Against the Grain

I finished reading another book! That's two this year. I mean, I'm reading all the time, but mostly articles, web pages, Reddit posts, Tweets. Since the derecho, I've finished two actual books.

This one was Against the Grain, by James C. Scott, which is an in depth look at the foundations of early states in Mesopotamia with the aim of challenging the traditional view that civilization arose organically once people started farming. Scott lays out how that's just not true, that people we're growing crops and living in villages for millennia before the early states were formed. From a wide variety of sources, Scott cobbles together a remarkably coherent view of what life was like before and during the rise of the states.

A number of things struck me while reading this book. One was that while pastoralism focused on domesticated animals, and agriculture focused on domesticating plants, the business of the state is to domesticate people. Scott is following up on his previous book about states, which I haven't read yet but is in my list, and he clearly has a bias against the concept of the state. His points are coherent and well laid out, but he doesn't try to hide the fact that he views the state as a parasite.

Another thing that I thought about while reading this was his in depth discussion of the relationship between a state and its frontier. The frontier has always existed as an alternative to the state, though in modern times it has shrunk considerably. When he started talking about populations migrating to the frontier when things got bad within the state had me wishing I could get off the grid as well.

I was tipped off about this book through a link in an article that appeared in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson called "The Workforce is About to Change Dramatically," which is an interesting read in its own right, and possibly a topic for another day.