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Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2017.

History is often viewed as a linear process towards more complexity. The more complex

and structured a society, the more sustainable and successful it was. However, this wasn’t

necessarily the case. From the first humans to the first millennium B.C.E., humans went from a

hunter-gatherer lifestyle to forming empires. The agricultural revolution and development of

states were generally viewed as developments that greatly increased humans’ quality of life and

made them more developed and successful than other animals. However, the complexity of early

states didn’t necessarily make it a superior life to the early hunter-gatherers. The state life was

plagued with disease from dense populations and ailments from demanding work conditions. The

states may have benefited those in power but forced taxation and labor on citizens created a

fragile state prone to collapse. In his book, James Scott presented his thesis that complex social

structures of states were not necessarily a superior lifestyle to early humans using often-ignored

evidence from history.

Agriculture and states allowed for larger and more dense populations, but these

populations were by no means healthier. These societies were plagued with both ailments and

disease. The citizens suffered many ailments from the crops available to eat. During and after the

agricultural revolutions, one of the main crops that were grown were cereal grains. Scott argued

that while these were able to be grown for large populations, they didn’t provide the nutritional

value and diversity necessary for good health. He used biological evidence from the study of

people’s bodies from agricultural societies to show that “the bones and teeth often bear the

signature or nutritional distress.”1 When Scott discussed the ailments found in humans with a

mainly grain diet, he used simple language instead of long difficult-to-understand medical terms.
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Scott, Against the Grain, 84
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He simply said “deformed knees”2 and “signs of nutritional distress” instead of the medical terms

for those diseases. This use of language allowed Scott’s argument to be more clearly understood

by readers of different backgrounds. In this way, Scott made his argument more accessible to

people less knowledgeable in the field of biology. Scott used clear biological evidence to support

his argument that humans were less healthy after the agricultural revolution.

These population hubs that formed with the agricultural revolution and beyond caused a

host of diseases to spread throughout the communities. Scott presented evidence from different

time periods and locations to show how disease was a constant torment in all civilizations. In the

Epic of Gilgamesh, which takes place in the third millennium B.C.E., there was clear evidence of

disease that caused mass death throughout the early city-state of Uruk,3 and almost two thousand

years later, the Thucydides wrote of a deadly plague in the city of Athens.4 Based on this

evidence provided by literature, Scott demonstrated that disease was a catastrophic side effect of

dense population that has been overlooked. The diseases didn’t just spread through the dense

human population, but also through the crops and livestock that humans had domesticated. Scott

used linguistics to show how agricultural societies struggled with diseases ruining their crops and

possibly the collapsing of their civilization if there was not enough food to provide for the dense

populations. Scott noted how “the literal meaning of ‘parasite,’ from the original Greek root, is

‘beside the grain.’”5 The Greek State suffered from diseases wiping out their crops and Scott

used evidence from the etymology of parasite to demonstrate this.

Shortly after the agricultural revolution came the formation of states. Scott argued that

these states were a tool for control and centralization of power for those in charge. In 3,200

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3
Scott, Against the Grain, 97
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Scott, Against the Grain, 99
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B.C.E., Uruk in Mesopotamia has been noted as one of the earliest states.6 Uruk was a grain

state, meaning that the mainly cereal grains were grown and taxed. Nearly all early states grew

cereal grains as the main crop. Other crops are also able to be dried and stored, but Scott deduced

that grain states were the most common was because grain was the most easily taxed. The

Ottoman empire was formed by pastoralists, and because they don’t grow grain and instead had

herds of animals, and the biggest struggle of this empire was figuring out how to tax the

pastoralists. Taxation was a form of control and power that the rulers forced on their citizens.

Writing has often been viewed as proof of human’s intelligence because of the poems and

literature they write, but Scott argues that writing actually came to be because of states’ need for

control. Scott used the chronology of writing to show that writing initially kept tabs on the

citizens of states. Writing was utilized for bookkeeping and administration for approximately

500 years in Uruk before it was used for literature such as mythology or religious texts.7 This

same pattern occurred 1000 years later in China where writing was used to create lists of people,

taxes, manpower well before it was used for texts of literature.8 Scott speculated from

chronological and archeological evidence that states formulated new methods of records to keep

tabs on what they control and who they have power over.

It is often argued that when these states collapse, they were replaced by a dark age, and

this showed that the states provided a level of culture and organization that cannot be attained

otherwise. However, just because there weren’t as many records during the dark ages, this didn’t

mean there was nothing happening. In the dark age between Egyptian kingdoms, “there seems

not to have been any crash in population or even a radical dispersal of settlement patterns.”9

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Scott, Against the Grain, 118
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Scott, Against the Grain, 141
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Scott, Against the Grain, 145
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There was a decentralization of power in this dark age, but there was no radical migration of

people from Egypt. The culture was democratized. There may have been less records, but the

culture may have been better without the state and records that came along with it. Scott used

less direct evidence of oral epics that were maintained during a Grecian dark period to argue the

same point.10 Decentralization of power occurred, but groups of people remained that were able

to survive and preserve parts of their society without a state around to tax and control their crops.

In his book, Scott made the argument that the increasing complexity of human culture

with the formation of states did not correlate to a better life for people. He used different areas of

study, from archeology to linguistics, to formulate evidence to argue against the current view of

states. He explained aspects of biology and climatology in a way that was understandable to both

scholars and readers with no knowledge of the subject. Patterns of state shortcomings were

connected to show the failures of states in improving human quality of life. One caveat of Scott’s

book is that he rarely pointed out or explained the other side of the argument, presenting the

evidence and timeline in a one-sided manner. He sparsely acknowledged any argument of merit

against his thesis. Both sides of an argument should be addressed to present a more well-rounded

thesis, with better support for the thesis. Overall, Scott presented a convincing, well supported

argument to dismantle the notion that the increasing complexity and structure of human society

provided a better culture.

10
Scott, Against the Grain, 216