A Deep History of the Earliest States
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, …
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. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
(source: Yale University Press)
Hardcover, 336 pagine
lingua English
Pubblicato il 22 Agosto 2017 da Yale University Press.
Wonderful book.
This is what science is about, challenging longheld beliefs, criticsing the previously uncriticisable.
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.
