against the grain
by james c scott (2017) via 165 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-against-the-grain]:
Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States
notes/quotes:
4
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote thus:
Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. . . . Writing is a strange thing. . . . The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals . . . into a hierarchy of castes and classes. . . . It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind..t
lit & num as colonialism et al
write ness.. against written thought
5
preface
This book thus reflects my effort to dig deeper. It is still very much the work of an amateur. .. First, there is the advantage of the naïveté I bring to the enterprise! ..my ignorance and subsequent wide-eyed surprise at how much of what I thought I knew was wrong might be an advantage in writing for an audience that starts out with the same misconceptions. Second, I have made a conscientious effort, as a consumer, to understand the recent knowledge and debates in biology, epidemiology, archaeology, ancient history, demography, and environmental history that bear on these issues. And finally, I bring a background of two decades trying to understand the logic of modern state power (Seeing Like a State) as well as the practices of nonstate peoples, especially in Southeast Asia, who have, until recently, evaded absorption by states (The Art of Not Being Governed).
We thought (most of us anyway) that the domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism and fixed-field agriculture. It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared. Sedentism and the first appearance of towns were typically seen to be the effect of irrigation and of states. It turns out that both are, instead, usually the product of wetland abundance. We thought that sedentism and cultivation led directly to state formation, yet states pop up only long after fixed-field agriculture appears. Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. The state and early civilizations were often seen as attractive magnets, drawing people in by virtue of their luxury, culture, and opportunities. In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding. The early states were fragile and liable to collapse, but the ensuing “dark ages” may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare. Finally, there is a strong case to be made that life outside the state—life as a “barbarian”—may often have been materially easier, freer, and healthier than life at least for nonelites inside civilization.
dawn of everything (book) et al
legibility and control et al
7
I will name some of my most important guides here because I do wish to implicate them in this enterprise insofar as their wisdom has helped me find my way. At the top of the list are archaeologists..t and specialists on the Mesopotamian alluvium who have been exceptionally generous with their time and critical advice: Jennifer Pournelle, Norman Yoffee, David Wengrow, and Seth Richardson. Others whose work has inspired me are, in no particular order: John McNeill, Edward Melillo, Melinda Zeder, Hans Nissen, Les Groube, Guillermo Algaze, Ann Porter, Susan Pollock, Dorian Q. Fuller, Andrea Seri, Tate Paulette, Robert Mc. Adams, Michael Dietler, Gordon Hillman, Karl Jacoby, Helen Leach, Peter Perdue, Christopher Beckwith, Cyprian Broodbank, Owen Lattimore, Thomas Barfield, Ian Hodder, Richard Manning, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Edward Friedman, Douglas Storm, James Prosek, Aniket Aga, Sarah Osterhoudt, Padriac Kenney, Gardiner Bovingdon, Timothy Pechora, Stuart Schwartz, Anna Tsing, David Graeber,..t Magnus Fiskesjo, Victor Lieberman, Wang Haicheng, Helen Siu, Bennet Bronson, Alex Lichtenstein, Cathy Shufro, Jeffrey Isaac, and Adam T. Smith. I am particularly grateful to Joe Manning, who, I found, anticipated a good part of my argument about cereal grains and states and whose intellectual large-spiritedness extended to allowing me to poach his title, Against the Grain, as the first element of my own.
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Introduction: A Narrative in Tatters: What I Didn’t Know
The narrative of this process has typically been told as one of progress, of civilization and public order, and of increasing health and leisure. Given what we now know, much of this narrative is wrong or seriously misleading. The purpose of this book is to call that narrative into question on the basis of my reading of the advances in archaeological and historical research over the past two decades..t
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I propose an alternative point of departure..I suggest that we begin with the use of fire,..t the first great hominid tool for landscaping—or, rather, niche construction. Evidence for the use of fire is dated at least 400,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier still, long predating the appearance of Homo sapiens.[2] Permanent settlement, agriculture, and pastoralism, appearing about 12,000 years ago, mark a further leap in our transformation of the landscape. If our concern is with the historical footprint of hominids, one might well identify a “thin” Anthropocene long before the more explosive and recent “thick” Anthropocene; “thin” largely because there were so very few hominids to wield these landscaping tools. Our numbers circa 10,000 BCE were a puny two million to four million worldwide, far less than a thousandth of our population today. The other decisive premodern invention was institutional: the state..t The first states in the Mesopotamian alluvium pop up no earlier than about 6,000 years ago, several millennia after the first evidence of agriculture and sedentism in the region. No institution has done more to mobilize the technologies of landscape modification in its interest than the state.
fire and state as causes of ‘departure’
endnote [2] For the dating, personal communication, David Wengrow.
