Against The Grain: A Deep History Of The Earliest States, by James C. Scott

Those who are familiar, as I am, with some of the author’s other works, will find in this book that the author makes a lot of references to his other writings, especially his writings about anarchism in upland Southeast Asia. This particular book deals with the fragile and often troubling development of what we refer to as civilization in the region of Southern Mesopotamia, and the author’s intriguing reading against the grain of the literature of the proto-state to demonstrate what a loss civilization was to the well-being of humanity as a whole, except for those elites who were able to command the labor of others under harsh living and working conditions. What this book presents to do, at least in a broad and allusive way, is to catalogue the development of the Babylon system that has governed much of humanity’s attempts to organize and dominate the world and the people who live on it. The author does not phrase it exactly like it, it should be noted, as the author is an anarchist scholar and not someone whose knowledge of or belief in the Bible is particularly profound, but the author’s clearly anti-Babylonish standpoint is at least one that I welcome, even as the author admits that he is not at all a specialist in the specific field of the ancient history of the Near East.

This particular book is a bit more than 250 pages of material, divided into seven chapters. The book begins with a preface, and then an introduction where the author talks about what he didn’t know about the narrative of early civilization in Mesopotamia. This is followed by a discussion of the lengthy period of domestication of fire, plants, animals, and people (1). After that comes a discussion of the landscaping of the world that took place to lead people to engage in agriculture (2). After that the author talks about how monoculture fields and people crowded into small areas with their domestic animals was a perfect storm for epidemics and diseases (3). The author then talks about the agro-ecology of the early state (4), as well as the pervasive use of population control efforts, bondage, and warfare in order to manage the peasant/slave/serf workforce of civilizations (5). This is followed by a discussion of the fragility of the early states, where excessively harsh behavior on the part of those who ruled over society led to frequent collapses that were followed by long periods of “dark ages” (6). The book then closes with a chapter on barbarians as a shadow state of competing exploiters of settled peoples (7), as well as notes, a bibliography, and an index.

One of the more interesting things that this book offers, and this is characteristic of the author’s writing as a whole, is a welcome antidote to theories of blind teleological progress in the way that human societies have operated over the past few thousand years. In this work, the author presents evidence that people were able to live in sedentary villages able to farm and gather food that was rich in caloric value and other nutrients without developing harshly stratified hierarchical governments full of grueling and unremunerative labor and deep privation and exploitation as we find in Ur, Uruk, Babel, and their neighboring city-states in Mesopotamia. Indeed, we may see that apart from the religious heresy of the worship of state authorities that we find in such cities and their later successors, we may also find in the very exploitation of mankind and creation in these civilizations a clear evil that the Bible has always been immensely hostile towards. Reading books like these should inform one as to the sorts of systems of bondage and exploitation that have long existed within human societies the sorts of things that we should reflexively and instinctively be against.