Scott argues that intensive grain cultivation was a natural choice not for cultivators, but for the states oppressing them. While hunter-gatherers who survived childhood usually lived to old age, agriculturalists suffered from disease, warfare, and conscription into dangerous forced labor. While hunter-gatherers worked ten to twenty hour weeks, agriculturalists lived lives of backbreaking labor. While hunter-gatherers were well-fed, agriculturalists were famished their skeletons were several inches shorter than contemporaneous foragers. While hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable and varied diet, agriculturalists subsisted almost entirely on grain their bones display signs of significant nutritional deficiency. Also, when you are surrounded by so much bounty, storing things takes on secondary importance.Īnd not because the new lifestyle made this happy life even happier. There is ample archaeological evidence of all of these techniques. Hunter-gatherers could store food just fine, from salting animal meat to burying fish and letting it ferment to just having grain in siloes like everyone else. Settled peoples would eat whatever plants they liked, then scatter the seeds in particularly promising-looking soil close to camp – reaping the benefits of agriculture without the back-breaking work.Īnd not because they needed to store food. Sometimes these towns subsisted off of particularly rich local wildlife other times they practiced some transitional form of agriculture, which also antedated states by millennia. Not because they were tired of wandering around Scott presents evidence that permanent settlements began as early as 6000 BC, long before Uruk, the first true city-state, began in 3300. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet? Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation. There was more than enough for everyone “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts during the Paleolithic, the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.Īgainst the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here.Īgainst The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. First, the book is more like 250 pages the rest is just endnotes. I have only two qualms with this description. Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”.
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