A sense, then, for how we came to be sedentary, cereal-growing, livestock-rearing subjects governed by the novel institution we now call the state requires an excursion into deep history. *History at its best, in my view, is the most subversive discipline, inasmuch as it can tell us how things that we are likely to take for granted came to be..t The allure of deep history is that by revealing the many contingencies that came together to shape, say, the Industrial Revolution, the Last Glacial Maximum, or the Qin Dynasty, it responds to the call by an earlier generation of French historians of the Annales School for a history of long-run processes (la longue durée) in place of a chronicle of public events. But the contemporary call for “deep history” goes the Annales School one better by calling for what often amounts to a species history. This is the zeitgeist in which I find myself, a zeitgeist surely illustrative of the maxim that “The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”[3]
*as long as we go back far enough to first ‘disturbance‘ of ecosystem.. ie: since forever
otherwise.. spinning our wheels in the cancerous distraction of history ness
endnote [3] It’s hard to avoid asking oneself, “Where did we go wrong to end up here?” That question is far too ambitious for me to tackle. One thing stands out, however, and that is that our trouble is largely of our own making. This, in turn, suggests a medical analogy. More than two-thirds of hospitalizations in industrial countries, it is claimed, are for iatrogenic illnesses: medical conditions that result from previous medical interventions and therapy. One might say that our current environmental ills are largely iatrogenic. If so, the first step is perhaps to elicit a long and deep medical history that might help us trace the origins of our current complaints..t
healing (roots of).. root of problem ness et al
again.. otherwise.. spinning our wheels in the cancerous distraction of history ness
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These raw facts trouble the version of human prehistory that most of us (I include myself here) have unreflectively inherited. Historical humankind has been mesmerized by the narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first great agrarian kingdoms. . In its essentials, it was an “ascent of man” story. Agriculture, it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless, and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads. Fixed-field crops, on the other hand, were the origin and guarantor of the settled life, of formal religion, of society, and of government by laws. Those who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt. In virtually all early agricultural settings the superiority of farming was underwritten
Once the basic assumption of the superiority and attraction of fixed-field farming over all previous forms of subsistence is questioned, it becomes clear that this assumption itself rests on a deeper and more embedded assumption that is virtually never questioned. And that assumption is that sedentary life itself is superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of subsistence. .. Yet there is massive evidence of determined resistance by mobile peoples everywhere to permanent settlement, even under relatively favorable circumstances. ..At the very least, we have no warrant at all for supposing that the sedentary “givens” of modern life can be read back into human history as a universal aspiration.
Each step is presumed to represent an epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being: more leisure, better nutrition, longer life expectancy, and, at long last, a settled life that promoted the household arts and the development of civilization. Dislodging this narrative from the world’s imagination is well nigh impossible; the twelve-step recovery program required to accomplish that beggars the imagination. I nevertheless make a small start here.
rather.. global detox leap
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It turns out that the greater part of what we might call the standard narrative has had to be abandoned once confronted with accumulating archaeological evidence. Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure.
The wounds the standard narrative has suffered at the hands of recent research are, I believe, life threatening. For example, it has been assumed that fixed residence—sedentism—was a consequence of crop-field agriculture. Crops allowed populations to concentrate and settle, providing a necessary condition for state formation.
Perhaps most troubling of all, the civilizational act at the center of the entire narrative: domestication turns out to be stubbornly elusive. Hominids have, after all, been shaping the plant world—largely with fire—since before Homo sapiens.
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Thus if you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be “discovered” and to dominate the pages of ancient history. If, on the other hand, you built with wood, bamboo, or reeds, you were much less likely to appear in the archaeological record. And if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record.
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Thumbnail Itinerary
The theme of the first chapter turns on the domestication of fire, plants, and animals and the concentration of food and population such domestication makes possible. Before we could be made the object of state making, it was necessary that we gather—or be gathered—in substantial numbers with a reasonable expectation of not immediately starving. Each of these domestications rearranged the natural world in a way that vastly reduced the radius of a meal. Fire, which we owe to our older relative Homo erectus, has been our great trump card, allowing us to resculpt the landscape so as to encourage food-bearing plants—nut and fruit trees, berry bushes—and to create browse that would attract desirable prey. In cooking, fire rendered a host of previously indigestible plants both palatable and more nutritious. We owe our relatively large brain and relatively small gut (compared with other mammals, including primates), it is claimed, to the external predigestive help that cooking provides.
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Thanks to their gut bacteria, they can digest plants that we cannot find and/or break down and can bring them back to us, as it were, in their “cooked” form as fat and protein, which we both crave and can digest. We selectively breed these domesticates for the qualities we desire: rapid reproduction, toleration of confinement, docility, meat, and milk and wool production.
The term “domesticate” is normally understood as an active verb taking a direct object, as in “Homo sapiens domesticated rice . . . domesticated sheep,” and so on. This overlooks the active agency of domesticates. It is not so clear, for example, to what degree we domesticated the dog or the dog domesticated us. ..It is almost a metaphysical question who is the servant of whom—at least until it comes time to eat.
The meaning of domestication for plants, man, and beast is explored in Chapter 2. I argue, as have others, that domestication ought to be understood in an expansive way, as the ongoing effort of Homo sapiens to shape the entire environment to its liking. ..While the thick Anthropocene is judged by some to have begun with worldwide deposit of radioactivity following the dropping of the first atomic bomb, there is what I have termed a “thin” Anthropocene that dates from the use of fire by Homo erectus roughly half a million years ago and extends up through clearances for agriculture and grazing and the resulting deforestation, and siltation. The impact and tempo of this early Anthropocene grows as the world’s population swells to roughly twenty-five million in 2,000 BCE. There is no particular reason to insist on the label “Anthropocene”—a term both in vogue and in much dispute as I write—but there are many reasons to insist on the global environmental impact of the domestication of fire, plants, and grazing animals.
