James Scott: The Late-Neolithic Multi-species Re-settlement Camp and the Earliest States

Prof. Dr. James Scott (Yale University)

I. The Domestication of Fire, Animals, Grain and….Us
The Early State: its Fragility and the Golden Age of “Barbarians”

All of the presumed civilizational steps required for state-making: agriculture, domestic animals, sedentism, towns and substantial commerce were in place several millennia before anything we might call a “state” appears in the historical record. Why the long delay? So long as other, broader subsistence options were open, Homo sapiens avoided substantial reliance on agriculture because of disease, drudgery, and risk. The creation of the state requires confinement, unfree labor and a cereal grain as a tax crop. Hence there are no cassava, sweet potato, banana, lentil, chick pea states, only millet, wheat, barley, rice and maize states. How the hegemony of these grains transformed our culture, our society, the domus and our bodies is part of this story.