Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Homo sapiens have existed for at least 200,000 years. Life was simple at first. Then, about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors began to switch from hunting and gathering to farming. Jared Diamond in 1987 famously called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” because it brought “the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.” Mark Cohen and George Armelagos wrote in 2013 (p. xxx) that Diamond’s essay “is the latest in a long list of those that criticize the transformation to agriculture.” The list is now longer, and includes a recent book written by political scientist James C. Scott. Scott condenses the best of this literature, explores the implications for formation of states, then argues that emergence of states made the health and lives of non-elite masses even worse. The surveyed literature, including a book by Richard Manning, the title of which Scott (p. xv) confesses to have poached, focuses on nutritional stress (from the replacement of a varied diet with a few starchy foods), physical stress (from hard farm labor), and infectious disease (spread in concentrated human and animal populations). By 1982, paleopathologists had unearthed sufficient evidence to produce a consensus that agriculture caused human life expectancy and health to deteriorate for all but a small elite. Fertility increased sharply, however. This more than offset increased mortality, so the population slowly grew, accelerating eventually in a “demographic explosion of agricultural peoples at the expense of hunters and gatherers” (p. 83). Looking at the history of early states, Scott finds the the type of crop grown by farmers to be extremely important. The “first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states,” he writes, “pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millenia after the first crop domestications and sedentism” (p. 7). Grain (wheat, barley, rice, or maize) was essential because it can be stored, rationed, and taxed. This is why “virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plaintain, breadfruit or sweet potato states” (p. 21). Ancient history was written by elites, not by the illiterate masses, so it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine the independent effect that states may have had on the quality of life of the masses. One commonly used measure of success is population size. Scott mentions (p. 96) that world population “according to one careful estimate” was about 4 million in 10,000 BCE, 5 million in 5,000 BCE, increasing to “more than 100million” by 1 CE. He does not cite his source, but the two BCE figures are identical to those of McEvedy and Jones (pp. 343–344), who add that population growth accelerated after 5,000 BCE, with world population reaching 100 million in 500 BCE, 150 million by the 2nd century BCE, and 200 million by the 2nd century CE. They attribute population growth to development of agriculture, but this growth coincides with, so could also be attributed to, development of early states. Scott barely mentions population growth, other than noting that it