“Domestication” changed the genetic makeup and morphology of both crops and animals around the domus. The assemblage of plants, animals, and humans in agricultural settlements created a new and largely artificial environment in which Darwinian selection pressure worked to promote new adaptations. The new crops became “basketcases,” which could not survive without our constant attentions and protection. Much the same was true for domesticated sheep and goats, which became smaller, more placid, less aware of their surroundings and less sexually dimorphic. I ask in this context whether it is likely that a similar process affected us. How were we also domesticated by the domus, by our confinement, by crowding, by our different patterns of physical activity and social organization? Finally, by comparing the life world of agriculture—strapped as it is to the metronome of a major cereal grain—with the life world of the hunter-gatherer, I make the case that the life of farming is comparatively far narrower experientially and, in both a cultural and a ritual sense, more impoverished.
20
The burdens of life for nonelites in the earliest states, the subject of Chapter 3, were considerable. The first, as noted above, 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. ..Diseases with which we are now familiar—measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other community acquired infections—appeared for the first time in the early states.
Chapter 4 is devoted to what might be called the grain hypothesis. ..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.
In contrast the tuber cassava (aka manioc, yucca) grows below ground, requires little care, is easy to conceal, ripens in a year, and, most important, can safely be left in the ground and remain edible for two more years. .. If we were evaluating crops from the perspective of the premodern “tax man,” the major grains (above all, irrigated rice) would be among the most preferred, and roots and tubers among the least preferred.
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.
ch 3: sedentary = disease.. ch 4: grain over yucca ness for tax man ness
21
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.
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The larger question, the one I address in Chapter 5, is important because it bears on the role of coercion in establishing and maintaining the ancient state. .
ch 5: coercion
coercion ness – aka: any form of m\a\p
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The reasons for this fragility and how we might understand its larger meaning provide the theme of Chapter 6.
ch 6: fragility of state
30
my seventh and last chapter is devoted to the “barbarians” who were simply the vast population not subject to state control.
ch 7: barbarians
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Perhaps the main commodity traded to the early states was the slave—typically from among the barbarians.
1. The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and . . . Us
Fire
33
Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world—a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide.
From our perspective, what this slow-motion landscape engineering accomplishes over time is to concentrate more subsistence resources in a smaller and smaller area… The radius of a meal, one might say, is reduced. Subsistence resources are closer at hand, more abundant, and more predictable. Wherever humans and fire were at work sculpting the landscape for hunting-and-gathering convenience, few nutrient-poor “climax” forests were allowed to develop.
34.
Fire largely accounts for our reproductive success as the world’s most successful “invasive.”[20] Much like certain trees, plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding. If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight
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Even on the basis of this rough-and-ready chronology—much of it still in some dispute—one can see how much of it is stubbornly at odds with what I have called the standard civilizational narrative. That narrative pivoted on the domestication of grain as the basic precondition of permanent sedentary life, and thus of towns, cities, and civilization. The presumption, still commonly held, was that hunting and foraging required such mobility and dispersal that sedentism was out of the question. Yet sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little or no cereal cultivation. What is also absolutely clear is that domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears—far longer than previously imagined.
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(Think of the “amber waves of grain” in “America the Beautiful.”) *Within this perspective, swamps, marshes, fens, and wetlands generally have been seen as the mirror image of civilization—as a zone of untamed nature, a trackless waste, dangerous to health and safety. The work of civilization, when it came to marshes, was precisely to drain them and transform them into orderly, productive grain fields..t and villages. Civilizing arid lands mean irrigating them; civilizing swamps means draining them; the goal in each case is making arable grain lands. H. R. Hall wrote of early Mesopotamia in “the state of chaos, half-water and half-land, of the [alluvial] fans of southern Babylonia before civilization began its work of draining and canalizing.”The work of civilization, or more precisely the state, as we shall see, consists in **the elimination of mud and its replacement by its purer constituents, land and water..t Whether in ancient China, in the Netherlands, in the fens of England, in the Pontine Marshes finally subdued by Mussolini, or in the remaining southern Iraq marshes drained by Saddam Hussein, the state has endeavored to turn ungovernable wetlands into taxable grain fields by reengineering the landscape.
*swamp school ness.. and **the legibility/control/violence ness of land/water vs mud
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A last and more speculative reason for the obscurity of wetland societies is that they were, and remained, environmentally resistant to centralization and control from above. They were based on what are now called “common property resources”—free-living plants, animals, and aquatic creatures to which the entire community had access. There was no single dominant resource that could be monopolized or controlled from the center, let alone easily taxed. *Subsistence in these zones was so diverse, variable, and dependent on such a multitude of tempos as to defy any simple central accounting..t Unlike the early states that we will examine later, no central authority could monopolize—and therefore ration—access to arable land, grain, or irrigation water. There was, therefore, little evidence of any hierarchy in such communities (as usually measured by differential grave goods).
