James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at
Yale. He’s a smooth writer and a deep
thinker. A while back, he decided to
update two lectures on agrarian societies that he had been giving for 20
years. He began studying recent research
and — gasp! — realized that significant portions of traditional textbook
history had the strong odor of moldy cultural myths. So, a quick update project turned into five
years, and resulted in a manuscript that I found to be remarkably stimulating,
from cover to cover — Against the Grain: A Deep
History of the Earliest States.
While the human saga is several million years old, and Homo sapiens
appeared on the stage maybe 200,000 years ago, the origin myth I was taught
began just 10,000 years ago, with domestication and civilization. We were transformed from hungry, dirty, dolts
into brilliant philosophers, scientists, and artists, who lived indoors, wore cool
clothes, and owned lots of slaves.
As a curious animal interested in ecological sustainability,
I’m amazed that every other animal species has, for millions of years, lived on
this planet without destabilizing the climate, spurring mass extinctions,
poisoning everything, and generally beating the <bleep> out of the
planet. These are the unintended
consequences of our reckless joyride in a hotrod of turbocharged progress. They define the primary aspects of a new
geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the era when tropical primates with huge
throbbing brains left permanent scars on the planet.
Experts argue about when the Anthropocene began. Did it start with the sorcery of nuclear
fission, or the curse of fossil-powered industry? Many point to the domestication of plants and
animals, and the birth of civilization.
Scott is among the few who say it began with the domestication of fire,
which occurred at least 400,000 years ago, sparked by our Homo erectus
ancestors. Every other species continues
to survive via the original power source, the sun’s wildfire. Plants grow green solar panels that produce
the nutrients that keep the fauna alive and happy, a perfectly brilliant design.
Imagine waving a magic wand, and eliminating everything in
the world made possible by domesticated fire — no metal, no concrete, no
plastic, no glowing screens. Would
humans still be around? Fire historian Stephen
Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near
helplessness.” We wouldn’t be able to
survive outside the tropics. The plant
and animal species that enabled civilization lived north of the tropics (see THIS). Without domesticated fire, we’d still be wild
and free — and far less crowded.
Scott focused on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace
of the earliest genuine states. What are
states? They are hierarchical societies,
with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding. The primary food of almost every early state
was wheat, barley, or rice. Taxes were
paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store than yams or
breadfruit. States often had armies,
defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.
The moldy myths imply that domesticated plants and animals, sedentary
communities, and fixed-field agriculture emerged in a close sequence. Wrong!
There is scattered evidence of sedentary hunter-gatherers by 12,000
B.C. Domestication began around 9000
B.C. It took at least four thousand
years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared, and then
another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3100 B.C.
Moldy myths assume that the Fertile Crescent has been a
desert since humans first arrived.
Wrong! Southern Mesopotamia used
to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and
gatherers. There was so much to eat that
it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities. “Edible plants included club rush, cattails,
water lily, and bulrush. They ate
tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and
migrating gazelles.” In a land of
abundance, it would have been absolutely stupid to pursue the backbreaking
drudgery of agriculture.
Moldy myths often give us the “backs-to-the-wall” explanation
for the shift to agriculture, which was far more work. Simply, we had run out of new alternatives
for feeding a growing mob, while hunting was producing less meat, and wild
plants were producing less food. We had
no choice! But in the Middle East, there
appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the decline
of either game animals or forage.
Cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance,
not scarcity. Every year, floods
deposited silt along the riverbanks, moist fertile soil ready for sowing. So, flood-retreat farming would have required
far less toil than tilling fields, while producing useful nutrients. More nutrients enabled further population growth,
which eventually pressed the shift to miserable labor-intensive irrigated
agriculture.
The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household). In early Mesopotamia, “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.” As a result of living
on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and
behaviorally. In this process, wild
species became domesticated. Over time, some species became “fully
domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their
survival. Domestication was also about
deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants,
and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal
family.”
Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their
wild ancestors. Pig brains are a third
smaller. Protected from predators,
regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, they became less alert, less
anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs. They reached reproductive age sooner, and
produced far more offspring.
“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a
historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known,
but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and
viruses that fed on them.” The domus was
a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and
mites. Unnatural crowds of animals spent
their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water. It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for
infectious diseases. Humans share a
large number of diseases with other domus animals, including poultry (26), rats
and mice (32), horses (35), pigs (42), sheep and goats (46), cattle (50), and
dogs (65).
Other writers have noted that, prior to contact, Native
Americans had no epidemic diseases. With
very few domesticated animals, they lacked state of the art disease
incubators. Scott goes one step further,
asserting that prior to the domus, there was little or no epidemic disease in
the Old World. “The importance of
sedentism and the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means
that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically
adapted to Homo sapiens
came into existence only
in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the
past five thousand.” Thus, the humans
that first crossed from Siberia to North America 13,000 years ago were free of
disease because little or no infectious disease existed anywhere in the world!
Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble. “Crops not only are threatened, as are
humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of
predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other
mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the
cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.” Once harvested and stored in the granary,
grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi. The biggest vulnerability of states was that
they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two
staple grains. Crops could be wiped out
by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.
Mesopotamian life was largely human powered. Workers grew the grain that the tax man
hauled away to the plump elites. More
workers meant more wealth and power for the big shots. In screw-brained hierarchical cultures
(including ours), it’s impossible to have too much wealth. Therefore, peasants and slaves were husbanded
like livestock. The diabolical “more is
better” disease was devastating. Some
believe that monumental walls were built as much for defense as to prevent
taxpayers and slaves from escaping to freedom.
Early states were vulnerable in many ways, and they frequently
collapsed. Collapse sounds like a
tragedy. But it could simply mean
breaking up into smaller components.
Larger was not necessarily better.
A drought might cause a state’s population to disperse. For the non-elites, life in a Mesopotamian
state could be oppressive and miserable.
Sometimes, collapse was a cause for celebration. Yippee!
Anyway, the book is fascinating. Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital
slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization,
irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and
benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders,
and on and on. It’s an outstanding book!
WARNING: The expensive
Kindle edition contains numerous charts, maps, and diagrams. When downloaded to the Kindle for PC
application (v 1.20.1), most are unreadably small, even on a 24” monitor. Clever nerds can tediously capture the images
to another application, expand them, and read them. Strong reading glasses (3.75 lens or higher)
also work with a big monitor.
Scott, James C., Against
the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 2017.
Four
Domestications is a free PDF download, the 48-page text of a lecture Scott
gave at Harvard. It includes some of the
foundation ideas for his new book.
Seeing
Like a State is a free PDF download of Scott’s 1998 book, a companion for
his new book.
