Against the Grain

A Deep History of the Earliest States

Hardcover, 336 pages

English language

Published Aug. 22, 2017 by Yale University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-300-18291-0
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OCLC Number:
990684513

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5 stars (3 reviews)

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.

Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. …

6 editions

Non-state history of the state

4 stars

Collects modern archaeological evidence - which has zoomed out from 19C teleological (and "navel gazing") history of empires and temples to cover ecological, epidemiological, and regional analysis - to undermine any sense of inevitable city-state domination from the cultural adoption of agriculture or sedentism, highlighting the fragile downsides to domestication which civilization avoided fully succumbing to for millennia. Focuses on what domestication - of fire, grains, animals, and ourselves - creates, and on the ways in which forced labor and exploitation are the central inevitable basis for the state.

De l'humain sauvage à sa domestication

5 stars

Ouvrage passionnant où l'auteur déboulonne des idées reçues sur le passage des humains à l'époque néolithique en s'appuyant sur les récentes découvertes de l'archéologie. Il est démontré ici que ce passage ne s'est pas fait sans heurs et qu'il est à l'origine des premières formes de domination et d'esclavage.

Review of 'Against the Grain' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

There has long been a debate over the merits of the life of the "civilized" human being over that of the "noble savage," one that seemingly turned decisively in favor of the modern state as the European empires expanded over the last several centuries. As the Thomas Hobbes memorably stated in his description of the state of nature, “and the life of man, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.” But what if Hobbes was wrong? Perhaps if he had considered the lives of London slum dwellers and American slaves versus the hunters and gatherers who persisted in much of Africa and the Americas at the time, he might have reached a different conclusion. History, after all, is written by the victors.

Perhaps the concentration of power in urban centers with its attendant dependence on a restricted diet of monocultures, especially grain, its problems of sanitation, concentration of germs and parasites and …

Subjects

  • Origin
  • Agriculture and state
  • Agriculture
  • History