*aka: antifragile
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If one source failed in a given year, another might be abundant. In the diversity and varying temporalities of this living storage complex lay its stability..t
One line of theorizing, favored for a time among students of social evolution, depicted agriculture as a crucial civilizational leap because it was a “delayed-return” activity. The cultivator, it asserted, is a qualitatively new person because he must look far ahead in preparing a field for sowing, then must weed and tend the crop as it matures, until (he hopes) it yields a crop. What is wrong—radically so, in my view—is not so much its depiction of the agriculturalist as its caricature of hunter-gatherers. It suggests, by the implied contrast, that the hunter-gatherer is an improvident, spontaneous creature of impulse, coursing the landscape in hope of stumbling on game or finding something good to pluck from a bush or tree (“immediate return”). Nothing could be farther from the truth. All mass capture—gazelle, fish, and bird migrations—involve elaborate, cooperative advance preparation: the building of long narrowing “drive corridors” to a killing ground; building weirs, nets, and traps; building or digging facilities for smoking, drying, or salting of the catch. These are delayed-return activities par excellence. They involve a large kit of tools and techniques and a far greater degree of coordination and cooperation than agriculture requires. Beyond these more spectacular mass-capture activities, hunters and gatherers, as we have seen, have long been sculpting the landscape: encouraging plants that will bear food and raw materials later, burning to create fodder and attract game, weeding natural stands of desirable grains and tubers. Except for the act of harrowing and sowing, they perform all the other operations for wild stands of cereals that farmers do for their crops.
Neither “food storage” nor “delayed return” are remotely plausible reasons for the limited use of domesticated grains that we find in the historical record. I propose a quite different explanation for sowing crops based on a simple analogy between fire and flood. The general problem with farming—especially plough agriculture—is that it involves so much intensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor: “flood-retreat” ..has been shown to be the most labor-saving form of agriculture regardless of the crop being planted
flood retreat et al
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For our purposes, flooding in this case can be seen to accomplish the same landscape sculpting as the fire deployed by hunter-gatherers or swidden (slash-and-burn) cultivators. A flood clears a “field” by scouring and drowning back all competing vegetation and, in the process, deposits a layer of soft, easily worked, nutritious silt as it recedes. The result, under good conditions, is often a nearly perfectly harrowed and fertilized field ready for sowing at no cost in labor. Just as our ancestors noticed how a fire cleared the land for a new natural succession of quickly colonizing (the so-called r plants) species, so they must have noticed much the same succession with floods. And since the early cereals are grasses (r plants), they would have thrived and gotten a head start on competing weeds if broadcast on this silt. Nor is it much of a stretch, as observed earlier, to imagine making a small breach in a natural levee to provoke a small flood and the recession agriculture that it would make possible. Voila! a form of agriculture that an intelligent, work-shy hunter-gatherer might take up.
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2. Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex
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Here *the term “domestication”—from “domus,” or household—needs to be taken rather literally. The domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen..t Just as important, the domus as a module of evolution was irresistibly attractive to literally thousands of **uninvited hangers-on who thrived in its little ecosystem.
*domesticate ness
**invited vs invented et al.. so too.. uninvited ness leans us toward not being enough.. toward dehumanization.. et al
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*Those most eligible for domestication were, aside from their food value, “generalists” that could thrive in disturbed soils (the tilled field), could grow in dense stands, and were easily stored..t The problem for the would-be farmer was that the natural selection pressure for wild plants promotes characteristics that are designed to defeat the farmer. Thus wild grainheads are typically small and shatter easily, thereby seeding themselves. They mature unevenly; their seeds can remain long dormant but still germinate; they have many appendages, awns, glumes, and thick seed coats,..t all of which discourage grazers and birds.
*aka for people: most pliable/friendly to ‘norm’ ness
**aka for people: most disorderly and crazywise (doc) et al
The diversity of crops and subspecies was greatest in natural settings of greater ecological and climatic diversity and least in the alluvial bottomlands with more dependable water and growing conditions.
bush mono crop law et al and discrimination as equity ness
“Fully domesticated” means simply that it is, in effect, our creation; it can no longer thrive without our attentions. .. its future is entirely dependent on our own. ..t Some domestic plants and animals (oats, bananas, daffodils, day lilies, dogs, and pigs) have, as we know, resisted full domestication and are capable, to varying degrees, of surviving and reproducing outside the domus.
aka: the violence of people telling other people what to do rather than the freedom of left to own devices ness
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Not all prey animals were suitable candidates. Here the evolutionary biologists and natural historians stress that certain species were “preadapted,” having characteristics in the wild that predisposed them to life in the domus. Among the characteristics proposed are, above all, herd behavior and the social hierarchy that accompanies it, the capacity to tolerate different environmental conditions, a broad spectrum diet, adaptability to crowding and disease, the ability to breed under confinement, and, finally, a relatively muted fright-and-flight response to external stimuli. .t
Those animals that were domesticated, however, entered an entirely new life world, encountering radically different evolutionary pressures from those they had experienced as free-living prey. First and foremost, to take the most common early domesticates, sheep, goats, and pigs, they were not free to go wherever they pleased. As a captive species their diet was, along with their mobility, restricted, and they were often crowded together in enclosures, wadis, and caves to a degree unprecedented in their evolutionary history.
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As a sheep breeder myself for more than twenty years, I have always been personally offended when sheep are used as a synonym for cowardly crowd behavior and a lack of individuality. We have, for the past eight thousand years, been selecting among sheep for tractability—slaughtering first the aggressive ones who broke out of the corral. How dare we, then, turn around and slander a species for some combination of normal herd behavior and precisely those characteristics we have selected for?..t
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More diagnostic than the overall reduction in brain size are the areas of the brain that seem to be disproportionately affected. In the case of dogs, sheep, and pigs, the part of the brain most affected is the limbic system (hippocampus, hypothalamus, pituitary, and amygdala), which is responsible for activating hormones and nervous-system reactions to threats and external stimuli. The shrinkage of the limbic system is associated with raising the threshold that would trigger aggression, flight, and fear. In turn, this helps explain the diagnostic characteristics of virtually all domesticated species: namely the general reduction in emotional reactivity. Such emotional dampening can be seen as a condition for life in the crowded domus and under human supervision, where the instant reaction to predator and prey are no longer powerful pressures of natural selection. With physical protection and nutrition more secure, the domesticated animal can be less intently alert to its immediate surroundings than its cousins in the wild.
