"Against the Grain" : A Contrary Book

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (published 2017) is difficult for a reader like me, a lay reader without a lot of formal training in history. The book is presented as viewing prehistory in a new way -- reinterpreting the story of how humans took over the earth, how humankind eventually developed agriculture and cities and political classes, and how inhabitants of emerging settled cities might not have been all that happy with "civilization." Scott's purpose is to rework the classic narrative of "progress, of civilization and public order, and of increasing health and leisure." (p. 1).

There's some paradigm-shifty content of course, but what the book really does is to show a reader like me new things about the non-elite city dwellers (where elites usually get the most attention), and above all about people that history sometimes terms "barbarians." These "barbarians" were the people outside the cities and their territories, people who didn't rule the land; didn't till the fields and produce the grain for the storehouses that supported civilization; and didn't build the monuments. Some outsiders were raiders that lived on caravans trading goods between civilized cities. Some were nomads who gathered forest foods and hunted, or did mixed agriculture not field crops. At times, these were enemies of the cities' rulers -- kings, priests, nobility. Scott mainly describes the history of Mesopotamia, but includes examples from many other emergent civilizations such as Greece, China, and the Americas.

We remember the cities and their rulers because their stone constructions and written history to glorify their efforts survived, Scott observes. Life in early cities posed lots of difficulties, not always acknowledged. "An epidemic, one imagines, was capable of devastating a city in a matter of weeks. A shortage of fuelwood or the gradual siltation of canals and rivers resulting from deforestation was more a matter of gradual economic suffocation -- quite as lethal but far less spectacular." (p. 195). But life outside the cities was active and vital though it left far fewer traces. People outside, cultivating land or hunting and gathering, could have a kind of counter-civilization, more freedom than the subjects in the cities, and sometimes fewer diseases of civilization.

Scott's description of the many downsides of early city life is interesting and detailed, and very revealing to a reader like me. He shows that many of the non-city people nearby frequently had escaped from cities, where forced labor and slavery kept larger populations alive and supported a relatively idle upper class. Mining and smelting metals, quarrying huge stones, and constructing pyramids, temples, palaces, and tombs demanded low-wage or slave labor: there's no other explanation for people accepting these horrific tasks. The written records don't directly admit the rulers' troubles, but the archaeological record combines with hints in the archives to suggest their problems.

When they went to war with other cities, the early despots usually took loot and slaves -- though not usually new territory. They had enough trouble governing the land they already owned, controlling their subjects, and keeping the local "barbarians" from stealing their wealth and retreating into the wild areas where they lived. The captured people, along with local slaves or workers, contributed to the huge building projects. Captured women became breeders of new slaves or in some cases of new subjects: early societies were sometimes open to changing of one's class. And walls around settled areas functioned not only to keep out the "barbarians" but to prevent slaves or unwilling workers from running away to a freer life. Slowly, successful outsiders could became partners with the city rulers in quite a number of ways, such as taking a share of the wealth in exchange for ceasing their raiding activities.

Before Scott gets to the invention of cities, he details a history of agriculture and how it led to life in settlements. There are quite a few surprises in this account: for example, his very detailed case for the necessity of grain-growing agriculture -- rice, wheat, barley, maize -- in enabling cities to form. I won't try to summarize this. Scott undermines quite a few of the accepted "facts" that usually appear in accounts of the prehistoric transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary life. He considers both later written history (by scribes in early cities) and recent discoveries in archaeology, especially the timing: settled agriculture in some form existed for centuries or millennia before cities appeared.

Several "golden ages" of new civilizations ended in interim "dark ages" when cities fell into ruins. Scott makes us question the usual interpretation that this was a loss for humanity: the people who had labored to build the cities became more free and perhaps happier and even healthier when the darkness descended. Maybe it wasn't so dark to them, but only to later elite writers and propagandists favoring giant building projects and ambitious rulers -- the workers "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." (p. 211).

Before the discussion of settled agriculture and cities, the heart of the book, Scott begins by describing how early humans and pre-humans changed their environment -- and changed the whole earth -- by using fire to clear forests, to chase and entrap large game animals, and to affect edible plants before humans could be said to cultivate them. He concentrates on domestication of animals and in what he also calls "domestication" of subjects and slaves. This is a long story, and includes much human activity besides fire. As the New Yorker review of Against the Grain puts it: "Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch." (Review: "The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" by John Lanchester, New Yorker, September 18, 2017)

I won't try to duplicate Scott's interesting argument about how very early humans and pre-humans employed fire and changed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Scott suggests that earlier accounts don't appreciate how very long was the era when cultivation of crops and domestication of animals were a predominant way of life, but cities and higher organization didn't yet emerge. Early chapters of the book give details and sources for all this.

For me, the value of Against the Grain is not in what it may or may not challenge about conventional accounts of the history of human civilization and its opposites, but the details of how the inhabitants of early cities and the outsiders who lived differently interacted for many millennia. To see what's new and what's conventional in Scott's account, you really have to read it carefully.