In his sparkling new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott makes his case by tracing, step by unholy step, how human beings were led first into the agricultural fields and then into the domain of the state, bringing a vast set of conscripts into the army of supposed advancement ...if you view history as an unalterable dialectic of state oppression and ordinary resistance, inevitably you will also wonder how it got started — and whether it was inevitable. This genealogical task is the central ambition of Scott’s new book ...a lot more is going on in Against the Grain than a book report: Scott believes that he has made several advances thanks to his outsider status, and he has unmistakably imported a prior intellectual project — the prosecution of the state — into the literature about how the first examples of it were born.
In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of man ... We don’t give the technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests, because we don’t give our ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over the long period — ninety-five per cent of human history — during which most of our species were hunter-gatherers ...extends these ideas into the deep past, and draws on existing research to argue that ours is not a story of linear progress, that the time line is much more complicated, and that the causal sequences of the standard version are wrong ... These events are usually spoken of as 'collapses,' but Scott invites us to scrutinize that term, too.
Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, has never wielded a trowel, but his research is extraordinarily meticulous and detailed, and the lives of his imagined first citizens are unlike anything existing today. His analysis implies that the history of the metropolis has been marked by one long struggle by ordinary citizens to free themselves from oppression ... Against the Grain deserves a wide readership. It has made me look afresh at the urban world. Now when I see monumental architecture, I think of the workers who in many cases literally slaved over its construction. And, having been awakened to the concept, I see cases of near-politicide everywhere, from the growing inequality of wealth in our societies, to the taxpayer-funded bank bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. If Scott is right about the world’s first citizens, then cities and their inhabitants have been on quite a journey.
...Mr. Scott set about self-improvement, and Against the Grain displays a lively mind and impish spirit with occasional insights, challenges and teases ...the book echoes familiar disavowals of 'civilized' prejudices. Agriculture undermined health, caused famines, and empowered tyranny, he writes...for a purported expert who claims to be 'condensing the best knowledge,' he does not know enough about his subject ...book’s second fatal flaw is its misleading invocation of the 'earliest' states ...asserts, repeatedly and trenchantly, that sedentism and agriculture are essential for statehood ... Mr. Scott devotes a chapter to his assumption that early agrarian states were short-lived.
In Against the Grain, Scott argues that we still think of our world as the fruit of a series of undeniable advances: domestication, public order, mass literacy, and prosperity ...often like reading a fantasy novel, in a very good sense: Scott leaves you with the feeling that the world is packed with more ways of life, more stories, and different kinds of heroes and villains than you encountered in history class ...not a large book, it is a kind of thematic summa of Scott’s work so far, as it reworks the entire canvas of history by reconsidering its origins through the lens of state-formation ... Part of Scott’s goal in recasting the story of civilization is to open a new space for its 'dark twin,' the great majority of human experience that has been lived outside cities and empires ...what makes Scott’s story novel is the central and esteemed place he gives the barbarians ... Scott ends on an elegiac note.
...with Against the Grain, the Yale political scientist turns his ever-expanding gaze to the distant past in search of some explicit answers ... Productively driven by the curiosity of a self-declared outsider, Scott has a sure eye for the most important debates as he probes the origins of civilisation ... Written with great enthusiasm and characteristic flair, Scott’s account is at once compelling, idiosyncratic and more than a little uneven ... His repetitive claim to be rescuing his audience from some tellingly unreferenced straw-man 'standard version' of social evolution that indiscriminately meshes together farming, sedentism, urbanisation, irrigation and state formation cannot bear much weight ... Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilisation and political order.