Just as human sedentism represents a reduction in mobility and increased crowding in the village and domus, so the relative confinement and crowding of domestic animals has immediate consequences for health. The stress and physical trauma of confinement, together with a narrower spectrum diet and the ease with which infections can spread among individuals of the same species packed together, make for a variety of pathologies. Bone pathologies due to repeated infection, relative inactivity, and a poorer diet are particularly common. Archaeologists have come to expect cases of chronic arthritis, evidence of gum disease, and bone signatures of confinement in analyzing the remains of archaic domestic animals. ..The difference can be largely attributed to the effects of confinement—muddy, feces-rich corrals in which virulent clostridium bacteria, among others, thrives and, like other parasites, finds an abundant supply of hosts close at hand.
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The Domestication of Us
We, as a species, are inclined to see ourselves as the “agent” in narratives of domestication. “We” domesticated wheat, rice, the sheep, the pig, the goat. But if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, one could argue that it is we who have been domesticated..t Michael Pollan sees it this way in his sudden and memorable aperçu while gardening. As he is weeding and hoeing around his thriving potato plants, it dawns on him that he has, unwittingly, become the slave of the potato. Here he is, on his hands and knees, day after day, weeding, fertilizing, untangling, protecting, and in general reshaping the immediate environment to the utopian expectations of his potato plants.
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But literally thousands of years before the social changes Elias describes—and quite apart from any hypothetical changes to our limbic system—much of our species was already disciplined and subordinated to the metronome of our own crops..t
since forever ness.. mitchell garden law
Once cereals became established as a staple in the early Middle East, it is striking how the agricultural calendar came to determine much of public ritual life: ceremonial ploughing by priests and kings, harvest rites and celebrations, prayers and sacrifices for an abundant harvest, gods for particular grains. The metaphors with which people reasoned were increasingly dominated by domesticated grains and domesticated animals: “a time to sow and a time to reap,” being “a good shepherd.” There is hardly a passage in the Old Testament that fails to make use of such imagery. This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of wild fauna for a handful of livestock.
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3. Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm
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4. Agro-ecology of the Early State
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The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”..t Other crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation..t
of math and men.. graeber violence/quantification law et al
The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary. In practice, in the case of the medieval tithe, the cultivator was expected to assemble the unthreshed grain in sheaves in the field, from which the tithe collector would take every tenth sheaf.
Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the remainder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly. Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by opposing armies
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Cereal grains also lend themselves well to bulk transport.. and storage
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The nomads followed small scale changes in climate to maximize their access to good pasture and sweet water; consequently they were always on the move.”t
pirates ness
In one way or another, nongrain peoples—that it to say most of the world—embodied forms of livelihood and social organization that defeated taxation: physical mobility, dispersal, variable group and community size, diverse and invisible subsistence goods, and few fixed-point resources..t To Romans, for example, a key defining characteristic of barbarians was that they ate dairy products and meat and not, as Romans did, grain.
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Walls Make States: Protection and Confinement
The existence of walls was an infallible proxy for the presence of permanent cultivation and food storage.
City walls were thus intended to keep the essentials of state preservation inside.. The control and confinement of populations as the reason and function of city walls depends in large part on demonstrating that the flight of subjects was a real preoccupation of the early state..t
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Writing Makes States: Record Keeping and Legibility
To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, reformed, corrected, punished..t
—Pierre-Joseph Prudhon
pierre-joseph proudhon.. proudhon ruled law
Peasantries with long experience of on-the-ground statecraft have always understood that the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. So when a government surveyor arrives with a plane table, or census takers come with their clipboards and questionnaires to register households, the subjects understand that trouble in the form of conscription, forced labor, land seizures, head taxes, or new taxes on croplands cannot be far behind. They understand implicitly that behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders—paperwork that is for the most part mystifying and beyond their ken. The firm identification in their minds between paper documents and the source of their oppressions..t has meant that the first act of many peasant rebellions has been to burn down the local records office where these documents are housed. Grasping the fact that the state saw its land and subjects through record keeping, the peasantry implicitly assumed that blinding the state might end their woes. As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector.”
Southern Mesopotamia was the heartland of not one but several related state-making experiments between roughly 3,300 and 2,350 BCE. Like China’s Warring States period or the later Greek city-states, the southern alluvium was the site of rivalrous city-polities whose fortunes waxed and waned. Among the best known were Kish, Ur, and, above all, Uruk. Something utterly remarkable and without historical parallel was taking place here. On one hand, groups of priests, strong men, and local chiefs were scaling up and institutionalizing structures of power that had previously used only the idioms of kinship. They were creating for the first time something along the lines of what we would call a state, though they could not possibly have understood it in those terms. On the other hand, thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control..t
It is at roughly this time that writing makes its first appearance. The coincidence of the pristine state and pristine writing tempts one to the crude functionalist conclusion that would-be state makers invented the forms of notation that were essential to statecraft. But it would not be too strong to assert that it is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping, even if it took the Inka form of strings of knots (quipu). The first condition of state appropriation (for whatever purpose) must be an inventory of available resources—population, land, crop yields, livestock, storehouse stocks. This information is, however, like a cadastral survey, a snapshot soon out of date. As appropriation proceeds, continuous record keeping is required—of grain deliveries, corvée labor performed, requisitions, receipts, and so on. Once a polity comprises even a few thousand subjects, some form of notation and documentation beyond memory and oral tradition is required.
