for the periphery and other modes of subsistence. They became, in effect, barbarians by design.
Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine primitives” who stubbornly refused the domus, but ex–state subjects who had chosen, albeit often in desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length. This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism”. The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery. Places of refuge where they accumulated over time became “shatter zones,” as their linguistic and cultural complexity reflected that they were peopled by various pulses of refugees over an extended period.
The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called “going over to the barbarians”, is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot …
… A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war.
As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet. The existence of a large frontier—rather like migration to the New World for poor Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—provided a less dangerous avenue of relief than rebellion. Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation. As the state was weakened and under threat, the temptation was to press harder on the core to make good the losses which then risked further defections in a vicious cycle …
… While the density of grain, population, and livestock in a concentrated space is the source of a state’s power, it is also the source of its potentially fatal vulnerability to mobile raiders. To be sure, the state is often no richer than its periphery, but as we have seen, the decisive difference is that the wealth of the state, or any sedentary community, is all conveniently stacked up in a confined space, while the wealth of the periphery is widely dispersed.
Mobile raiders, especially if they are mounted, have the military initiative. They can arrive at a time and place of their choosing and in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the weakest point of a settled community or to intercept a trading caravan. If they are numerous enough, they can take a fortified community. Their advantage lies in lightning raids; they are unlikely, for example, to lay siege to a fortified city, as the longer they stay put the longer a state has to mobilize against them, thus nullifying their tactical advantage.
Under premodern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons, mobile armies of pastoralists have generally been superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of states. Even in regions without pastoralists and horses, the general pattern seems to be that more mobile peoples—hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, and boat people—tend to dominate and extract tribute from sedentary horticulturalists and farmers.
The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture” … is significant. It gestures, I think, in the direction of an important truth about the parasitic quality of raiding …
Trade over long distances was hardly new. Even before the Neolithic, valued commodities, so long as they were small and light, were exchanged over great distances: obsidian, precious and semiprecious stones, gold, carnelian beads. What was new was not so much the range of the trade but the fact that it had come increasingly to include bulk commodities moved long distances across the entire Mediterranean. Egypt became the “breadbasket” of the eastern Mediterranean, shipping grain to Greece and later to Rome. What is crucial as well is that the market for goods that were raised, grown, collected, and foraged outside the agrarian core had an exponentially larger potential market. Goods from the mountains, high plateaus, marine fringes, and marshes that might previously have circulated locally were now traded “worldwide”. Beeswax and bitumen, used to caulk ships, were in great demand. Aromatic woods such as camphorwood and sandalwood, as well as aromatic resins such as frankincense and myrrh, were much prized. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this transformation.
Suddenly the periphery and semiperiphery of the early states were the sites of valuable commodities for which there was now an appreciable market. Foraging, hunting, and marine collecting became lucrative commercial activities …
… On a … revolutionary scale for their epoch, the various peripheries of the agrarian states became valuable commercial landscapes—in some ways more valuable than the alluvium itself—thoroughly enmeshed in Mediterranean-wide trade networks. The possibilities for hunters, foragers, and marine collectors had never been more promising …
… The relationship between a nomadic periphery and an adjacent state could take any number of forms and was, in any case, highly volatile. At the predatory end it might simply consist of occasional raids punctuated by retaliatory expeditions by state armies. Caesar’s brutal campaigns in Gaul might be considered a rare example of a successful expedition that, despite many subsequent uprisings, extended Roman rule. In other cases, such as the Xiongnu, Uighurs, and Huns, the relationship might involve bribes, subsidies, and a kind of reverse tribute. Such arrangements, under which the barbarians received part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding, might be thought of as a de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians. Under relatively stable conditions, such an equilibrium might approximate the frontier protection-racket model … Conditions, however, were rarely so stable with respect either to statecraft or to the often fragmented, fractious nomadic polity …
… There is, I believe, a long period, measured not in centuries but in millennia—between the earliest appearance of states and lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago—that might be called a “golden age for barbarians” and for nonstate peoples in general. For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern nation-state did not yet exist. Physical movement, flux, an open frontier, and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period. Even the exceptional and often short-lived empires of this long epoch (the Roman, Han, Ming, and in the New World the Mayan peer polities and the Inka) could not impede large-scale population movements in and out of their political orbit.
Hundreds and hundreds of petty states formed, thrived briefly, and decomposed into their elementary social units of villages, lineages, or bands. Populations were adept at modifying their subsistence strategies when circumstances dictated—abandoning the plough for the forest, the forest for swiddening, and swiddening for pastoralism.
While the increase in population would have, by itself, encouraged more intensive subsistence strategies, the fragility of the state, its exposure to epidemics, and a large nonstate periphery would not have allowed us to discern anything like state hegemony until, say, 1600 CE at the earliest. Until then a large share of the world’s population had never seen a (routine) tax collector or, if they had seen one, still had the option of making themselves fiscally invisible …
… The earliest states, because of the opportunities they opened for trade, supplemented by raiding and protection rackets, represented a qualitatively new environment for nonstate peoples. Now a good deal of the world around them was valuable; they could participate fully in the new opportunities for trade without becoming a subject of the state. There would have been periods when leaving behind the plough of a state subject to take up foraging, pastoralism, and marine collecting would have represented a rational economic calculation as well as a bolt for freedom. In such moments, it is likely that the proportion of barbarians vis-à-vis state subjects would have grown because life at the periphery had become more, not less, attractive.
The life of “late barbarians” would, on balance, have been rather good. Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs; being dispersed, they would have been less vulnerable to the failure of a single food source. They were more likely to be healthier and live longer—especially if they were female. More advantageous trade made for more leisure, thus further widening the leisure-drudgery ratio between foragers and farmers.
Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state. They were in almost every respect freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer. This is not a bad balance sheet for a class of barbarians over whom the waves of history were supposed to have rolled a long time ago.
There are, however, two deeply melancholy aspects of the golden age of barbarians. Each has directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life. Many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other nonstate peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core. So pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia that one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups raided their weaker and more dispersed neighbors. In so doing they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians.
The second melancholy aspect of the new livelihoods at the periphery afforded by states was, as previously noted, the sale of their martial skills to states as mercenaries. One would be hard put to find an early state that did not enlist nonstate peoples—sometimes wholesale—in their armies, to catch runaway slaves, and to repress revolts among their own restive populations. Barbarian levies had as much to do with building states as with plundering them. By systematically replenishing the state’s manpower base by slaving and by protecting and expanding the state with its military services, the barbarians willingly dug their own grave.
The Source:
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press 2017 [pp. 16, 20-29, 171-179, 214, 231-237, 246-247, 250-256]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.