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Surely we know enough about even quite modern bureaucracies to realize that there is no necessary relation between the records on the one hand and the facts on the ground on the other. Documents are forged and fiddled for private advantage or to please superiors. Rules and regulations laid out meticulously in the documents may be a dead letter on the ground. .t
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Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.
Since the script was not a transcription of a speech dialect, it had, inherently, a kind of universality.
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Captives were settled near the court, and regulations restricted population movement. One of the hallmarks of early statecraft in agrarian kingdoms was to hold the population in place and prevent any unauthorized movement. Physical mobility and dispersal are the bane of the tax man..t
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One student of early writing in Mesopotamia suggested, admittedly speculatively, that writing was elsewhere resisted because of its indelible association with the state and taxes, just as ploughing was long resisted because of its indelible association with drudgery.
[Why did] every distinctive community on the periphery reject the use of writing with so many archaeological cultures exposed to the complexity of southern Mesopotamia? One could argue that this rejection of complexity was a conscious act. What is the reason for it? . . . Perhaps, far from being less intellectually qualified to deal with complexity, the peripheral peoples were smart enough to avoid its oppressive command structures for at least another 500 years, when it was imposed upon them by military conquest. . . . In every instance the periphery initially rejected the adoption of complexity even after direct exposure to it . . . and, in doing so, avoided the cage of the state for another half millennium
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5. Population Control: Bondage and War
The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft..t
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The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is “consumed” in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what *Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed.2 [125] Access to resources—land, pasture, hunting—**was open to all by virtue of membership in a group, whether tribe, band, lineage, or family, that controlled those resources. Short of being cast out, an individual could not be denied direct and independent access to whatever means of subsistence the group in question disposed of. And in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A. V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.
endnote 2 (125): sahlins stone age econ
**if membership.. not legit common\ing/free
The important point for our purpose is that a peasantry—assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs—will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it. Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor—corvée labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery—was a surplus brought into being. .. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree.
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It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently. As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage..
..perhaps as much as two-thirds—of Athenian society, and the institution was taken completely for granted; the issue of abolition never arose. As Aristotle held, some peoples, owing to a lack of rational faculties, are, by nature, slaves and are best used, as draft animals are, as tools. In Sparta, slaves represented an even larger portion of the populatio
The ubiquity of slaves as a commodity was reflected in the fact that in the classical world a “standardized” slave became a unit of measurement: in Athens at one point—the market fluctuated—a pair of working mules was worth three slaves.
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“It would appear, therefore, that in the minds of the Uruk scribes and in the eyes of the institutions that employed them, such laborers were conceptualized as ‘domesticated’ humans, wholly equivalent to domestic animals in status.”
Other evidence about slaves and prisoners of war indicates that they were not well treated. Many are shown in neck fetters or being physically subdued. “On cylinder seals we meet frequent variants of a scene in which the ruler supervises his men as they beat shackled prisoners with clubs.” There are many reports of captives being deliberately blinded, but it is impossible to know how common the practice was. Perhaps the strongest evidence of brutal treatment is the general conclusion by scholars that the servile population did not reproduce itself.
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For our purpose, however, what is most important is that these resettled populations would not necessarily have appeared in the historical record as slaves at all. [on mass deportation ness et al]
immigration detentions centers ness et al
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What if we were, as a fruitful conjecture, to take seriously Aristotle’s claim that a slave is a tool for work and, as such, to be considered as a domestic animal as an ox might be? After all, Aristotle was serious. What if we were to examine slavery, agrarian war captives, helots, and the like as state projects to domesticate a class of human servitors—by force—much as our Neolithic ancestors had domesticated sheep and cattle?..t The project, of course, was never quite realized, but to see things from this angle is not entirely far-fetched. Alexis de Tocqueville reached for this analogy when he considered Europe’s growing world hegemony: “We should almost say that the European is to the other races what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys..t[164]
endnote 164: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 544; quoted in Darwin, After Tamerlane, 24. Tocqueville adds, “Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity.” For a similar analogy between animal and human domestication, see also the remarkable book by Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire, 15. For a brilliant analysis of the analogy between domesticated animals and slaves in the antebellum U. S. South, see Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature.”
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If we substitute for “Europeans” “early states,” and for “other races” “war captives,” we do not greatly distort the project, I think. The captives, individually and collectively, became an integral part of the state’s means of production and reproduction, a part, if you will, along with the livestock and grain fields of the state’s own domus.
Pushed even farther, I believe the analogy has an illuminating power. Take the question of reproduction. At the very center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s or animal’s reproduction, which entails confinement and a concern for selective breeding and rates of reproduction. In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor. It would be instructive, but alas impossible, to know, in the light of the epidemiological challenges of early state centers, the importance of slave women’s reproduction to the demographic stability and growth of the state. The domestication of nonslave women in the early grain state may also be seen in the same light. A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general.
If one’s own agrarian population could not be made to do this work without risking desertion or rebellion, then a captive, domesticated, alien population must be made to do it. That population could be acquired only by slavery—the long-standing, ultimately unsuccessful, and last attempt to realize Aristotle’s vision of the human tool..t
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6. Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly
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What might “collapse” mean, anyway—as in the phrases “the collapse of Ur III,” around 2,000 BCE; “the collapse of the Old Kingdom Egypt,” around 2,100 BCE; “the collapse of the Minoan Palatial Regime” on Crete, around 1,450 BCE? At the very least it means the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental court center. This is usually interpreted not merely as a redistribution of population but as a substantial, not to say catastrophic, loss of social complexity. If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages. Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent. Taken together, such changes are often understood to be a deplorable regression away from a more civilized culture. In this respect, it is just as essential to emphasize what such events do not necessarily mean. They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.
The history of the term “collapse” and the melancholic associations it evokes are worth reflecting on. Our initial knowledge of and wonder at the archaic state come from what might be called the heroic period of archaeology, .. the prevailing standard images of these early states have become icons: the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the Athenian Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the warrior tombs at Xian. So when these archaeological superstars evaporated, it seemed as if it were the end of an entire world. What in fact was lost were the beloved objects of classical archaeology: the concentrated ruins of the relatively rare centralized kingdoms, along with their written record and luxuries.
When the apex disappears, one is particularly grateful for the increasingly large fraction of archaeologists whose attention was focused not on the apex but on the base and its constituent units. Their cumulative knowledge of shifting settlement patterns, structures of trade and exchange, rainfall, soil structure, and changing mixes of livelihood strategies allows us to see a great deal more than the apparently gravity-defying apex. .. While “collapse” represents a reduction in social complexity, it is these smaller nuclei of power—a compact small settlement on the alluvium, for example—that are likely to persist far longer than the brief miracles of statecraft that lash them together into a substantial kingdom or empire. Yoffee and Cowgill have aptly borrowed from the administrative theorist Herbert Simon the term “modularity”: a condition wherein the units of a larger aggregation are generally independent and detachable—in Simon’s terms, “nearly decomposable.” In such cases the disappearance of the apical center need not imply much in the way of disorder, let alone trauma, for the more durable, self-sufficient elementary units. Echoing Yoffee and Cowgill, Hans Nissen cautions us against mistaking “the end of a period of centralization as a ‘collapse’ and regarding the phase during which a once unified area was split up into smaller parts as a politically troubled period.”
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it is essential to acknowledge the fundamental structural vulnerability of the grain complex on which all early states rested. Sedentism arose in very special and circumscribed ecological niches, particularly in alluvial or loess soils. Later—much later—the first centralized states arose in even more circumscribed ecological settings where there was a large core of rich, well-watered soils and navigable waterways, capable of sustaining a good number of cereal-growing subjects. Outside these rare and favorable sites for state creation, foraging, hunting, and pastoral people continued to flourish.
State-making sites were above all structurally vulnerable to subsistence failures that had little to do with how adept or incompetent their rulers were. First and foremost of these structural vulnerabilities was the fact that they depended overwhelmingly on a single annual harvest of one or two cereal staples. If that harvest failed because of drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases, the population was in mortal danger—as were their rulers who depended on the surplus they produced. These populations were also, as we have seen, in far greater danger from the infectious diseases that affected them and their livestock because of crowding than were dispersed foragers. And finally, as we shall explore, the reliance of elites on a surplus, together with the logic of transportation, meant that the state relied far more heavily on the population and resources located closest to the core, a reliance that could undermine its stability.
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The first pristine states in the Middle East, China, and the New World were operating in totally uncharted territory. There was no way that their founders and subjects could anticipate the ecological, political, and epidemiological perils that awaited them. Since the problems were without precedent, they were hard to fathom. Once in a while, especially when there are written sources, the reason for a state’s demise is fairly clear: a successful invasion by another culture that replaces its enemy, for example, a destructive war between states, or a civil war or insurrection within the state. More commonly, however, the reasons behind the state’s disappearance are more obscure and insidious, or else are catastrophic events, such as flood, drought, or crop failure, which may have deeper, cumulative causes. Such causes, I believe, are of particular interest to us for at least three reasons. First, unlike more contingent events like an invasion, they have a systematic character that may be linked directly to state processes. As such, they afford us a unique window on the structural contradictions of the ancient state. Second, such causes are likely to be slighted by most historical analyses, as they appear to have no direct, proximate human agent behind them and often leave no obvious archaeological signature behind to identify themselves. Evidence for their role in state mortality is speculative as well as circumstantial, but there is reason to believe their importance has been greatly underestimated.
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States themselves required resources on a far grander scale than early sedentary communities, and resources of a different order. The result was an explosion of overland and, especially, waterborne trade. Students of early trade Guillermo Algaze and David Wengrow go so far as to refer to the “Uruk world system” around 3,500 to 3,200 BCE as an integrated world of trade and exchange.. Uruk and its competitors required resources from afar that were not available in the alluvium: copper and tin for tools, weapons, armor, and both decorative and utilitarian objects; timber and charcoal; limestone and quarried rock for building; silver, gold, and gems for sumptuary display. In exchange for these goods the statelets of the alluvium dispatched textiles, grain, pottery, and artisanal products to their trading partners. The effect, for our purposes, of this vast enlargement of the commercial sphere is that it similarly enlarged the sphere of transmitted diseases, bringing hitherto separate pools of diseases into contact for the first time.
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That the issue of “collapse” should arise at all is essentially an artifact of the rise of walled settlements with monumental centers, and the common mistaken assumption that such central places are “civilization” itself. There are any number of occasions, as we have noted, when prestate sedentary communities are, for one reason or another, abandoned temporarily or permanently. Such events, noted by archaeologists, may involve substantial numbers of people, but they are unlikely to be “historical news” so long as the community is not a walled state center. The stones and rubble matter; they provide both an impressive site of excavation, museum artifacts, and often an iconic lineage for a nation’s glorious past. Civilizations that, like Srivijaya on Sumatra, built with perishable materials and now are all but vanished hardly appear in the history book, while Angkor Wat and Borobudur live on as luminous centers.
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Praising Collapse
Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? ..t..the “Dark Age” of Greece, the “First Intermediate Period” of Egypt, and the decline of Uruk under the Akkadian Empire. Yet there is a strong case to be made that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare..t
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What is lost culturally when a large state center is abandoned or destroyed is thus an empirical question. Surely it is likely to have an effect on the division of labor, and scale of trade, and on monumental architecture. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the culture will survive—and be developed—in multiple smaller centers no longer in thrall to the center. One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations. Above all, the well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center. It is not uncommon for the subjects of early states to leave both agriculture and urban centers to evade taxes, conscription, epidemics, and oppression. From one perspective they may be seen to have regressed to more rudimentary forms of subsistence, such as foraging or pastoralism. But from another, and I believe broader, perspective, they may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation. This is emphatically not to deny that life outside the state may often be characterized by predation and violence of other kinds, but rather to assert that we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and violence.
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Episodes of collapse are frequently succeeded by what comes to be known as a “dark age.” Just as the meaning of collapse merits close and critical inspection, so the term “dark age” needs to be queried: “dark” for whom and in what respects?.t Dark ages are just as ubiquitous as storied dynastic highpoints of consolidation. The term is often a form of propaganda by which a centralizing dynasty contrasts its achievement with what it casts as the disunity and decentralization that preceded it. At a minimum, it seems unwarranted for the mere depopulation of a state center and the absence of monumental building and court records to be called a dark age and understood as the equivalent of the civilizational lights being extinguished. To be sure, there are in fact periods when invasions, epidemics, droughts, and floods do kill thousands and scatter (or enslave) the survivors. In such cases the term “dark age” seems appropriate as a point of departure. The “darkness” of the age, in any event, is a matter of empirical inquiry, not a label that can be taken for granted. 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.”
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There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being..t Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription.
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7. The Golden Age of the Barbarians
The history of the peasants is written by the townsmen
The history of the nomads is written by the settled
The history of the hunter-gatherers is written by the farmers
The history of the nonstate peoples is written by the court scribes
All may be found in the archives catalogued under “Barbarian Histories”
history ness et al
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The hinterland was not simply an ungoverned—or better put, a not-yet-governed—zone, but rather a zone governed, from the perspective of the state center, by “barbarians” and “savages.” Though hardly precise Linnaean categories, “barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who might, under certain circumstances, be incorporated; “savages,” on the other hand, were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable as raw material for civilization, who might be ignored, killed, or enslaved. When Aristotle wrote of slaves as tools, one imagines that he had in mind “savages” and not all barbarians (for example, Persians).
I should make it crystal clear, once again, that I am using the term “barbarian” in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek sense. “Barbarian” and its many cousins—“savage,” “wild,” “raw,” “for- est people,” “hill people”—are terms invented in state centers to describe and stigmatize those who had not yet become state subjects. In the Ming Dynasty the term “cooked,” referring to assimilating barbarians, meant, in practice, those who had settled, had been registered on the tax rolls, and who were in principle governed by Han magistrates—in short, those who were said to have “entered the map.” A group that was identical in language and culture would often be divided into “raw” and “cooked” fractions entirely on the basis of whether they were outside or inside state administration. For the Chinese as for the Roman, the barbarians and tribes began precisely where taxes and sovereignty stopped. Let’s understand, then, that henceforth, when I use the term “barbarian,” it is merely an ironic shorthand for “nonstate peoples.”
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And here we should recall that virtually all of our knowledge of barbarian “threats” comes from state sources—sources that might well have self-interested reasons to downplay or, more likely, to overdramatize the threat and to define the term “barbarian” narrowly or widely.
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They were, by virtue of their mobility, their diverse livelihoods, and their dispersal, unsuitable raw material for appropriation and state building, and it was for precisely these reasons that they were called barbarians. .t
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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..t 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..t
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Precisely because this practice of going over to the barbarians flies directly in the face of civilization’s “just so” story, it is not a story one will find in the court chronicles and official histories. It is subversive in the most profound sense. The attraction of the Goths in the sixth century CE was at least as great as that of the Huns had been earlier. Totila (king of the Ostrogoths, 541–552 CE) not only accepted slaves and coloni into the Gothic army, but even turned them against their senatorial masters by promising them freedom and ownership of land. “In so doing he permitted and provided an excuse for something the Roman lower classes had been willing to do since the 3rd century”: “to become Goths out of despair over their economic situation.”
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.
Holding that population in place or, failing that, replenishing losses was the key to statecraft. Confinement could help. “The only way to avoid losing population, power and wealth to central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at the frontier cities, and attack steppe peoples as often as necessary to destroy them or keep them away.”
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A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.
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be you. 